Charting Maine’s Future

With gas prices over $3 a gallon and rising all the time, global warming concerns, and gas-tax revolts among truckers in the north woods, Maine drastically needs to diversify its transportation infrastructure to provide its citizens with more cost-efficient alternatives to driving alone.

“Now the state believes it is time to expand passenger rail routes because of the need to make transportation more efficient without building more highways,” says Greg Nadeau, deputy commissioner of the Maine Dept. of Transportation.

In the midst of a budget shortfall, Governor Baldacci is making a bold commitment towards a rail-based solution. Maine’s existing Downeaster service already eases traffic burdens on the Maine Turnpike, is generating new development and investment in station areas around Saco, Portland, and Old Orchard Beach, and is contributing to walkable, vibrant downtowns and Main Street districts in those communities.

Now, the Governor and the Downeaster’s operators are looking to expand the successful service northward to Lewiston-Auburn and Brunswick, further easing congested highways, as soon as 2010. In the longer term, the state might expand these lines further north to Augusta, Waterville, Bangor, Montreal, and St. John.

Read the article for more details:
Bangor Daily News: “Baldacci Eyes Railway Expansion”

On the day of contentious hearings for Plum Creek’s large development proposal in the Moosehead region, the Portland Press Herald published this editorial on the importance of Maine’s quality places. It also raises the interesting question of how to balance the preservation of these places with how we utilize (i.e., develop) them in our economy (the Plum Creek debate, of course, has amplified this question to rather shrill levels throughout the state). At the same time, the editorial asks, how can we balance our need for tax reform with our need to invest in and preserve our quality places?

If you read this blog, these questions should be very familiar: after all, preserving our quality places, growing the economy, and reducing the tax burden were the three dominant themes of the GrowSmart-Brookings report, “Charting Maine’s Future.”.

While we appreciate the Press Herald asking these questions and publicizing our core issues on their editorial page, we don’t necessarily accept the premise that these are “tough choices” - in fact, they shouldn’t have to be choices at all. The Brookings Institution argued, convincingly, that investing in quality places will grow the economy. Strategic tax reductions will help preserve our quality places by making it easier to invest in downtowns and preserve rural forests and farmland. And smart, high-quality economic development will value and help to preserve our quality places, whether on Main Street, on our working waterfronts, or in the Moosehead region.

Economic development, spending reform, and quality places aren’t competing priorities: they’re interdependent. If we fail at any one of them, the others will suffer. The only decision we need to make is whether we’ll commit ourselves to all three - and this certainly shouldn’t be a “tough choice.”

Today’s Lewiston Sun-Journal has an article about LD 262, a proposed bill that would expand the tax credit for historic renovation projects. This article focuses on the potential investment the bill could attract to Lewiston’s historic downtown mill district, but all of Maine’s communities stand to gain millions of dollars in new investment if this bill passes.

Besides protecting our architectural and community heritages, LD 262 will also bolster the economies of Maine’s historic downtowns and village centers by putting vacant or underutilized buildings back on the tax rolls and into productive service for Maine businesses and households.

We’ve set up an action alert where you can quickly and easily take action on this issue. Click here to send an e-mail message to your representatives in Augusta.

Thanks to our friends at DownEast Magazine, who honored GrowSmart and the Charting Maine’s Future report in the lead editorial of their first annual “Best of Maine” issue with a special “best of” category. Editor Paul Doiron writes:

Charting Maine’s Future argues that the best things about Maine are the qualities that make it unique: livable communities, stunning scenery, great recreational opportunities. As we move forward, our collective challenge is to grow economically while protecting the special character of our state. We need to resist the forces of homogenization, not just out of a nostalgic sentimentality for the Maine of our childhoods, but because quality of life is our biggest asset. To quote former Governor Angus King, we need to keep Maine “Maine.”

DownEast Magazine is a leading expert on what makes Maine “Maine” - in fact, they celebrate Maine’s quality of place and culture in every issue, and as a business they serve as one more example of how valuable the Maine “brand” can be. So we accept this “Best Kick in the Butt” award as a great honor.

The editorial is available online at DownEast’s excellent new website, or you can view the editorial as it appeared in print by clicking the image at left.

A lot of Mainers love to hate Roxanne Quimby, the Maine entrepreneur who has spent millions of dollars to acquire large tracts of the northern forest, but her latest conservation venture has earned admiration from some of her fiercest critics. Quimby will sell one tract of her privately-owned wilderness to the state, which will open the land up to hunting and snowmobiles, and use the proceeds to purchase another more isolated wilderness parcel adjacent to Baxter State Park.

The conflicts between Quimby and her critics in the northern forest boil down to differing views of what “wilderness” is, but ultimately, both sides can agree that preserving public access to wild lands is a good thing. This quote comes from a Bangor Daily News article on the deal: “We all agreed and committed to finding out what we had in common and working from that beginning point,” Quimby said. “And as it worked out, we had a ton in common. It was an enjoyable year … and I’m looking forward to working together to make even bigger and bolder plans come true.”

The parties involved in the current Plum Creek debates should take note: when people who disagree with each other collaborate and find common ground, good things can happen.

Passing along a couple of links for anyone interested in the LURC hearings regarding Plum Creek’s Moosehead Lake proposal:

- Diano Circo of the Natural Resources Council of Maine has been sentenced to sit through all of this week’s intervenors’ testimony, and amidst all of the frenetic excitement, he’s somehow finding time to blog daily updates from the hearing room. Read his dispatches or send your condolences at blog.nrcm.org.

- Interested citizens can also listen in on a live webcast of the hearings - a new development that LURC is testing out for the first time. Visit http://www.maine.gov/doc/lurc/webcast.html to listen in. If you don’t hear anything, they’re probably taking a break - check back in after a few minutes.

This afternoon, the Governor’s Council on Maine’s Quality of Place presented its final report and recommendations to Governor Baldacci. Echoing themes from the GrowSmart-Brookings report, the Council’s final report makes a strong connection between Maine’s economic fortunes and the quality of Maine’s natural and built environments.

“This is a dramatically new way of thinking for Maine people,” the report asserts. “In the old way, Maine’s surroundings were nice but not relevant to economic development. Today, Maine’s surroundings remain nice, but they are now the very key to our economic future.”

The report also contains recommendations to preserve this valuable “quality of place” in concert with future economic growth. From an AP report:

Stressing the desirability of broad public involvement, the report calls for expanding the Land for Maine’s Future program of public land acquisition and access, as well as tax incentives for historic preservation.

It also suggests that a hike in the state lodging tax and new state borrowing could be used to support asset-based development.

Funding details were left open-ended at a gubernatorial news conference Tuesday.

These recommendations align with those found in the Brookings Institution’s “Action Plan for Sustainable Prosperity,” and GrowSmart Maine will make their implementation a high priority in the upcoming legislative session.

The Associated Press coverage of the report’s release has already been picked up on the web sites of Forbes and MSN Money.

You can also download the Council’s final report here.

The Land Use Regulation Commission kicked off public testimony for Plum Creek’s proposed rezoning and development plan for the Moosehead Lake region this past weekend.

During the week this week, Commissioners will hear the testimony of all of the “intervening” organizations. GrowSmart’s Alan Caron testified yesterday in Augusta, and just as we’ve done in our activism surrounding the Brookings report, Caron called for LURC commissioners to “find ways to grow that build on our traditions rather than tearing them down.”

A lot of accounts portray this debate as being tremendously divisive - they even had Augusta police officers searching bags at the entrance to Sunday’s hearings - but we see a lot of opportunities to find common ground with a revised development proposal that benefits everyone. True, we still think that Plum Creek needs to make some more changes. But consistent critics also need to recognize the benefits of Plum Creek’s landscape-scale planning initiative and become more proactive in working with the company to find a workable solution.

Kevin Miller of the Bangor Daily News has been providing good coverage of the hearings. Here’s his article on the weekend’s public hearings, and here’s his coverage of Monday’s intervenor testimony.

South Portland’s new mayor would like to see some tax reform come out of Augusta:

“South Portland alone generates more than $45 million a year in sales taxes, most of it from the Maine Mall area, Soule said. The city receives about $4.1 million in state assistance for its schools – about 10 percent of the school budget, he said.

‘The state of Maine needs South Portland more than South Portland needs the state of Maine,’ Soule said in his inaugural address to about 35 people in the council chambers.”

So South Portland, like many of Maine’s older “service center” communities, is forced to charge high rates of property taxes because the state won’t let it have any part of the property taxes it generates. This, of course, provides a financial incentive for sprawl on the regional level - and as the Brookings report demonstrated, it’s not as though the state is spending its money altogether wisely on the state level.

So what’s a community like South Portland to do? Forget about TABOR - Mayor Soule is talking about secession, and leaders from other southern Maine towns are listening.

Whether or not anything comes of it, Soule does make a compelling case for reducing state spending, reinvesting more into our downtown communities, and relieving property taxes. Augusta, take notice.

Click here for the Press Herald’s article on Mayor Soule’s inaugural address.