UTU takes its message of `two Maines’ to Stetson > Group urges caution on wildlands bill

STETSON — The “UTU Traveling Road Show” came to Stetson Saturday morning, as Robbie McKay put it. Just a dozen people traversed slippery roads to get there, but the Kingman woman rarely misses a chance to spread the message of Unorganized Territories United, the fledgling organization that has become known for talking about “two Maines.”

McKay had traveled more than 100 miles with her husband and young son, only to find the heat slow to get going in the Stetson Meetinghouse. Fighting a cold, she stood near the front of the church, with its elegant tin walls and ceiling, and its small pipe organ in the corner.

“We started about a year ago, although we didn’t realize it,” she told the folks sitting in traditional white pews.

Tired of fighting for dwindling property rights and against increasingly intrusive government regulations, the group is investigating separating from Southern Maine.

An ally, Rep. Henry Joy, R-Crystal, already has filed legislation this session to examine the feasibility of creating two states within Maine.

For McKay, the first issue was education in the unorganized territories. “One of the options was to close the schools,” she said, and rural Mainers were concerned. “Kids would have to be bused over horrible roads a long distance,” she explained.

McKay said she and others began to feel “under attack” by those involved with efforts such as RESTORE: The North Woods and Ban Clearcutting, and soon many property owners were working together against the campaigns such as the forestry referendum for the right to continue to pursue their lives.

The members of UTU are a varied group. The McKays are concerned that excessive environmental efforts will infringe on their homestead, which has been in the family for more than a century.

Helen Gordon of Sullivan, who publishes a free newspaper on fishery issues, has been attending legislative hearings to look out for those interests for years.

But Gordon’s convictions go back long before she married her fisherman husband, Howard, or held her own lobster license. She still recalls, as a child, hearing about her mother’s family from Levant traveling the coast once a year to catch cod for the coming winter.

Then there’s Wilbur Landry of Abbot, who met up with UTU in December.

“I heard they were having a meeting to do with property rights at the Bangor Armory,” he recalled. Landry showed up, liked what he heard, and has been involved ever since. A recent public meeting for UTU in Abbot drew about 50 people, he said.

The organization is still involved in the forestry compact issue, but really follows issues worldwide, especially the international Convention on Biological Diversity treaty. The U.S. Senate has yet to ratify it, McKay said, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t making inroads in how property is controlled, especially in other parts of the country.

UTU displays maps of what could happen in Maine — yellow for “highly regulated” areas, red for “wild reserves and corridors with little to no use.” Those corridors, which follow rivers, for example, go right through the communities of Bangor and Waterville and Augusta — but not Portland.

One of the big issues for UTU right now, of course, is a bill in the Legislature that would prevent development in 4.5 million acres of the unorganized territories — at the headwaters of the Androscoggin River, in the western mountains, in Aroostook County, in a large area around Baxter State Park, and Down East.

The sponsor of the bill? Rep. David Shiah of Bowdoinham, just above Brunswick.

The way UTU members see it, southern Mainers want all the action — and the economy — centralized in their part of the state. In the north, land will come off the tax rolls as the state acquires it, hurting the tax base and economy.

It’s not that the UTUs are against clean water and air and having plenty of trees. Environmental efforts have done some good things, McKay said.

“In the ’60s, things were really nasty, and they did a good job cleaning it up,” she said. Environmentalists include many kind, decent, caring people, she said, but they’re being used by those who have turned their efforts and money from the original environmental issues to the restriction of human beings and their property.

Organizers of many of the land efforts have said that residences will not be infringed upon, nor will hunting and fishing privileges. UTU members are not convinced.

McKay said she urges those who are starting to think about land takeovers to decide for themselves, “do their own digging.”

The wildlands bill comes up in the Legislature on April 16. You know who will be there.