Land for people

Plum Creek is a willing seller. The Trust for Public Lands is a people-friendly conservation group and an astute judge of real estate. The land in question is reasonable in amount and of extraordinarily high recreational value. The $5.26 million price tag seems fair. There’s a lot to like about the deal Gov. King announced Thursday regarding 65 miles of shoreline around Moosehead, the Kennebec and other Northern Maine waters.

A lot to like and a lot still to sort out. The pace of the last six months has been dizzying: company-to-company sales of millions of acres; company-to-conservation group sales of development rights on hundreds of thousands of acres, accompanied by the nagging feeling that state policy is being set by unelected out-of-staters and that the state eventually will pick up the tab; numerous competing funding ideas — from the governor’s $50 million bond package to competing legislative proposals (some sponsored by the same lawmakers) going as high as $200 million. A high-stakes game is well under way before the rules have been established.

Few issues divide Maine like the purchase of public lands. Opinions on how much of Maine the public should own range from a multi-million acre national park to zero. And while the final position, reached by both legislation and referendum, will most likely be towards the middle, property-rights activists, those tending toward the zero, have raised important questions that must be answered. As long as government — state or federal — is the buyer, it will take more than a willing seller to still this predominantly Northern Maine voice.

First, the question of taxation, of the damage done when a community’s tax base is eroded by public purchases. Rural Mainers rightfully object when urbanites suggest they make a sacrifice for the public good. The state has no business using the taxpayers’ money to drive up local property taxes until it stops shifting its statutory obligations onto local property taxes, such as General Purpose Aid to Education. When public purchases go from a few acres for a picnic area to tens of thousands of acres for a park, it’s time to talk compensation, yet none of the funding proposals contains even a whisper.

Second, access. Mainers, especially Northern Mainers, have long enjoyed open access to private land for camping, hunting, fishing, snowmobiling. There are legitimate concerns that public land means the restriction, even the elimination, of these traditional uses. Last year there was a bitter squabble about what would be permitted at an addition to Baxter State Park; the spat over access to the Allagash at John’s Bridge a more recent example. The debate on what the public can do on the land it buys should be held before the sale. Again, nothing before the Legislature creates a forum for that debate.

Finally, although polls suggest wide public support for increasing Maine’s public lands, there has been no wide public discussion of what land should be bought. Most of the attention so far has been on large tracts of remote, unspoiled North Woods, yet there is a clear need for smaller, day-use parks in the highly developed areas of Southern Maine, especially on the coast. The recreation value of public lands cannot be guaged in acreage alone, nor is the worth of land-acquisition legislation only counted in dollars.

All of which is why Maine should welcome the continued interest of the Trust for Public Lands. TPL is a well-respected, long-established national organization that emphasizes preserving recreation opportunities in small and medium-sized projects, very often in the center of town, always with an acute awareness of local concerns. In Maine, the group has worked to keep a development-threatened beach in Scarborough open for public frolic; it worked to preserve the historic McCurdy Smokehouse in Lubec. One of its more interesting projects elsewhere is in Cleveland, where it joined locals in ensuring that the land under a stadium to be razed became part of an adjacent park and not another stretch of suburban sprawl.

TPL’s motto is “Land for People.” Its success — projects in 45 states — is largely due to its understanding of the importance of public land the public actually uses and its willingness to help sort out issues before they become intractable problems. It’s a motto, and a model, the Legislature would do well to follow.