City Council seizes the moment

I admired my rooster Ben. Proud, upright, full-voiced, cock of the roost. He had little use for me, and still less when I stole up on him one autumn night while he was sleeping and stuffed him unceremoniously into a traveling pen.

There comes a time in the lives of all roosters when they must forswear green pastures and prepare for the journey to my freezer. Ben protested vociferously, to no avail. But then he had his moment in time. There was a split second at the abattoir – fleetingly, instantly brief – when I had the door to his pen opened and was unloading my birds. Ben’s head was out the opening, he looked me straight in the eye, recognized his pending fate, and was gone, instantly.

His look, his eyes, stay with me. Recognition was followed by action quicker than I could move my hand. I admire such decisiveness.

With little fanfare the Bangor City Council acted with equal decisiveness two weeks ago when it approved the rezoning of nearly 50 disputed acres near the Bangor Mall after an amendment to ensure a 600-foot setback from the Penjajawoc Marsh. This land use issue has been brewing, simmering, and variably erupting for the last four years, one of the most intractable in the city’s recent history.

How can you protect what is arguably the best freshwater marsh in Maine and at the same time allow private landowners and commercial development their due? A Wal-Mart Supercenter drowned in this miasmic swamp two years ago after an expenditure of nearly $500,000 by both sides with nothing to show – other than angered landowners, gun-shy developers, environmentalists on hair trigger alert, and a battered and bruised city council.

Enter a perfectly reasonable request by a local landowner to rezone 50 acres from agricultural/residential to commercial near the Bangor Mall. Except that the property is in the disputed area, the no-man’s-land between commercial Maine and unspoiled Maine. Should the setback from the marsh be 75 feet per city regulations, 250 feet per state rules, 600 feet as recommended by some naturalists or 1000 feet as desired by others? The issue had been debated by the Planning Board, swirled through City Hall, and bumped into almost all the alphabet soup organizations in Bangor with no resolution in sight.

On June 12 the issue finally came to the Bangor City Council for a decision. Six of the eight councilors leaned towards approval of the zoning change. They were still willing to listen, but not orchestrate how one of the parties should respond to pending inevitable disappointment. The city would speak and environmentalists and developers would have to fight out their ongoing disagreements in front of other boards, the courts, the Department of Environmental Protection, and the Army Corps of Engineers.

There were nearly three hours of testimony, most of it interesting, very little of it new, all of it impassioned. The wildlife in the marsh was described in detail, a developer said he could actually live with a 600-foot buffer, and the benefits of adding commercial development to Bangor’s tax base were lauded. More testimony. A developer could live with a 600-foot buffer? Wait a second! What did he say? Is there a different way of looking at the problem, a potential for compromise, a breakthrough?

We spent from 10:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. hammering out the details with the help of the city solicitor. A recess allowed time for brains to cool and reboot. The solution was not ideal for proponents of an untouched marsh nor for those wanting maximal acreage for stores. But it was a solution that allowed us to solve our problem in Bangor, setting a precedent for incorporating conservation plans into development, away from the litigious spotlight. The amended motion passed eight to zero with weary smiles.

The problems inherent in balancing conservation and development are far from over. The issue will resurface again in many different forms. But, like my rooster Ben, the City Council seized the moment. Although it was late at night and tempting to think in preordained patterns, the council kept listening, kept thinking, and kept looking for a creative, unanticipated solution.

The credit should be shared by all – in particular the contesting parties who acknowledged the legitimacy of other viewpoints, didn’t vilify their opponents, and risked unconventional thoughts. They came together and showed how protection and development don’t need to be at odds.

Government worked well June 12; our community is the better for it. Now is the time for the city to build on this advance by moving ahead to revise the Comprehensive Plan and including all interested citizens in the process.

“There is a time in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

“Julius Caesar,” Act III, 217ff

Geoff Gratwick is a Bangor city councilor.