With a new focus to Lucas St. Clair’s efforts to create a proposed North Woods national park comes a new campaign logo he debuted informally on social media this weekend, his spokesman said Monday.
The new circular logo features drawings of a hiker in silhouette against a backdrop of an evergreen forest and Mount Katahdin with the slogan “Maine Woods National Monument” wrapped around them. That’s a departure from the rectangular logo featuring silhouetted drawings of people fishing, canoeing and snowmobiling and a moose over the words “ Katahdin Woods & Waters.”
The change, St. Clair spokesman David Farmer said, naturally follows the progression of the campaign. It is not an indication that the effort to create a national park originally suggested in 2011 by entrepreneur Roxanne Quimby, St. Clair’s mother, is over.
“We just thought that when we built the first logo, it was about getting [people] onto the land to recreate,” Farmer said Monday, “and the new logo touches on the fact that we have moved on to a national monument as an interim step toward creating a national park.”
Farmer and St. Clair confirmed in November 2015 that pro-park leaders were in talks with the federal government over creating a national monument after the U.S Department of Interior released 63 pages of documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Bangor Daily News. The documents showed that George Cooper, a lobbyist from Forbes-Tate, a public policy consulting firm in Washington, D.C., has worked on behalf of the park effort since April 13, 2015.
Talks with the White House continue with no indication of whether or when President Barack Obama would create a monument of the approximately 87,500 acres owned by the Quimby family east of Baxter State Park, Farmer said Monday.
“At this point it is all in the information-gathering stage about what it would look like and all the documents that need to be prepared to walk through the process,” Farmer said. “We are trying to answer the questions that people have.”
The campaign also continues discussions with U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin, R-Maine, and U.S. Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Angus King, I-Maine, Farmer said. The three have said they resist or oppose a national park or monument, while U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, said she supports a park and monument. Gov. Paul LePage also opposes a park or monument.
Campaign officials believe that “there is interest in a monument” on the part of the president, “but we don’t know what his thoughts are,” Farmer said. “At this point, no one has said yes or no to it.”
Obama has used his authority under the American Antiquities Act of 1906 to designate 22 national monuments totalling more than 3 million acres, breaking the record of 18 held by President Theodore Roosevelt. The most recent monument designation occurred with the 350,000-acre Mojave Trails National Monument, the 20,920-acre Castle Mountains National Monument and the 154,000-acre Sand to Snow National Monument in February. The three newest monuments are in California.