Leader of SAM faults Katahdin plan State agency accused of bias against hunting

AUGUSTA – Political tensions over the Katahdin Lake land deal escalated Wednesday when the head of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine criticized the leading compromise proposal and implied that state officials were complicit in efforts to close land to hunting.

Department of Conservation officials angrily dismissed George Smith’s comments and defended the agency’s record on hunting.

Smith, the high-profile executive director of SAM, has been surprisingly quiet during the three weeks of committee hearings held so far on the proposal to annex more than 6,000 acres around Katahdin Lake to Baxter State Park.

He ended that relative silence with a boom Wednesday.

Smith, who is spokesman and lobbyist for the 11,000-member group, rejected a proposed compromise to split the property into two sections: a 2,000-acre parcel where hunting would be permitted and 4,000 acres managed as a wildlife sanctuary.

Committee members proposed the split hoping to secure a two-thirds vote in the Legislature, which must sign off on the sale of 7,400 acres of state-owned forests to Gardner Land Co. as part of the deal. The committee could vote today on which, if any, of several options to recommend to the full Legislature.

Smith claimed that roughly 100 hunters – both SAM members and nonmembers – approached him during the past week to talk about the Katahdin Lake issue. Only two recommended giving up the fight to keep hunting rights on all 6,000 acres, he said.

“This has been my experience everywhere I’ve gone for the past month,” Smith told members of the Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry Committee. “There is no way I can convince sportsmen that this is a good deal for them.”

Smith’s figures contrasted sharply with those provided by Rep. Donald Marean, a Hollis Republican who conducted his own unscientific poll. All 26 of the hunters he polled in his district last weekend said they supported keeping the land as wildlife sanctuary in order to conserve the property. Twenty-three of the hunters were members of SAM, he said.

But the biggest bomb that Smith dropped was when he implied that staff in the Department of Conservation had schemed – and were still scheming – with groups or individuals that Smith considers hostile to hunting and other “traditional” activities.

Smith charged that the department had tried to convince Roxanne Quimby to buy the Katahdin Lake parcel. Quimby, the wealthy founder of Burt’s Bees, is reviled by some Maine sportsmen because of her history of buying large tracts of forestland and closing them to hunting.

“We thought it was a travesty for our Department of Conservation to be trying to get Roxanne to buy more land in the North Woods where sportsmen would be kicked out,” Smith said. “But they did try, and when that failed, they moved to the deal that is before you today.”

That prompted an angry response from the department’s commissioner.

A visibly furious Patrick McGowan told the committee that the department never asked Quimby to buy the Katahdin Lake parcel.

Afterward, McGowan said the department had facilitated last year’s land swap between Quimby and Gardner Land Co. that kept thousands of acres of land near Baxter open to hunting.

“We always have an open dialogue with Roxanne just as we do with all of the major landowners in Maine,” McGowan said.

Smith also accused department staff of holding secretive meetings in which the group carved up the state into areas that could be designated as “wilderness,” a term that Smith and others interpret as meaning off-limits to hunting.

McGowan pledged to provide the committee with more information on the meetings at today’s meeting but said afterward that Smith’s charges of an anti-hunting agenda were “absolute hogwash.”

The department manages more than 600,000 acres of state land, all of which is open to hunting, trapping, snowmobiling and other traditional uses, he said. Baxter State Park, where hunting is only permitted on one-quarter of its 204,000 acres, is managed independently by a park authority outside of McGowan’s department.

“We’re the most pro-hunting, pro-public access, pro-multiple use administration that has been in Augusta in a long time,” McGowan said.