YES TO A LAND BOND

Those lawmakers opposed to a bond question to replenish the Land for Maine’s Future coffer know that if the question goes to voters it would be supported by the same enthusiastic margins that passed two previous measures. The question the public should have is why the Legislature would stand in the way of such a valuable and broadly supported idea.

Not only are 260 businesses and a wide range of sporting and environmental groups in favor of this bond, through long experience with land purchases by the board, the voting public likes the idea of protecting land and trusts the board to make smart decisions. Turning a rail corridor in Aroostook County into a snowmobile trail, preserving spectacular stretches of coastline and making them accessible with hiking trails and protecting large swaths of wildlife habitat have been positively received statewide, and the board’s more recent emphasis on making those places easier to find has encouraged people to visit much more of the state.

The LMF fund has now run out of money, recently committing the last of the $50 million voters approved in 1998. This is, fortunately, a good time for new bonds. Though not all of the money would be bonded immediately, rates are especially low right now. And it is one of the few affordable areas of budgeting right now. The state includes in every annual budget the assumption that $150 million worth of general obligation bonds will be sold each year. The land bond before the Appropriations Committee is for $60 million over five years, $12 million a year, a small portion of the anticipated total. Nor is the total bond debt high right now. Maine, like many states tries to keep its annual debt service below 5 percent of revenues. Currently, the debt repayment is at 3.9 percent.

Voters created the Land for Maine’s Future Program in 1987 with enthusiastic support of a $35 million bond issue. The program promised to preserve the state’s most special places and to do it by forging public and private partnerships. Consider one of the more recent LMF projects, a conservation corridor along Spednic Lake and the upper St. Croix River. The conservation purchase – a 500-foot shoreland corridor along 16 miles of the lake and 34 miles of the river for a total of 3,000 acres – protects an area of exceptional historic, scenic, ecological and recreational value. That it does so in eastern Washington County, a struggling region with a promising future in nature-based tourism, adds an economic element as well.

The $2.5 million deal for land owned by a group of investors and managed by Wagner Land Management combines $1.43 million in LMF money, $175,000 in federal conservation funds and $50,000 from Maine Outdoor Heritage lottery proceeds with about $1 million in private money. The public money leverages the private, and Maine gets to protect especially important areas. Without the LMF money, these deals don’t happen.

The Legislature is expected to decide today whether to send the LMF bond to voters this fall. It should, confident in the fact that the board’s 17-year track record speaks of wise investments statewide.