BELFAST – Three nations inhabit the Passamaquoddy Bay region, and this larger community opposes a plan to build a $300 million liquefied natural gas terminal there, members of a coalition said Tuesday.

The Save Passamaquoddy Bay Alliance met with reporters at the Hutchinson Center of the University of Maine in Belfast on Tuesday to better reach reporters from around the state, coalition members said.

“It’s been very hard to tell our story in Portland, Augusta and Bangor,” group spokeswoman Linda Godfrey said.

The group was then bound for Augusta and a meeting with Alan Stearns, a senior policy adviser to Gov. John Baldacci.

The alliance includes representatives from the Passamaquoddy Indian Nation; from bay-area towns such as Eastport, Perry and Lubec; and from Canadian towns such as Campobello Island and Deer Island, making it a “three-nation” coalition.

Godfrey, who operates a lodge on Campobello Island, said the group wants to hold Baldacci to his pledge of not siting an LNG terminal in a community opposed to it.

Though a nonbinding Passamaquoddy Nation vote supported the project, 193-132, the governor should consider the sentiments of the larger community, Godfrey said.

Alliance members believe Quoddy Bay LLC, the Tulsa, Okla.-based company that would develop the LNG terminal with the Passamaquoddy Indian Nation, is days away from filing its pre-application to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The terminal would be built on 42 acres of tribal land on Gleason Cove on the west side of the bay, just north of the Pleasant Point Reservation.

The group believes state officials – and perhaps many Mainers – see impoverished Washington County as an appropriate site for a controversial LNG terminal. Similar projects have been turned back in Harpswell; on Cousins Island in Yarmouth; on Hope Island in Cumberland; on Sears Island in Searsport; and in Corea in Gouldsboro.

With its deep-water access, proximity to the natural gas pipeline that crosses from Canada into Maine, and the region’s perennial high unemployment, Passamaquoddy Bay appeared to be logistically and politically suitable.

An internal e-mail from Baldacci senior policy adviser Dick Davies to Baldacci and Stearns, obtained by LNG opponents through a public-access law, said as much: “The logical site would be in Washington County because … it is likely to have the strongest level of support for a major industrial project, and has the least amount of NIMBYism.” NIMBY stands for “not in my back yard.”

Such an assessment of the region is insulting to residents, Godfrey said.

Alliance members reviewed the basis of their opposition over a two-hour session, hitting the familiar themes of threats to the safety of residents from fuel fires, damage to the tourism economy by a major industrial development, damage to the ecosystem of the bay and damage to the fisheries industry.

But the most dramatic portion of the opponents’ argument against the proposal came visually.

Though nearby Eastport is known for its deep-water shipping terminal, and large ships frequent the bay, the site of the proposed LNG terminal would mean the ships would come within a mile of the major population areas of the bay, opponents said.

Speakers showed on nautical charts the sharp, zigzagging turns a 940-foot-long LNG ship would have to take through Canadian waters between Grand Manan Island and Blacks Harbour, then between Campobello Island and Deer Island, and past Eastport.

Homeland security rules mean all maritime activity two miles in front of the LNG ships, a mile behind, and 1,000 feet on both sides would have to cease when vessels are approaching the terminal, Godfrey said.

Arthur Mackay, a biologist who is director of the Canadian St. Croix Estuary Project, said the region’s environmentally based economy accounts for $1 billion in tourism, recreation, fisheries and related business each year.

“Why would we take a $1 billion industry and chuck it and move New Jersey north?” Mackay asked.

Seals, porpoises, whales and birds make their home – and in some cases, raise their young – in the bay, he said, and the industrialization of the area would threaten their habitat.

The initial development would attract related industry, alliance members said, so the project could grow to several hundred acres.

David Moses Bridges, a member of the Passamaquoddy Nation, said the tribe lives on just 250 acres.

“They want to take one-fifth of that and turn into a zone for heavy industry,” he said. Tribal leaders are motivated by greed, Bridges continued, and failed to give members enough time to gather facts on the LNG proposal before the vote.

“Right now my community is divided,” he said. “We were promised 90 days on this, and two weeks later we were voting on it.”

A move to hold a second vote is under way, he said.

The proposed terminal site is so close to the reservation’s housing, school, church, day care and health center, Bridges said, that “It’s not even in our back yard – it’s in our front yard. It’s in our only yard.”

Fellow Passamaquoddy member Gail Dana said the tribe is not squarely backing the LNG plan.

“Make no mistake – the Passamaquoddy Nation does not embrace LNG,” she said.

Jan Meiners, a business owner who operates a bed-and-breakfast inn on Campobello Island, described newspaper maps of the region that showed the Canadian islands as “gray shadows.”

Many people live in those gray shadows, she said, and their objections to LNG should be considered.

Nancy Asante, a member of the town of Perry’s planning board, said a 1986 town vote to give the Passamaquoddy Nation land east of U.S. Route 1 included the provision that it not be used commercially. That provision could be changed only be town vote, she said.