LIBERTY, Maine — One midcoast man’s decade-long dispute with the Town of Liberty and his lakefront neighbors over his right, or lack thereof, to use a Jet Ski on a lake will be decided in a townwide vote this weekend.
Liberty residents will be asked whether they want to ask the Maine Legislature to lift a ban on Jet Skis during the town’s annual meeting, starting at 9 a.m. Saturday, March 25.
In 2003, Liberty passed a local ordinance banning the use of “personal watercraft,” such as Sea-Doos and Jet Skis, on Lake St. George, Waldo County’s fourth largest lake. Locals at the time were worried about how recklessly some people operated the machines. The ban doesn’t include other motorized boats with hulls either larger than 14 feet or engines less than 15 horsepower.
“They’re designed for play,” Linda Breslin, president of the Citizens Association of Liberty Lakes, said during a recent interview. “You wouldn’t use a Maserati in your driveway.”
Mark Haskell, a Camden resident who also owns a house on the lake, took offense to the ban and defied it, taking his Jet Ski out on the 1,000-acre lake in 2005. He got a ticket, and challenged the ticket in court.
“It is so crazy, and it is so unbelievable that it feels foolish,” Haskell said of the law during an interview several years ago. “It’s based on, ‘I don’t like it. You can’t do it. Go somewhere else.’”
Haskell’s case made all the way it to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court in 2008. The state’s highest court determined that municipalities did, in fact, have the right to ban personal watercraft on their lakes and ponds.
That foiled Haskell’s bid to have the ban overturned, but he continued to fight the ban in other ways, even asking Maine Gov. Paul LePage to intervene at one point, according to The Free Press. Haskell has been cited for defying the ban at least four times.
Nearly nine years after the Supreme Court decision, townspeople will be given the chance to change their minds on the ban. Haskell asked town officials in Liberty to put the question of whether to lift the ban before townspeople at this year’s town meeting. The town agreed, according to Kenn Ortmann, the town administrator.
Attempts to reach Haskell this week were unsuccessful.
The 2003 ban was implemented primarily out of concern for the safety of other boaters and swimmers, Breslin said. Jet Skis wouldn’t be safe in the lake because of the size and prevalence of islands in the lake creating blind spots and the narrow channels frequented by non motorized boaters and swimmers, proponents argued at the time.
Locals talked about ways to enforce safe operation of Jet Skis on the lakes, but determined there weren’t enough wardens available to effectively police and monitor the waterways, so the town opted for a full ban, Breslin said.
Today, the association, which represents more than 280 property owners who have camps or homes around Lake St. George and its two neighboring ponds, still doesn’t believe that Jet Skis can safely operate in the lake’s tight spaces, Breslin added.
Breslin said the association has sent out notifications to its members about the upcoming meeting, and that the “vast majority” of people who have responded indicated that they were in favor of keeping the ban alive.
State law currently lists 33 ponds and lakes where personal watercraft (Jet Skis) are banned, though more municipalities have local bans and restrictions. If Liberty residents voted in favor of the repeal, the town would ask the Legislature to take Lake St. George off that list.
Follow Nick McCrea on Twitter at @nmccrea213.