BANGOR – Just one mile northwest of here, Tammy Campbell plays with her 21/2-year-old daughter, Alexis, in their family’s spacious new home on Jillian Way in Glenburn.

Five months ago, Tammy and her husband, Bobby Campbell, lived with their two young children in a smaller house on Yankee Avenue on Bangor’s West Side. But like many middle-class parents – as suggested by figures recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau – the Campbells have packed up their belongings and headed for the suburbs.

“There’s nothing that I really miss,” said Tammy Campbell, a 32-year-old nurse at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor. “We’re five minutes out [of Bangor], there’s nobody around us and we don’t have to deal with Bangor’s high taxes anymore.”

The Campbells are not alone.

Once pastures and forests, Glenburn is now the fastest-growing suburb in the Bangor metropolitan area, posting a 24 percent jump in population since 1990 and a staggering 310 percent increase since 1960, according to U.S. Census figures.

The total population of the 15-community metro area dropped slightly during the last decade to just below 91,000.

But on Jillian Way, a cul-de-sac in the booming Forest Hills subdivision off Route 221, large homes in different stages of construction are popping up in place of the pine trees and boulders that have been bulldozed to the outskirts of the 2-acre lots.

Lots like those, gigantic by Bangor standards, have lured city dwellers from their in-town neighborhoods with the promise of elbowroom in towns such as Hermon, Hampden, Eddington and Winterport.

The boom of those lower-taxed suburbs has come – at least to some extent – at the expense of their anchor city, which this year lost 5 percent of its population, or more than 1,700 people. The city’s population is now at 31,473, its lowest since 1940 and 20 percent below its 1960 peak of 38,912 when Dow Air Force Base loomed large in the community.

But just as the Campbells are not alone in suburbia, neither is Bangor in its urban dilemma.

All three of Maine’s major cities lost population since 1990, with Lewiston losing 10 percent of its residents, bringing its population well below 36,000 for the first time since 1930. Portland, too, posted a loss, albeit of just 109 people, to remain far and away the state’s largest city, with a population nearly double that of Bangor’s.

Bangor ‘in good shape’

Bangor officials, upon receiving the latest census figures, were disappointed but not surprised – and not particularly concerned.

“Population is extremely important to us and nobody likes to see it go down,” said Mayor John Rohman. “But, unlike some other towns that may lose, our economic base simply does not erode because of it.

“Quite frankly, I think we’re in good shape,” he added.

Since 1990 the total value of the city has risen 30 percent, he said, and more than 220 homes have been built. While there may be more places to live in the city, smaller families are living there, state demographers say, citing a decades-old, statewide trend.

City officials also note that state estimates have shown a stable population in Bangor for the past few years, with the major drop coming in the early 1990s.

At least part of the population drop was by design, said city planners, citing an effort to convert multiunit homes in several neighborhoods into single-family homes. This is perhaps best evidenced by the transformation of Bangor’s East Side “tree streets,” including Elm, Birch and Maple, the populations on which have dropped 18 percent since 1990.

For the convenience of living in the city, those families are paying higher property taxes – in some cases nearly twice as much – than their suburban counterparts. For example, compared to Bangor, a homeowner in Glenburn would save more than $600 in taxes on an $80,000 property, while in Hermon, that savings would approach $800.

But Bangor’s property tax burden – 19th in the state – pales in comparison to those of Portland and Lewiston, the state’s second- and third-highest-taxed cities. Like Bangor, those southern Maine cities have seen an outward migration to their suburbs during the past 30 years.

Closer to home, high taxes are also a factor in Orono, home of the state’s flagship university. The town appeared to take a big hit in the past decade, losing nearly 14 percent of its population.

That drop, however, also can be attributed to a steep decline in the number of students at the University of Maine. In the fall of 1990, 13,278 students were enrolled at the university, an all-time high for the 135-year-old institution.

After admissions standards were toughened and a campus in Bangor was severed from UM and put under the jurisdiction of the state university system’s Augusta campus, enrollment declined sharply to a low of 9,213 in the fall of 1997. It rebounded somewhat to 10,282 students by the fall of 2000.

In addition, as part of a budget-cutting plan, 81 faculty accepted an early retirement package in 1997.

Price to pay

But any property tax savings gained by moving from a developed town such as Orono comes at a larger cost, according to Evan Richert, Maine State Planning Office director.

“It’s an expensive way to develop outlying communities and regions,” said Richert, referring to the cost of “sprawl,” a nationwide phenomenon of people moving from traditional urban centers to outlying areas. “Everybody’s spreading out.”

Spreading out inevitably means expensive new roads, more traffic and new schools for the outlying communities, Richert said. In the past 30 years, the state spent about $1 billion on new schools, he said, about half of which were built in growing suburbs while populations in aging city schools dwindled.

While Richert recognizes the allure of living in the country, he said sprawl also affects taxpayers in the state’s larger cities still responsible for maintaining expensive infrastructures that, during the day, often serve more than double a city’s nighttime population.

To a lesser extent, this suburbanization of the Bangor region has affected nearby Brewer as well, with neighboring Eddington and Orrington gaining 5 percent and 7 percent in population, respectively, since 1990 while Brewer lost just 34 people in arriving at a 2000 population of 8,987.

Converting once-rural areas such as Eddington and Orrington into suburbs often results in higher taxes in those communities as they expand services to meet the needs of their new residents, he said. Transplanted city dwellers accustomed to trash pickup, recycling and promptly plowed roads often expect similar services in their new towns, many of which have limited infrastructure.

“If you ask these people what they most value about their communities, they’ll often say its rural character,” Richert said. “It’s ironic because what they’re getting is a suburban character.”

Tammy Campbell of Glenburn knew exactly what she wanted.

“We talked about it a lot,” Campbell said of the couple’s decision to move from Bangor after eight years. “We wanted more room for the kids to play, and we wanted some privacy. For us, it was the right thing.”