The Price of Prosperity Shorefront property boom a mixed blessing for Lincoln residents

loading...

After 42 years of marriage and 21 years of U.S. Army housing in Nebraska, New York, Texas, Virginia and West Germany, Richard and Linda Wyman want the first house they build together to be their best, and final, home.

Their dream house.

“About five years ago, we started looking for a place to retire to,” Linda Wyman said during a recent telephone interview from their home in Springfield, Va. “We looked at Gettysburg; Concord, New Hampshire; Colorado Springs. Nothing seemed to work out.

“And last summer he said to me, ‘If you could be anywhere in the world, where would you like to be?’ And I said, ‘New England,'” Wyman said. “Where else can you find a fall like in New England?”

That’s why the 64-year-old retired lieutenant colonel and his wife, a 62-year-old retired administrative assistant, next year will move to a palatial, 3,700-square-foot house they are building on Upper Coldstream Pond.

“We are looking for a less hectic lifestyle. We want to go from eight lanes of traffic to two,” Wyman said.

Vernon and Debra Bowers have the same dream – and won’t be living it.

For 18 years, the 77-year-old retired carpenter and his wife lived on Upper Coldstream, one of 14 ponds and lakes in Lincoln, in a small house that they converted from a camp. Like the Wymans, they were seduced by the lake’s serene beauty.

“It was peaceful and calm. It was a nice place to be,” Debra Bowers, 73, said. “I loved to watch the loons, and listen to them at night, and watch the ducks. A lot of times I would take out bread and leave it there for them.”

But the Bowerses were forced to sell their lakefront property last August and move to a small house on Tibbetts Drive.

“When they [town officials] more than doubled our taxes, we decided we didn’t need that expense anymore,” Bowers said. “We thought we might finish our retirement there, but it just got too expensive for us.”

Thanks to recent leased-lot sales by the heirs of the Webber Timberlands Co. – one of Lincoln’s largest landowners, owning half of the 23,000 town forestry acres – and other land management companies, the town has seen an explosion in building permits issued to property around Caribou, Egg, Long and Upper Coldstream ponds and lakes, said Ruth Birtz, the town economic development assistant and a zoning enforcement supervisor.

“A lot of people who are purchasing property are buying homes and hoping to retire here,” Birtz said.

That growth infuses cash into the economy and increases the town’s populace with people like the Wymans, Birtz said, but it threatens economic and cultural displacement that leaves lifelong Lincoln residents, like the Bowerses, with their retirement dreams dashed because lakefront property values and taxes climb too high.

“You just figure when you get older you would like to retire on the lake, but you can’t afford it,” Debra Bowers said. “It’s going to be all out-of-staters by the lakes because they’re the ones with all the money.”

Explosive growth

The town’s lakefront growth is most easily measured in building permits issued and lot sales, Birtz said. With more than 100 issued so far this year – compared to 60 permits issued at this time last year – and another 100 expected issued by summer’s end, she expects about 300 building permits to be issued this year.

That’s double a typical year’s output, Birtz said, and doesn’t include septic, plumbing or electrical work permits.

“Our workload is about three times what it was last summer,” Jerry C. Davis, a town code enforcement officer, said recently.

Most permits are going to lakefront property, as leaseholders who formerly would not invest much in land they didn’t own have begun buying their leased lots and improving them, Birtz said.

Within the last three years, Webber Timberlands sold 22 lots on the Little Narrows, the local name for Upper Coldstream; 16 lots on Long Pond; 27 on Egg Pond, and has another 60 lots remaining on Little Narrows that are to be offered for sale to current leaseholders this month, Birtz said.

When the 60 lots are sold, Webber will have less than five lease lots left on lakefront property in Lincoln – the end of an era, Town Manager Glenn Aho said.

Lincoln’s waterfront property sales and construction sharply contrast with other similar areas, such as Millinocket, which has a half-dozen lakes and ponds in and near it.

The Millinocket area’s lakefront properties still are mostly leased, which denies Katahdin-area contractors the steady diet of work that Lincoln’s contractors have, said Millinocket Town Councilor David Cyr, who owns a cement contracting company.

Lincoln has already had several growth spurts. It is the first major service hub north of Bangor and Old Town along Interstate 95, and the state’s economic growth generally has run south-to-north over the last 20 years, Birtz said.

It also has Lincoln Paper & Tissue LLC, which is undergoing a $36 million upgrade and plans to add 40 full-time jobs to the plant’s 356-worker, $21 million payroll. When it is finished in August, the plant’s new tissue machine will make 100 tons of white tissue per day, doubling LP&T’s capacity.

Some new homes being built around Lincoln’s lakes, Birtz said, reflect the town’s nouveau wealth. Some cost as much as $400,000, and many are two or three times the size of the typical town housing, which is about 1,100 square feet.

“Some of the designs we are seeing are absolutely gorgeous,” Birtz said.

Many of the people building them are from New Hampshire, Vermont and southern areas of Maine, Birtz said.

The land sales and increased construction have a trickle-down effect on the town’s economy. Construction companies, related tradesmen and suppliers of their raw materials are among the first benefactors, Birtz said.

“The number one complaint that we get is that people are having difficulty finding tradesmen to do the work that they need,” Birtz said.

Larry and Annette Ham, co-owners of Larry Ham Construction of Chester, said their company has done four jobs of varying sizes this spring on Upper and Lower Coldstream ponds, will be doing the Wymans’ new home and would be doing more lakefront developments if the company did only residential work, Larry Ham said.

“I think we are starting to see the beginning of a boom,” said Larry Ham, whose company employs about a dozen workers. “There may be some people who are not financially able to do it. It’s sad to see somebody who has had a camp for 50 years not be able to afford it anymore.”

Most of the people selling formerly leased land are offering fair, if not sympathetic, prices to the lessees, Larry Ham said.

“There’s not many lots around the lakes that are vacant now,” he said.

“We get quite a few out-of-staters that come up. I think there’s more money from out of state than from this area,” Annette Ham said.

Cyr and other Katahdin region contractors are starting to get business calls in the Lincoln Lakes area, he said.

With waterfront property owners paying higher valuations, other taxpayers will have less of a tax burden, Birtz said. Because many new waterfront owners are retirees, they won’t need many town services, such as public schools, that they will be helping to fund.

“It’s the beginning of a shift in our local tax burden going from in-town residential and commercial properties to waterfront property owners,” Birtz said. “This is happening statewide, but in Lincoln, it’s especially interesting because we have 14 lakes, 13 of which are entirely within our borders.”

Paul Lovett is one of those retirees. Lovett, 71, has bought his lease on Milt’s Way off Upper Coldstream Pond and plans to buy the land and house he built there within the next month. He already is rebuilding his Milt’s Way property by himself.

“I got the outside completed, and now I have to start on the landscaping and then I am just going to putter around on the inside. It’s nothing I have to push on,” Lovett said.

The lifelong Lincoln resident, who owned a GMC truck dealership in Lincoln for 28 years, probably will sell his Sweet Road house and might sell another property on Prince Edward Island and split his time between Milt’s Way and a house he has in Florida.

“Shore property nowadays is worth pretty good money. We have always lived on the lake or the ocean, and the wife wants to be on the water, you know,” Lovett said. “It’s good … it’s money in the bank.”

Cost of prosperity

Yet such growth comes at a cost – first, to people such as the Bowerses, who get displaced, but it also causes other problems, Birtz said.

Lincoln’s road network isn’t yet known for traffic problems, but residents eventually will see gridlock on Routes 2 and 6, the main arteries through town, unless road expansion occurs. Parking will become an issue.

Town medical practitioners also might experience gridlock, as could Penobscot Valley Hospital of Lincoln, which is building a $4.1 million expansion of its surgical suites that is due to be finished in October. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is planning a veterans clinic on River Road near Interstate 95 next year that Ham’s company will construct.

Both efforts are partially influenced by the influx of retirees expected with the housing boom, Birtz said.

All town services, such as fire and police, eventually will start getting heavier workloads as the population and the town’s commercialization increase, Aho said.

The displacement itself is a mixed blessing, for while people like the Bowerses give up their lakefront properties, they often help keep the town’s aging housing stock revitalized as they move into areas such as downtown, Birtz said.

The Bowerses’ Tibbetts Road house was in good shape when they bought it, Debra Bowers said, but they did some additional work to get it the way they like.

Other issues that the lakefront housing boom causes are an increase in lake pollution, a degrading of the town’s environmental beauty and diminished access to the lakes themselves, Birtz said. Town officials have made a priority of buying lakefront property to help keep the waters from becoming private swimming holes to the people who live around them.

With that in mind, town officials used a $25,000 grant to buy the Folsom Pond Boat Launch for $38,000 in May 2005, she said.

“The hope is that the public will have as many access points as possible,” Birtz said. “We would like public boat launches in every lake or pond in Lincoln.”

About the worst scenario town officials could foresee, Birtz said, is Lincoln becoming two sparring groups: rich out-of-towners, and natives resentful at having to provide services to areas such as the lakefronts that they themselves can no longer access, afford or enjoy.

Hoping to fit in

Gerald Pelkey sees that scenario occurring despite town efforts. He and his wife, who live on a fixed income, think that their next tax bill will force them to move from Upper Coldstream, where they have lived on leased land for 34 years, he said.

“I figure I would need to come up with about $700 more a month to stay here,” said Pelkey, who is a retired carpenter, iron worker and handyman. “I would have to go back to work, and I am 69 and a half. Who wants to hire a man approaching 70?

“I am very frustrated. I should be depressed,” he added. “I can get a good dollar for the lot and dwelling I got, but to go in town, property costs have gone up, and I don’t want a mortgage payment. Unless we step into a fixer-upper, I can’t afford it.”

Pelkey doesn’t know where he and his wife will go. “I’ll know when I get the tax bill next month,” he said. “I’d like to win the lottery so I could stay here.”

Linda Wyman, meanwhile, sounds very pleased, even girlish, at the thought of her dream house and what life will be like on Upper Coldstream Pond.

“It’s one of the cleanest lakes, and it’s small, which we like. We don’t anticipate a lot of noise and wild parties,” she said wryly. About the only thing she doesn’t like about Lincoln, she said, “is all those black flies. They were like black snow around the car the last time we were there.”

Her husband jokes about preparing for the move.

“He’ll say, ‘Look at that loon out there,'” Wyman said. “We pretend that we are there already.”

But Wyman said she worries that her house will overpower those of her neighbors and that she and her husband will be treated, if not resented, as outsiders. She is actually from Mattawamkeag and he is from Winn, although they haven’t lived in Maine in more than 20 years.

“But there are a lot of nice properties up there now, and I hope we can bring something to the community by volunteering and doing things like that,” Wyman said. “I want to get active in the church, get back to the church we were married in, St. Thomas Episcopal in Winn.

“It’s familiar to us,” Wyman said of Lincoln, “and when we traveled to these other states looking for a place to retire to, nothing seemed to click, and it has to click. It has to seem right. This seemed right.

“We sacrificed a lot to get where we are. It really will be a dream house for us.”

Big Narrows (foreground) and Little Narrows (background) make up Upper Coldstream Ponds, one of the most heavily occupied shorefront areas in Lincoln.