Legislation is an assault on sovereignty of Maine landowners

Another Viewpoint

There is a bill before the U.S. Congress that would empower a regional Northern Forest Lands Council to plan “a coordinated regional approach to forest land conservation” in Maine and three other northeastern states. The bill would provide a platform for organized preservationists to breach the constitutional and civil rights of landowners in Maine.

In its editorial of June 6, the Bangor Daily News pointed out that environmental groups were “pushing hard in a campaign for federal regulations that would place unprecedented restrictions on landowners.” The federal legislation proposed by Sens. Mitchewll and Cohen “acknowledges the federal role” in the Northeast, and is nothing less than a Greenline planning bill to allow the federal colonization of rural Maine for which states and national preservationist groups have lobbied for three years.

If it is passed, the legislation would create a gigantic $3.3 million-a-year (mostly federal) money machine for the environmentalist lobby and government bureaucrats. It will fund their planning; a professional publicity campaign (that they call “outreach and education”!); and the compilation of a comprehensive, prioritized “inventory” (i.e., hit list) to officially catalog whose land they are going after next.

Thousands of landowners will be included without their consent, and there are no limits. The council is authorized to define the regional boundaries anywhere it chooses and expand them at any time.

The council already has begun to function, in advance of actual legislative authority. It now exists as a private corporation to protect its members from liability, and its employees are accountable to no one.

As an appointed commission, it bypasses the Legislatures of the four affected states and is immune to both state and federal laws (such as the Freedom of Information Act) that ordinarily protect citizens from arbitrary and secret government actions. The membership of the council and its so-called “advisory” committee is stacked with environmentalist and federal political interests.

The bill accepts as a given the recommended “strategies” of the politically motivated Northern Forest Lands Study, completed last year by the U.S. Forest Service, that advocated Greenline controls and the establishment of new federal areas.

It would establish in federal law the preservationist political premise that our lands are “unique ecological resources of national significance.” It would direct the council to “foster a regional understanding” that transcends states sovereignty and “encourage” public acquisition of the targeted lands. It speaks vaguely of “current patterns of use” and rural economic development (a financial bribe), but provides specifics only for land-use strangulations and acquisition planning.

The proposed bill is patterned after the infamous Pacific Northwest Columbia Gorge regional Greenlining scheme long advocated by preservationists as a “model” for what they want to do to us. The new bill stops short of authorizing additional land-taking authority, but that surely will follow when the official “plan” is legally and politically established; persuading the public to swallow the whole package at once would have been a little too ambitious.

Some claim that by supporting this radical bill, the Maine congressional delegation is “protecting” us from Washington backrooms and a full preservationist takeover, but that belief is naive at best (and ingenuous at worst).

Federal takeovers across the country have almost always been endorsed by one or more of the targeted region’s own congressmen on behalf of preservationist lobbyists. Maine’s delegation, especially Sen. Mitchell, has enough clout in Washington to squelch this whole travesty if it wants to. Their support for this assault on Maine sovereignty and landowner rights demonstrates that they are part of the problem, not the solution.

Congressional staffs in Washington have circulated the myth that the bill has no opposition in Maine. When the Maine Conservation Rights Institute (MECRI) tried to testify in Washington against that lie a few months ago, we were politically stopped because they didn’t want an open controversy. Letters of inquiry and protest have gone unacknowledged. They intend to slip this bill through quietly.

Even the two sham “public hearings” are part of the orchestrated public relations strategy intended to give the impression of what the council is calling “solidarity.” To support this falsehood, preservationists cynically manipulated, in advance of the legislation, a vaguely defined endorsement from a council of forestry groups that had no experience contending with federal agencies, nor any understanding of the political and legal consequences of the proposed federal legislation.

Small landowners are indeed, as the NEWS stated, “overmatched” by the highly funded, military-like operation of the preservationists and their surrogates in government. Small landowners are being taken taken by surprise; they are unorganized, unfunded, uninformed, inexperienced, and have to spend their time earning a living while their taxes support the “non-profit” preservationist lobby. But one of the most serious problems is that the public has been kept in the dark about the nature and purpose of this federal campaign for more than three years.

When MECRI recently discovered that drafts of the proposed legislation were circulating among environmentalist groups, we notified every newspaper in the state; provided a description of the contents; and offered to provide a copy of the 17-page document. With few exceptions it was ignored. Wasn’t that news, or must every issue be defined by what the senators say in their publicity releases? How can the public be expected to “comment” intelligently on federal legislation when it doesn’t know what the bill actually says?

The NEWS editorial was correct: Small landowners had better get involved — before it is too late. For a legal analysis of the legislation, contact MECRI at Box 220, Lubec 04652, telephone 733-5593.

Erich Veyhl is a director of the Maine Conservation Rights Institute, an organization dedicated to the preservation of landowners’ rights.