MILLINOCKET – Maine’s Land Use Regulation Commission’s comprehensive land-use plan favors environmentalists, curtails traditional rights and threatens the state’s forest products industry, according to speakers at a workshop here Tuesday.

After stops in Fort Kent and Presque Isle, LURC visited Stearns High School as part of its update of the planning document that will aid decisions within the 10.4 million-acre Unorganized Territory for the next decade.

As of 9 p.m. Tuesday, more than two hours into the public comment portion of the meeting, no one who spoke praised the plan. About 120 people attended.

Town Manager Eugene Conlogue and Rep. Herbert E. Clark, D-Millinocket, recognized that LURC was not an economic development agency, but faulted the plan for failing to protect the state’s $7 billion forest products industry, which has shrunk, devastating the local economy.

“The proposed [comprehensive land-use plan] appears to move away from LURC’s long-standing priority of protecting landowner interests in favor of the environmentalist agenda of public ownership and increased control of others’ property, in many cases without compensation,” Conlogue read from a prepared statement.

“The CLUP should add strong language that endorses the value of the forest products industry, suggests ways that LURC can positively assist the industry, and commits to giving jurisdictional preference to the landowners who make the industry possible,” he added.

LURC staff has said they need to modify the comprehensive plan to ensure that it reflects changes that have taken place within Unorganized Territory since the last update in 1997. Commercial forestry remains the economic engine of the region, but much timberland has changed hands during the past decade.

LURC staff have rated wilderness sprawl – and the commission’s inability to control it – as one of its top concerns. About 8,800 new dwellings have been permitted by LURC since its inception in 1971. Staff said it is the location of development, rather than the total number, and the prospect of that trend continuing unabated that is disconcerting.

Roughly 72 percent of those 8,800 dwellings were on lots that were part of subdivisions that legally bypassed the commission’s review process that aims to keep development out of areas deemed inappropriate for growth.

Yet those concerns seemed totally off-base to those who spoke up at Tuesday’s meeting. In an area that has seen unemployment at twice the state average and a record population exodus, many speakers preferred more development and people in the area.

Roger Ek of Lee and Jimmy Busque of Millinocket called for the rejection of the plan outright, saying it fomented “rural cleansing” when it should encourage economic revitalization.

“We need wind farms, hydro power, vertically-integrated forest product plants, light clean manufacturing, widespread ATV trails, better snowmobile trails and a bridge network to connect our recreational opportunities,” Ek said.

What the commission calls sprawl, Ek called “economic recovery, and it needs to start now.”

Much of what the commission heard was fear – fear of disenfranchisement, of greater economic devastation, of pervasive yet hidden agendas that restrict landowners rights.

Suspicion of state government, LURC and its southern Maine-dominated membership was rife during the meeting. Speakers said LURC ignored large landowners in updating their plan – none has apparently participated – and conservation efforts already achieved, which showed LURC’s ignorance of the area.

Many speakers at the meeting expressed confusion about what and who LURC represented and what the plan was supposed to be – a guideline, rule, element used to shape either or none of the above. Some treated LURC like an economic development agency and questioned its inability to create jobs in the region, not as a board that regulates the development of unorganized territory.

“You people just don’t get it. You just don’t know,” one woman said.

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