Do you favor requiring landowners to obtain a permit for all clear-cuts and defining cutting levels for lands subject to tree growth tax law?

Maine can acknowledge that some large landowners have over cut parts of the forest without resorting to this flawed initiative as a way to mend the harm. Voters should reject this question not because of the dire ads of the opposition, the theoretical issue of increased sprawl or sheer fatigue with the debate over forestry practices and the people who raise the issue. Voters should reject Question 2 because it presents more problems than it purports to solve.

The question, like most referendum questions, bears only a passing similarity to the bill itself. It would limit annual cutting by species to average annual growth during the previous 10 years. It requires landowners to get a permit for a clear-cut, to be awarded if the state thinks the clear-cut is justified and if the public does not object. It establishes a council of broadly defined interested people to establish rules to carry out these two provisions.

Because supporters of the initiative assembled this proposal without a lot of public input, several mistakes in it became clear after it was placed on the ballot. For instance, the state report on which the question bases its provision on looking back 10 years to measure growth actually said look forward 10 years, though modeling, a key difference for anyone who believes the status quo in the forest is not acceptable. And the question mistakenly leaves out the ability of small woodlot owners to “bank” growth so that cutting is economically feasible. Supporters, in fact, now say that perhaps any landowner with fewer than 1,000 acres should have been left out of the bill altogether. They cannot rewrite the question’s language at this late date, of course, but they promise to try to fix it in the Legislature next session.

It is almost too obvious to point out that if large landowners made a similar number of mistakes and promises of rectification in a referendum question that environmentalists would be shouting from every corner of the state about how no measure with such serious flaws should be passed, about how the voters should decide based on the actual language of the question, about how anything less is a subversion of the democratic process, etc. Suffice it to say that, in this case, environmentalists have overreached by assuming they have the unusual ability to read voters’ minds and can determine how a bill that has yet to be voted on will later be rewritten.

Unfortunately, Question 2 is worse than the sum of its mistakes. The limitations on the amount of wood that could be cut encourages landowners to remove the most valuable trees – high grade – and leave the worst standing. It restricts the ability of a landowner to restore, for instance, spruce forests by removing significant amounts of hardwood. Less cutting means less money for each stand cut, resulting in a lowered investment in those stands, just the opposite of where Maine should be going.

The alternative to more regulation like Question 2 already has arrived. Certification by independent experts, who judge each piece of land on forestry practices, wildlife habitat and socioeconomic issues, is far preferable than asking voters what size clear-cuts should be allowed statewide or what growth rates foresters should use. The key for Maine is to identify a legitimate certification process and push landowners to use it. Few people doubt poor cutting practices have left scars on the Maine woods; certification is a good way to make certain those scars heal and no new ones are made.

Question 2’s poorly written standards, however, make the process of moving toward certification, what would necessarily be a collaborative process, more difficult and drives Maine even further from the kind of forestry most people say they want. That’s reason enough to vote no.