In the past month the Maine media have been redundant with the proposals of some gubernatorial candidates and the environmental community for more public lands and more governmental mandates on the forest industry.

One candidate calls for a doubling of the public lands in Maine. Another candidate calls for moving the historic terminus of the Appalachian Trail from Maine to New Brunswick.

In a recent edition of the Bangor Daily News, a staff lawyer for the Maine Audubon Society and a supporter have called for a significant increase in the amount of public lands and in the state regulation of timber harvesting in the northern Maine forests. Why, for whom, and at what cost?

The California Desert Act is currently being debated in Congress. If approved, it will add an additional 8 million acres of federal wilderness areas in California, including three new national parks. Assuming this land paid at least $10 an acre a year in property taxes, this proposed acquisition will result in an annual loss of $80 million in local and county property tax revenue. When combined with the other 46 million acres of federal land in California the cost to the local taxpayers is more than $500 million in lost property taxes a year, every year, from now on.

And, this does not include the additional $80 million one-time acquisition cost to the taxpayers to purchase this new federal land.

In Maine, we are told that our state park system is grossly understaffed and undermaintained. Some state facilities may not even be able to open this season. The same is true of our national park system. Many have turned into wilderness slums. No source of the needed funding for either system appears in sight.

The politicians and the bureaucratic land managers and their environmental cohorts argue that more public lands are needed for our children. Great parenting!

Please tell our children exactly how much the additional public lands you are proposing will cost them, when you cannot afford to properly maintain the public land we already have. Tell our children the truth about, how at Acadia and at Moosehorn, their parents’ private property (their inheritance) is being greenlined and devalued with little or no appropriate compensation.

Please explain to them the rationale of how their paid public land managers decide who will and who will not get to their public lands, and when and what they can do. Explain to them the difference between the quantity and quality of recreational opportunities on public vs. private lands in Maine.

Explain to our children the tremendous burden they will be put under to appeal any decisions of their tax-paid land managers and regulators, especially how much their legal fees will be to fight the bureaucrat and their attorney, whose salary and benefits, they also have to pay. Tell them the odds of winning against the power of the land management and regulatory bureaucracy.

Please explain to our children how the Maine Coastal Heritage Trust and the proliferation of local land trusts are creating additional costs to them by encouraging individuals, mostly wealthy summer persons, to place their lands in semi-public trust (not accessible to the general public) in exchange for significant income tax breaks. Explain how these trusts act as holding companies for state and federal agencies and how these lands usually end up transferred into public ownership. Explain to them the total lack of public input, debate and priority setting involved in these essentially self-serving private decisions.

Please explain to our children why you want to spend so much of our limited public money on the acquisition and maintenance of public lands and on an expanding land management and regulatory bureaucracy. Explain to them why we are not instead using the money to improve the quality of their educational and employment opportunities or to improve the decaying public infrastructure and our decaying urban environments or to help them pay for their parents’ retirements and health benefits.

In Teton County, Wyo., 90 percent of the land is in federal ownership. The undeveloped portion of the remaining private land is owned by four historic ranching families. With the support of national environmental groups, Teton County just imposed a 35-acre minimum lot size on these ranchers. If that was not enough the environmentalists also want to reintroduce the wolf. Deja vu!

If we are to double the public land in Maine, let’s acquire it in York, Cumberland, Androscoggin, and Kennbec counties. Why not establish a Casco Bay National Wildlife Refuge? Why not remove all the dams and declare the Saco River, the lower Kennebec or Androscoggin Rivers as federal wild and scenic rivers? Why not establish a 100,000-acre state wildnerness area or forest preserve around Sebago Lake or Cobseecontee Lake or Lake Auburn?

If we are to increase the regulation on timber harvesting, let’s increase the regulation on argiculture and suburban lawns. Why not require farmers to limit their harvest to 40 percent of their crop in any 10-year period? Why not tell the farmers that they can only cut 4 3/8 corn stalk? How about prohibiting the clearcutting of grass in all public parks, along all public roadsides, and on all golf courses? Let’s require all homeowners to leave 40 percent of their lawns unmowed, unfertilized and unsprayed each year to increase the habitat and diversity of endangered wild plants, insects and soil organisms? This would help the food chain, reduce pollution and save money all at the same time.

Jim Haskell lives in Millinocket.