Bethel bingo

The Land Use Regulation Commission staff got it right in recommending approval of the Passamaquoddy Tribe’s bingo hall in Albany Township. Now, as LURC itself gets down to business, it’s time for opponents of this relatively innocuous project to get a grip.

Two thousand bingo players 27 weekends a year simply will not bring about the end of the world. Heck, they’ll hardly be noticed among the throngs of skiers, kayakers, mountain bikers, and other assorted vacationers and conventioneers who pack the Bethel region’s resorts. And if marker-wielding retirees want to get rowdy, they’ll have to go off-premises, perhaps to a local upscale brewpub. The tribe’s entire 18-acre property will be dry.

Yet, no sooner had LURC staff released its recommendation Monday than opponents were talking lawsuit. Their arguments — tired old anti-development whining about traffic, police and fire protection, and septic tanks, along with a new and rather distasteful grouse about special rights for the Indians — did not impress the staff, so now they’ll try to stall it death in court.

Opponents are in a particularly high dudgeon that the staff, in finding that the project addressed environmental concerns and would benefit the community, considered the tribe to be part of the community. Just not their sort.

So when LURC convenes next Thursday in Rockland to vote on the rezoning application, the board will need a keen eye for the truth, a good sense of balance and a strong stomach for what, at best, is snobbishness. At worst, it’s something much worse.

First off, Commissioner Teresa Hoffman is sure to be asked once more to recuse herself from this decision, as opponents demand. Hoffman is a Penobscot and so, they say, cannot judge fairly a Passamaquoddy application. One has to wonder if the same absurd demand would be made if the commissioner was a Murphy and the applicant a McGillicuddy.

No, when it comes to recusal, the commissioner with the tough choice to made will be Chairman Stephen Wight, owner/operator of the Sunday River Inn and a member of the Bethel Area Chamber of Commerce.

In recent months, this conflict of interest personified has said, in public, that the bingo hall would not fit in with the region’s existing tourism package, that the tribe needed a setting more in the Motel 6 range (as opposed, we assume, to Sunday River Inn), and that innkeepers who would rent rooms out for one-night-stand bingo orgies would be engaging in a form of economic prostitution. And he added more fuel to the fire after the staff report Monday by saying the LURC decision will only be the staging ground for a lawsuit, doing everything but offering to deliver the papers to the Oxford County courthouse himself. If Wight votes against this project and it is turned down, this is one headed for court all right, and the taxpayers of Maine will be the ones writing the big check.

Opponents so far have tried to defeat this project by coming at it from two directions: the Bethel region is a pristine patch of forest primeval that cannot be sullied; the Bethel region is a tourist Mecca for hoity toity pilgrims only, hoi polloi need not apply. If they can’t get real, they could at least get their story straight.