A brighter sunrise

Boosters call it the Sunrise County, but sometimes must wonder whether the sun is coming up or going down on Washington County. It needs a good lift – or, rather, it needs some help in giving itself a good lift. Already, its residents have done a lot on their own.

The bare economic figures show a bleak picture: The county lost 1,367 people in the 1990s. That’s 3.9 percent of its population.

Some of this loss represents young people leaving in hopes of finding better jobs out of state or at least out of the county. Unemployment in April was 8.1 percent, according to the Maine Department of Labor. Good jobs are scarce in the county. Businesses wonder if it makes sense to locate there, when they see that only about 12 percent of the work force are college graduates (although more than 50 percent of the high school graduates go on to college or into the military).

Still, there are favorable signs: Employment has gone up 6 percent since 1997, including 75 jobs at the new Palmer Street School in Calais for children who need special attention. And the official figures miss an unknown number of self-employed people and an unreported “gray economy,” in which a cord of wood may be bartered for a string of haircuts or an engine overhaul.

A powerful force for improvement of life in Washington County is the Sunrise County Economic Council. In eight years, it has helped generate well over $2 million in funding for dozens of projects, plus another $1 million for its own projects. When the Palmer Street School was just a dream, the council helped develop a business plan and pointed to funding sources. It helped enlist each class of high school seniors to build an alumni data bank so that a Web site and newsletter can tell those who have gone away what life is like and what opportunities await back home. The idea is that some will return.

Dianne Tilton, the council’s executive director, recalls a meeting in which a graduating senior complained that there were no decent jobs in the county. A health care official astounded him by telling of a current opening for a psychiatrist paying more than $100,000 a year. The council seeks to keep young people from leaving and attract wanderers home by matching job opportunities with their qualifications. She urges prospective employers to look beyond the statistics, since many workers are overqualified, such as college graduates who are cutting wood or digging clams.

The Washington County Leadership Institute, operated by the University of Maine at Machias, trains 20 students and adults a year by exposing them to such things as the planning that went into the new Machias Savings Bank building in Machias. By erecting it downtown, the bank helped preserve the town center rather than contributing to sprawl.

Aside from improving the job market, the council seeks also to promote tourism. It wants to make Washington County “a destination rather than a pass-through point on the way to Canada,” says Charles McAlpin, chairman of the council. He mentions such tourist sites as Indian carvings in Machias, fly fishing in Grand Lake Stream, west of Calais, and the development of the Heritage Center, a museum to be built in Calais. It will focus on the beauty and history of St. Croix island, where Samuel de Champlain and his crew wintered in 1604 as the first settlement in the New World. (Half the settlers perished that winter and the settlement later died out, but it beat Jamestown, Va., by three years.)

Starting in early 1996, the council began raising a modest endowment of $1 million, so that it could have reliable income in addition to its more chancy and less flexible funding from various grants. The drive started with pledges of $100,000 each from the Machias Savings Bank and the county. Now it is seeking funds statewide, from firms that do business in Washington County and from other businesses and individuals who see the value in strengthening the entire state.

The hope is that development driven by local people will preserve the environment and the character of the small towns and villages Down East. It is an idea well worth fighting for, and one that residents elsewhere in the state, busy trying to keep their own communities healthy, should loudly support.