Legislation for Acadia Advisory Commission clears hurdle

ACADIA NATIONAL PARK – Federal legislation that could bring the park’s citizen advisory commission back to life and raise the monetary limit the park can spend on acquiring land cleared a hurdle Wednesday in the U.S. Senate.

The bill also would enable Acadia to take on an active role in a new intermodal transportation facility planned for Trenton.

The legislation was endorsed Wednesday by the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee and will go before the full Senate in the coming months, according to information released by Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.

The Acadia Advisory Commission, a panel composed of citizens from towns that abut park land, was created in 1986 but was dissolved in 2006 after the legislation that created it expired. Past members of the commission have said it has played an important role in keeping lines of communication open between the park and surrounding towns.

Besides reauthorizing the advisory commission, the legislation would allow the park to spend up to $10 million on acquiring land within a limit set by Congress in 1986 and would give the park a formal role in the development and operation of the proposed Acadia Gateway Center on Route 3 in Trenton.

In other business, Acadia officials indicated Tuesday that more people visited the park in 2007 than in 2006.

In a prepared statement, Acadia officials said that the park had 2.2 million visitors last year, an increase of 120,000 people, or 5.7 percent, over the year before.

Most of the added visitors were in the park in June, August and September, but fewer people visited the park in July 2007 than in July 2006, they said. The number of visitors in Acadia had declined steadily since 1995, but has crept back up each of the past two years and is now back to 2004 levels, they said.

The number of campers in Acadia rose 3 percent last year while the number of commercial bus passengers rose 7 percent, or by 5,000 people, to 80,000 total. Ridership on the Island Explorer bus system, which travels through and makes stops in the park, also rose 6 percent to 351,378 passengers for the year. The seasonal bus system operates annually from late June to early October.

Despite the legislation’s movement in the Senate and the release of 2007 visitor figures, park officials are still waiting on some crucial information. Though Congress has approved an omnibus spending bill for 2008, Acadia has yet to learn what its budget for the year will be.

Park officials have said they hope this information will be made available to them and to the public as soon as possible.