Evidence mounts

The case for an east-west highway builds. Vermont, New Hampshire, Quebec and the Maritimes are laying serious plans, showing this is not a parochial wish but a regional concern. State and federal employment data quantify the easily seen observation that what job growth Maine has enjoyed has occurred almost entirely along the only modern highways Maine has, I-95 and the turnpike. Now there is a strong indication that this project, as enormous as it is, actually could be affordable.

Bangor Finance Director Ron Heller and Rick Bronson, a member of the Maine East-West Highway Coalition, have crunched some interesting numbers. By comparing and melding data from two studies — one by Wilbur Smith Associates for the Maine Turnpike Authority and the other by the University of Maine Canadian-American Center and the Atlantic Provinces Truck Owners Association — Heller and Bronson conclude that tolls generated by a Calais-to-New Hampshire (and-or Quebec) highway could support between $240 million and $600 million in debt, enough to pay for a lot of road-building.

Better still, Heller and Bronson have been extremely conservative in their estimations. They low-balled the traffic estimates of both studies, they assumed a not very imaginative bonding plan and they made no assumptions at all that a modern highway would increase economic activity along the route. Which, as the aforementioned employment data suggest, would hardly be the case.

The analysis of the two studies, Heller stresses, is not an authoritative finding, but a point of departure for informed discussion and further, more rigorous studies. That’s a good, modest point to make, but conservative projections based upon a study commissioned and accepted by the turnpike authority and upon research conducted by UMaine’s Canada experts should not be discounted.

More rigorous studies on feasibility and economic potential are under way by the Maine Department of Transportation and the State Planning Office. Their release early next year is eagerly anticipated, but it is somewhat curious that the salient points of two studies done for and by two major state entities were ferretted out not by the state’s top economic and transportation experts, but by two local guys.

Which raises the same troubling point that has nagged at this initiative from the start. To date, the real work on creating a modern roadway for Northern Maine, the heavy lifting of assembling information, of making contacts with other states and provinces, and of building public support has been done from the ground up. It is local — emphasize local — political, business and civic leaders that are moving this along. The leaders in state government — elected, appointed, executive, legislative or administrative — have pretty much been bystanders.

A local advocate of the east-west highway recently observed that Maine’s response to the narrow, twisting roads that serve the state’s northern tier has been to slap up a sign or two designating them as scenic routes. It’s time Maine’s state-level leaders quit enjoying the view and got behind the wheel.