LAND ENDOWMENT

It is a contradiction that as Maine acquires more and more public land, the amount of money it allocates to maintaining and overseeing these lands, whether state parks, public reserved lands or other state entities, is declining. The majority of funding for state park maintenance comes from the sale of conservation license plates.

Since a chickadee replaced the boiled lobster on the state’s regular license plates, the revenue generated by loon plates has dropped by almost one-third to just over $650,000 this year. Money for public reserved lands comes primarily from timber harvested on these mostly remote parcels. A weak lumber market has meant less money for these lands. At the same time, the state has added 105,000 acres through purchases and easements to its ownership since 1995.

This points up an obvious problem.

If there was barely enough money to keep state lands shipshape before, the problem will only get worse as the state has more that it must keep watch over. State voters will have a chance to approve bonds for state park improvement projects and additional land and easement purchases next fall. The wording of the land purchase bond issue will be debated in the Legislature early next year.

Lawmakers would do well to include a provision to set aside funds to monitor any new easements and to maintain any new lands that are purchased by the state. Think of it as an endowment. Like colleges that set aside a pot of money (and hope to watch it grow) to pay for scholarships and other necessities, an endowment should be set up with each new purchase to be used to pay for maintenance of the property.

State officials have wisely already done this with some recent easement deals. Rather than an afterthought, such provisions should be part of all land transactions involving the state in the future. While buying easements to protect lakes, mountains and other areas from development is a good idea, the land protection could be meaningless if no one is making sure that the terms of the easement are not being followed.

Conservation groups are now eyeing more than 2 million acres in Maine for protection. Buying some of this land and putting easements on the rest could cost nearly $500 million. Even if only a portion of this land is ultimately protected, much money will have to be spent to ensure that land that is preserved is not abused by wayward recreationists, timber trespassers or landowners harvesting too many trees or allowing development in off-limits areas.

The perfect example for protecting land while also paying for its maintenance already exists in Maine. When Percival Baxter turned nearly 200,000 acres over to the state for the park that now bears his name, he also set aside money to run Baxter State Park in perpetuity. That fund now contains more than $70 million.

It is a model worth emulating.