Portland The Other Maine Portland opportunities attract Mainers from northeastern counties

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Part 2 of a 6-part series

Jennifer Carney tried to stay close to home.

But like thousands before her in recent years, the 23-year-old lab technician left Aroostook County for Portland six months ago seeking two things she said she couldn’t find at home:

Opportunity and diversity.

“The way of life up there is just so hard,” said Carney, sitting amidst a hodgepodge of secondhand furniture in the small apartment she shares with her new husband in Portland’s Rosemont neighborhood. “People just scrape by and just can’t make enough money to ever really get ahead.

“My whole life we’ve always scraped by,” Carney

continued, referring to her family back in Ashland, where her older sister waits on tables at a local restaurant and works part-time at her father’s jewelry store in Presque Isle, the area’s retail hub. “I don’t ever want my kids to have to worry about those things.”

Carney is not the only one to head south in the last few years, and, not surprisingly, southern Maine – in particular Portland – was the top destination for those leaving Maine’s northeastern eight counties, according to a Bangor Daily News analysis of Internal Revenue Service data tracking county-to-county moves between 1995 and 2000.

For Carney, the difference between her rural hometown and Maine’s largest city is far greater than the hundreds of highway miles or the tens of thousands of people that separate the two.

It’s the difference, she said, between buying all her Christmas gifts in Presque Isle’s Wal-Mart Supercenter, and shopping in Portland’s multitude of specialty shops or the sprawling Maine Mall complex nearby.

It’s the difference between drinking beer on a Saturday night in a gravel parking lot on the edge of Ashland’s downtown, and bopping from restaurant to movie theater to nightclub with hundreds of other young people in Portland’s bustling Old Port.

Perhaps most importantly for Carney, however, it’s the difference between making about $25,000 a year as a lab technician at The Aroostook Medical Center, and more than $38,000 in the same job at Maine Medical Center, the state’s biggest and busiest hospital.

Keeping pace

Carney, who received her associate degree from the University of Maine at Presque Isle in medical lab technology in 1999 and her bachelor’s in environmental studies two years later, is actually an employee of NorDx, a Scarborough-based laboratory affiliated with Maine Med.

On a recent afternoon, about a dozen technicians like Carney darted about the lab in a sort of highly structured chaos, analyzing samples of patients’ blood and urine while doctors and nurses on the floors above eagerly awaited the results.

It’s the kind of intensity that fits Carney’s personality, a fact recognized by NorDx officials who offered her a hefty signing bonus and placed her at the hospital rather than the company’s larger Scarborough lab, where less urgent testing is done.

The faster pace has long attracted the state’s youth to Greater Portland, where the population has grown by 13 percent, or 28,258 people, in the last decade compared to a 10 percent drop of 2,808 people in Presque Isle and its surrounding towns.

Bigger paychecks have played a large part too in luring young professionals to Portland, where the per capita income of $23,000 is 44 percent more than in Presque Isle, according to 2000 Census figures.

In the 1990s more than 40 percent of the 15- to 29-year-olds left Aroostook County. One study showed almost a third of students in grades 6 through 12 believed they would have to leave the state to be successful.

To reverse the trend, Aroostook County officials, buoyed by federal funding for an “empowerment zone,” are accentuating the region’s natural benefits when seeking newcomers.

“If you’re not an outdoor person, it’s not the place to live, and it depends on what you’re looking for,” said Northern Maine Development Commission executive director Bob Clark. “This place isn’t for everybody, and in some ways we’re thankful for that.

“But it still comes back to people aren’t going to move to the rural areas unless they can maintain their standard of living,” added Clark, who was encouraged, he said, by a recent response to a job posting for an engineer in Caribou that drew 25 qualified applicants, five times the amount of previous postings.

For their part, Portland officials say they would rather see an influx from beyond the state’s borders, in part to help stabilize the north’s declining population and economy.

“You hate to steal them from the rest of the state,” said Elizabeth Darling, Portland’s marketing director, who attributed the city’s desirability to its proximity and similarity – albeit on a smaller scale – to Boston. “If we attract them all from northern Maine, who’s going to be left up there?”

Carney’s sister, for one; but perhaps not for long.

Decision time

After a breakup with her longtime boyfriend about a year ago, Kim Carney suddenly found herself with one fewer attachment to the area she has gladly called home for half her life.

And with an enthusiastic offer from Jennifer to stay in her extra bedroom until she gets on her feet, the opportunity might prove too much to pass by, she said.

“I guess I have a decision to make,” said Kim, 26, who’s also considering a move south, perhaps to Florida with her new boyfriend, Eric Guston.

She noted that any move would have to wait until the visiting snowmobilers and their tourism dollars left town. “I don’t know. I’m going to get through this season and see if there’s anything to keep me here.”

Despite no lack of snow on an early winter afternoon, the snowmobilers had yet to descend on the small town and its Four Seasons Inn restaurant, comfortably situated at the head of one of the main trails. Instead, the popular eatery was empty during the slow period between lunch and dinner except for one family at a booth in the next room.

“They’re regulars. Just coffee,” Kim explained, briefly excusing herself from the interview and dutifully asking the patrons for their orders, which she had accurately predicted moments before.

Ashland is full of familiar faces for Kim Carney, who is comfortable in the town where she attended high school and where the major businesses – three nearby lumber mills – employ nearly 500 people, more than one-third of the town’s population.

Although the Presque Isle area did add 2,130 jobs between 1995 and 2000 (after losing thousands of jobs in the area when nearby Loring Air Force Base closed), it paled in comparison to Portland. That southern Maine city enjoyed the highest growth rate in the Northeast during that period, adding nearly 20,000 new jobs, according to the Labor Market Information Service.

In her Portland apartment, Jennifer Carney was certain her sister would find her way in the city, population 64,249, despite Kim’s apprehension about the traffic, crime and losing touch with her close circle of friends back home, where she sings karaoke two nights a week at local bars.

“I wish she’d come, but I don’t think she will,” Jennifer Carney said. “She’s too afraid of change.”

But if Kim stays in Ashland, she might be the only one in her family to do so.

Sad farewell

Twenty miles away in his jewelry store at the Aroostook Centre Mall in Presque Isle, Carney’s father reluctantly planned his own move south.

“We were going to stick it out, but it’s like somebody has shut the curtain,” Gil Carney, 51, said of the economic climate in northern Maine, where he was born and raised. “Sometimes you have to make choices you don’t like.”

For Carney and his wife, those choices include closing his small store at the end of June and following their youngest daughter to Portland.

A 1970 graduate of Ashland High School, the father of two has strong ties to the town, to which he returned in 1989 with his wife and daughters, who had fallen in love with the freedom of rural living during a summer there with their aunt.

The girls’ pestering did propel the family’s move from Connecticut, where Gil Carney manged jewelry stores for two decades. But Carney said the move north was accelerated when he was forced to use a gun to chase a burglar from their Wallingford, Conn., home.

Now his daughter Jennifer has her own concerns about crime, living minutes from Portland’s Westgate Mall, where a store clerk recently was stabbed to death, allegedly by a fleeing shoplifter.

Although still a little jumpy if she hears noises at night, her fears were lessened with the arrival of her then- fianc?, Randy Gartley, who moved to Portland from Presque Isle in early December.

“It’s all because of her,” said the good-natured Gartley, smiling and putting his hands on the seated Carney’s shoulders. “I’ve never been in a big city before, but so far so good.”

The 26-year-old self-proclaimed “county boy” has been looking to work with children since his arrival and plans to finish his degree in teaching physical education at the University of Southern Maine where he can build on the courses he’s already completed at UMPI.

Gartley, who enjoyed his job at the Presque Isle Recreation Center before his relocation to Portland, acknowledged that the move wasn’t easy.

“He wants to go back, but there’s nothing up there,” Carney said once Gartley left the room. “You go to school, you work so hard and for what? You have to make a living for your family.”

For now, Carney is content in the apartment, which costs the couple $760 a month – a reasonable rent in Portland where two-bedroom units often go for as much as $1,200.

That’s a far cry from the $375 her sister pays for her second floor apartment on Ashland’s quarter-mile main drag, the layout of which Kim can recite flawlessly relying only on her memory.

While renters have it tough in Portland, homeownership there has posed a challenge for those far more established than Jennifer Carney and Gartley.

Never to return?

A starter home for first-time buyers in the Portland market will cost more than $100,000 on average, while new homes average more than $200,000. Homes there sell within days and oftentimes for far more than the asking price, according to a Maine State Housing Authority report.

For comparison, in the Presque Isle market, most homes are priced between $65,000 and $80,000 and sell within three months.

Carney and Gartley, married earlier this month, are in no hurry to buy a house in the Portland area.

And Carney, when pressed, acknowledged that she would consider returning in time to Aroostook County, but only as far north as Houlton, the last exit on I-95, if “they would pay me what I’m worth.”

With northern Maine employers hard pressed to compete with their counterparts in the booming Portland market, Carney’s imminent return is doubtful.

Even more unlikely is an eventual homecoming to Ashland, even though both sisters stressed they valued their rural upbringing and the intimacy of small-town life.

With the economic realities of adulthood, Jennifer’s affection for her hometown has simply waned.

“I’m never coming back here,” she said when asked about her prevailing thoughts upon driving the last stretch of Route 11 (which she calls the Woods Road) that leads from Medway to Ashland, where she returns frequently to visit.

Family is one of the only reasons Carney even opted to stay in Maine, where not even the relative urbanity of Bangor was enough to waylay her on the pilgrimage to Portland, still within driving distance of family.

“If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right and do it all the way,” she explained, echoing the sentiments, she said, of many of her remaining friends at UMPI.

“I’m sure they will come down after they graduate,” said Carney, who until Gartley’s arrival, lived outside Portland with two fellow Aroostook County emigrants. “They all want to come down.”

Tomorrow: Bright lights, big paychecks