There was a time in the early years of Maine statehood that trees were the coin of the realm.
“Town forests date back to the inception of this state,” said Jan Santerre, senior planner with the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry. “Towns devoted a parcel to the school, a parcel to the church and a third parcel to what would have been the ‘poor farm,’”
Today, according to forest service data, more than 170 of Maine’s 500 municipalities own and manage more than 150,000 acres of forestland ranging in size from a few to thousands of acres.
“I think it’s great there are still towns managing woodlots,” Santerre said. “By and large these towns recognize the importance of managing for revenue and for public access and recreation.”
While timber sales no longer fund churches, and poor farms are a thing of the past, income from forestland does still supplement some town budgets.
Up in Winterville Plantation just south of Eagle Lake in Aroostook County, 12,000 municipally-managed acres fund a quarter of the annual town budget.
“We are blessed to have this land,” Dale Emery, Winterville first selectman, said. “We are seeing an average of $100,000 to $120,000 in income a year from it, and that makes a huge impact for us.”
Day-to-day woodlot management has been turned over to Huber Land Management, Emery said.
“Huber has more resources than we do and better sources for marketing the timber,” he said.
The current management plan has the town harvesting about 4,000 cords of wood per year.
“We do an inventory every year that tells us what is out there and what the growth rate is,” Emery said. “The big thing for us is sustainability so we are not losing our forest over time and down the road there’s be nothing left to cut.”
Working with the foresters at Huber, Emery said Winterville officials keep a close eye on lumber markets.
“Everything we sell is market driven,” he said. “If softwood prices are down, we look at our hardwoods, [and] we make sure to balance everything out so we don’t deplete the resource.”
Most of Winterville’s land is on the west side of St. Froid Lake and is open to the public for hunting, trapping, snowmobiling and all-terrain vehicle riding.
Mapleton-Castle Hill-Chapman Town Manager Jon Frederick said the 2,000 cords per year cut in his municipalities generate about $100,000 annually each for Castle Hill and Chapman.
“We utilize those funds to offset taxes,” he said. “It’s a significant chunk of money for these two towns.”
According to Frederick, every $2,500 in timber sales is equivalent to a 10 cent reduction on the local property tax rates.
“It works out to around four mills,” he said. “It’s a huge help for these towns.”
Like Winterville, the towns of Castle Hill and Chapman contract with a forest management company to oversee the land and timber harvests.
“We use Prentiss & Carlisle,” Frederick said. “We are managing for the long term, and it is being maintained in a manner so the public can use it, too, for recreation [because] it is truly public land.”
As far as Ralph Dwyer, Ashland’s town manager, is concerned, municipal woodlots just make good fiscal sense.
Ashland manages 4,500 acres of forest land for commercial harvesting, wildlife habitat and public recreation.
“We are making around $50,000 a year off our woodlots,” Dwyer said. “I think it is very much a good idea to retain this land because it is a consistent source of income for the town.”
In 1927, Maine passed legislation that defined the modern “town forest,” and it gave municipalities the authority to establish and manage the woodlots.
The law also paved the way for towns to add to their woodlot holdings by reclaiming abandoned land or land on which previous owners had defaulted on the taxes.
“By and large, if a town intends to keep its woodlots, it needs to manage them for revenue,” Santerre said. “That land can also be available for recreation.”
That two-pronged approach, she said, is what drives much of the management practices in municipal woodlots.
“If you can safely manage the land to enhance wildlife and recreational opportunities while at the same time targeting areas for commercial harvesting, it’s a win-win,” Santerre said. “You might as well be making some money while you are in there.”
