The Road to Sprawl ‘Suburbia’ strengthens its hold in Maine

It wasn’t that long ago when raspberry bushes grew where Pam Auge now strolls in the roadway amid the tidy raised ranch houses along Treadwell Acres in Hermon.

“I guess I’ll just wait and see what happens,” Auge, 62, said, crossing onto a freshly paved extension of the road that will soon accommodate 15 new homes in a subdivision called Bayberry Ridge.

Over the past 27 years, Auge, a retired nurse, has watched the once small farming town grow into a full-fledged suburb of Bangor in which no less than 50 new houses have been built each year for the past two decades.

Gobbling up forests and farmland over the past 20 years, the residential and commercial dispersion of Maine – known as “sprawl” – was once bemoaned chiefly for its environmental impacts. But of late the focus has shifted to its economic effects, which will be a major emphasis of the state’s first Smart Growth Summit this Friday in Augusta.

The conference, presented by the nonprofit group GrowSmart Maine, will feature Gov. John Baldacci, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, and former Maine Gov. Angus King, whose administration rekindled the issue in the late 1990s as the Portland metropolitan area struggled with its seemingly unstoppable expansion.

With a strong real estate market, the trend has taken an upturn in recent years, and Bangor is now sprawling as fast as Portland, according to Evan

Richert, whom many consider to be the state’s top authority on the phenomenon.

“You can map it, you can chart it but, most of all, you can see the conversion,” said Richert, a former King administration official and chairman of GrowSmart Maine.

But unlike the Portland area, Bangor’s growth has come without a corresponding jump in regional population. In fact, the Bangor metro area and Penobscot County have posted slight population losses in the past decade. For comparison, in Cumberland and York counties, where sprawl has received more attention, the populations have grown 9 percent and 13 percent.

Hermon, although a prime example, is by no means alone in terms of residential growth. Other emerging Bangor suburbs, including Glenburn, Levant and Orrington, have seen similar expansions into once remote areas of town that now have names – often evoking idyllic images of the landscape they’ve altered – such as Woodbrook and Riverbend.

Approaching her house, the first built on Treadwell Acres, Auge said she doesn’t necessarily have anything against the growth, other than fleeting worries about the deer that visit her front yard and the potential for increased traffic on what used to be her dead-end street.

After all, she said, the new homes, many of which are relatively grand in scale, have helped to keep the town’s property tax rate down compared to surrounding communities, particularly Bangor, where she and her husband lived until 1977.

But that disparity in tax rates is shrinking as the once rural towns increase services such as fire and police protection to meet the demands of their newer residents. Many, like Auge, moved from the city to raise their children, who place their own demands on the town’s school system as well.

Funding local education has been increasingly challenging for many smaller towns, which often find themselves in need of new schools – at a substantial cost to both the town and the state – to accommodate the new students and the expectations of parents.

While the tax discrepancy shrinks, Bangor, which still has large parcels of undeveloped land on its outskirts, has seen a building boom of its own in recent months with more than 250 homes set for construction in the next six years.

But demand for the suburban lots has not slowed as a result, and it only took one month to sell all but three of the Bayberry Ridge lots in Hermon, which at more than an acre, are large by Bangor standards.

While demand for out-of-town homes persists, officials, in addition to reviewing town ordinances and crafting new rules for subdivisions, have made some more practical adjustments. In Hermon, those include this week’s addition of a third day for trash pickup, a remedy for the 16-hour workdays previously being logged by pickup crews.

The town has responded in other ways, tapping into Bangor’s water and sewer services to avoid redundancy – a major complaint of the Baldacci administration, whose recently released property tax reform proposal has targeted sprawl as a contributor to higher taxes and has renewed its call for regional delivery of services as a remedy.

“We need to think about efficiency and think differently,” said Lee Umphrey, the governor’s spokesman. “Stopping sprawl has to be part of that effort.”

GrowSmart Maine director Alan Caron said those state and local dollars could be better used to erase some of the inherent economic disadvantages in a rural state like Maine, which has a difficult enough time competing for high wage jobs with southern New England.

In the meantime, some towns, particularly those in southern Maine, have had some success in curbing sprawl. In Freeport, new subdivisions must preserve half the land as open space, and the downtown district has been rezoned to allow more housing, said Caron, who doubles as chairman of the Freeport planning board.

“This isn’t just about saving wildlife,” Caron said. “It has consequences for all of us.”

On the Net: www.smartgrowth.org.