Just a few years ago, a fledgling development boom on Moosehead Lake had people worrying that the lake’s largely wild shoreline would be transformed into a necklace of camps and cottages, strangling the wildness out of the 75,000-acre lake.

Development fever was raging in other parts of the state and seemed to be heating up in the Moosehead area, too.

Four subdivisions on the lake had received approval from Maine’s Land Use Regulation Commission in 1988. No applications to subdivide land on the lake had been processed by LURC during the previous three years.

The number of building permits issued by LURC also had jumped from five during 1985 to 19 in 1987, to 21 in 1988 and 24 in 1989.

The increase in development activity coincided with release of a LURC study that singled out Moosehead as the most outstanding of the 1,500 lakes in LURC’s 10-million-acre jurisdiction and noted also that Moosehead had significant potential for future development.

“Too much was happening too quickly,” said Donna Lander, executive director of the Moosehead Lake Chamber of Commerce. “It did appear to people that the character of the area was changing.”

Today the development scare seems like a phantom.

“Within the last year, development has almost slowed to a standstill,” Lander said.

“The sense of urgency has lessened,” said Luke Muzzy, a Greenville real estate agent. “Moosehead isn’t in any danger any more.”

Still, there remains a widely held belief that something ought to be done to make sure Moosehead Lake retains its raw, unspoiled beauty and wild character long into the future.

“I don’t think you can talk to anyone who doesn’t want Moosehead protected,” Muzzy said.

“I think people understand that we have to do something to protect Moosehead Lake, ” said David Cota, town manager in Greenville. “There still is and always will be pressure.” He pointed as an example to the potential impact of a change in the land-management policies of one of the three paper companies that own 76 miles of Moosehead’s shore.

“The impact would be just incredible if they decided to sell a lot of (shore) lots,” Cota said.

“It’s agreed that Moosehead shouldn’t become another Winnipesaukee or Sebago even,” said James Bernard, director of natural resources in the Maine State Planning Office. Lake Winnipesaukee in central New Hampshire and Sebago Lake in southern Maine are frequently cited as big lakes lacking natural character because of dense development.

People are impressed by the “wild expansiveness” of Moosehead Lake, said Paul Johnson, a Greenville resident and a biologist with the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could leave half the lake undeveloped” so future generations could enjoy the same increasingly rare wilderness experience?

Johnson has been part of a two-year effort, coordinated by Bernard of the State Planning Office and involving five state agencies, a consulting firm and a local advisory committee, to develop a plan that LURC could use to control future development around Moosehead Lake. LURC is the zoning board for all of the Moosehead lakeshore except for the land in Greenville.

The cornerstone of this plan is a property transaction called “transfer of development rights” which is new to Maine and already controversial.

Bernard and other advocates argue that a system of transferable development rights, commonly called TDRs, would guarantee that 60 percent of the Moosehead shoreline would never be dotted with buildings. A TDR system is stronger than traditional zoning or even state ownership when it comes to protecting areas from development because the transfer — meaning sale — of a development right is an irreversible action, Bernard said.

The TDR concept

Every piece of property comes with a bouquet of rights, including the right to enter and pass over the land, the right to extract natural resources like minerals or timber and the right to build structures. Owners can choose to sell or lease any of these rights to someone else and still retain ownership of the property.

The TDR system proposed for Moosehead Lake calls for new zoning on the lakeshore coupled with new legal authority that would allow some owners of shoreland to sell off their development rights and enable other owners of shoreland to buy those development rights to enhance their own ability to develop.

One of the proposed zones under a TDR system, called a sending zone, would effect strips of undeveloped shore frontage, 1,000 feet deep. Current LURC zoning limits development on the land earmarked as sending zones and those restrictions would remain if a TDR system was adopted. However, property owners would gain the ability to sell their rights to build on the 1,000-foot-deep swath running along the shore.

For selling purposes, the strips of undeveloped shore that were designated as sending zones would be divided into TDR units, with one unit measuring 500 feet along the shore and 1,000 feet deep. Bernard has estimated that there would be 1,200 TDR units along the 98 1/2 miles of undeveloped shoreline proposed as sending zones. There are just 20 owners of the land in the proposed sending areas, including Georgia Pacific Corp., Boise Cascade and Scott Paper Co.

Once a development right is sold, the right to build on a particular 500-by-1,000-foot rectangle on the shore is extinguished. The sale of development rights will be recorded on deeds, according to Bernard.

So that property owners in the sending zones have potential buyers for their development rights, the TDR system calls for a new zoning designation along another 35 miles on the lake. These lands, primarily located along the shore, would be designated as receiving zones. Here, the current zoning would become less restrictive than it is now. New low-density, residential development would be permitted. And, if landowners in these receiving zones wanted to increase the density of the development on their land by a camp or two, they could do so by purchasing the development rights to one or two TDR units in sending zones.

The Moosehead plan shows some receiving zones strung along the edge of the lake, but a number of the sites are pockets in the midst of stretches of undeveloped shore. The proposed TDR system suggests that these pockets are where some new sporting camps or hotels or denser cottage development might be located as long as the development was set well back from the shoreline and screened from view.

Bernard said 15 owners have land in the proposed receiving zones, including the three paper companies.

The Moosehead plan specifies how many TDR units property owners in receiving zones need to buy to undertake denser development of their land. For example, to have two camps on 6 acres of shore frontage in a receiving zone, rather than one as proposed new zoning would allow, a property owner would have to buy one TDR unit from someone in a sending zone.

A TDR system is a compensation system, said Bernard. Such a system would give property owners with land in sending zones, where development is and would remain restricted, a chance to get some cash for forgoing development.

The controversy

When the TDR system was first proposed a year ago, there was a firestorm of opposition, according to Bernard.

Property owners around the lake objected to zoning changes that would rob them of development rights they currently held and they objected to being required to buy or sell TDR units if their property was located in sending or receiving zones.

Gov. John R. McKernan, during his Capital-for-a-Day visit to Greenville last fall, promised that the recommendations in the Moosehead comprehensive plan would be changed so that no property owner on the lake would lose development rights.

Bernard stressed at two recent meetings with lake-area residents that the buying and selling of development rights under the proposed TDR system would be voluntary. If the system were set up on Moosehead Lake, no property owner would have fewer rights to development than they now have, unless they decided to sell their rights to develop. Those with property in the receiving zones would actually gain new development opportunities, even if they didn’t buy TDR units.

Not everyone is reassured. At a June 19th meeting in Greenville, one woman asked Bernard why the TDR concept was still included in the plan when it had been so vehemently opposed a year ago.

Bernard answered that the offensive rezoning and the mandated trading of TDR units had been taken out. Now, “the feedback we have received from a lot of people is really much more positive,” he said.

Still, there are critics of the TDR concept, like Gary Merrill, president of TM Corp. which bought and subdivided 6,200 acres on Tomhegan Township in 1986 and bought 322 acres on Kineo, including the old Mount Kineo resort, in 1988. Merrill said a TDR system would put the burden of protecting the lake on a handful of landowners.

“We shouldn’t be asking the landowners on Moosehead Lake to be responsible for the preservation of the lake for the public,” Merrill said. He argues that the 98 1/2 miles that are proposed as TDR sending zones ought to be purchased by the state.

“Why not go to referendum and ask the public if they want it? We haven’t even asked the public if they want it,” Merrill said.

Within the last year, the state already has acquired quite a bit of land around Moosehead Lake, including:

7,275 acres in Days Academy Grant, including 17.8 miles of shore frontage on Moosehead Lake, in a swap for timberland negotiated by the Bureau of Public Lands and approved by the Legislature.

880 acres on the Kineo peninsula, including the mountain and several more miles of shore, purchased by the Land for Maine’s Future Board.

A 6.3-mile conservation easement along the Roach River, the primary spawning place for Moosehead’s landlocked salmon, purchased by the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.

“That’s about all we are going to do on the lake,” said Bernard, whose job at the State Planning Office includes working for the Land for Maine’s Future Board.

Merrill isn’t the only critic of the TDR concept. The newly formed Maine Conservation Rights Institute, a coalition of groups throughout the state that are concerned about the erosion of property rights, plans to oppose the introduction of a TDR system on Moosehead Lake and elsewhere in the state, said Jonathan Malmude of Limerick.

Like Merrill, Malmude sees a TDR system as a way for government to avoid compensating people for robbing them of their rights to develop land. The system has other dangers, too, he said.

“It weakens the political rights of people” because some agency, not a body a elected officials, sets the size of the units to be sold and may even control the market, Malmude said.

He also believes a TDR system could be a “very potent patronage system” in which “friends” benefit from opportunities to purchase TDR units and intensively develop their lands.

Finally, Malmude said there were no guarantees that the compulsive elements originally proposed for the Moosehead TDR system wouldn’t be restored at some future date.

People also have voiced concerns that the TDR system earmarks too much of the undeveloped land around Moosehead Lake for new development.

Bernard argued that “the density that we are proposing isn’t very dense.”

Not everyone is convinced.

“If you cluster zone up here, you are going to have houses close together. You are going to see white picket fences between these houses and pinwheels,” said Bob Mello, a Rockwood resident and skeptic about the plan. The wild character of the lake will be lost.

Roger Auclair, another Rockwood resident, said he was concerned about the small-sized receiving zones tucked into coves along stretches of the shore designated to remain undeveloped.

“I’m really concerned about these clusters,” he told Bernard in June. “They break up an otherwise wild shoreline. Are they going to have docks and boats?”

The Moosehead Lake comprehensive plan, including the controversial TDR system, will be debated on July 31 by the Moosehead Lake Region Land Use Committee, the advisory group that has met monthly with Bernard and the consultants as the plan was developed.

The plan is scheduled to be presented to LURC in August. Review by LURC will take months and would include a public hearing. Bernard has said that the TDR system couldn’t be set up without legislation. He doesn’t expect the plan and the TDR system, if endorsed by LURC, to be in place until the fall of 1991.