Right Decision, Wrong Way

The decision to put the new international crossing between Calais and St. Stephen, New Brunswick – the now legendary Third Bridge – at the city’s industrial park is, under the state’s current, painfully cautious approach to rural economic development, the right one. The agonizing way this decision was reached was wrong.

The chosen location will keep traffic at the sixth-busiest vehicle crossing between the U.S. and Canada where it belongs – in Calais, a retail/service community that relies heavily upon travelers. It will get the big rigs at the eighth-busiest truck crossing out of the downtown district, increasing both safety and livability. It will help ensure the success of the Downeast Heritage Center now under construction and will make it possible for Calais’ under-used industrial park to live up to its potential.

Certainly, this was a complicated decision to make – things get tricky any time the governments of two nations, one state, one province and myriad agencies with varied, even conflicting, interests are involved. No degree of complication, however, can explain the confused messages the people of Calais got from their own state government.

This project was conceived more than two decades ago by the people of Calais; the expectation always was that a modernized crossing would stay within the city. When planning got under way in earnest with state involvement in the late 1990s, the bypass crept into the picture first as a mere option that must be studied in accordance with federal mandates but that gradually grew into the state’s clear, though undeclared, first (cheaper and easier) choice. A citizen’s advisory committee was formed as the law requires; its role in developing state policy was never defined and its advice treated as meddling. The state commissioned and accepted a consultant’s study that misinterpreted flawed data to conclude that a bypass would not harm Calais; the people of Calais pointed out the errors, but the state would not acknowledge them.

The worst moment in this ordeal was when both Gov. King and Transportation Commissioner Melrose warned Calais its insistence on the industrial park site would jeopardize the creation of an East-West Highway that the King administration has done too little to advance in nearly eight years – a neat a bit of blame-shifting.

As the people of Calais began, understandably, to wonder how a project intended to help their struggling city could spin so out of control, the governor ignored their invitations to tour the sites for himself, the transportation commissioner chose to call them paranoid.

The reason this turned out right is, simply, the people of Calais and their allies, from the Port of Eastport to the Domtar mill in Baileyville. Faced with a state government that gave every indication of being more concerned about the needs of Canada, New Brunswick, the U.S. Customs Service and even out-of-state consulting firms than about its own citizens, they did not give up. They persisted, gathered more facts, refuted more errors and, in the end, won. It was a remarkable effort of which they should be proud. State government should be ashamed that it ever was necessary.