Celebrating John Wasileski’s great compromise
Since last October I've been a co-leader with my good friend Gary Lawless of a monthly Sunday morning walk in the 235-acre Cathance River Nature Preserve in Topsham. The preserve is a hidden gem within the Highland Green retirement community, with a network of trails that circle a heath, cut through a small clearing with wild blackberries and blueberries and descend through a mixed forest to a winding river that alternates between whitewater rapids and placid passages that perfectly mirror the tall trees lining its banks.
Gary and I had been invited by the Cathance River Education Alliance to lead walks that would showcase the preserve's surprisingly wild beauty in the heart of Topsham and get people to share their experiences in writings, drawings and photographs. In lieu of pay, we were respectively designated CREA's poet and photographer laureates for an undetermined tenure.
Now here's the amazing back story to this nature preserve: When it was initially proposed by developer John Wasileski more than 16 years ago, this land would have been turned into an 18-hole golf course within the Highland Green housing development. The proposal called for the golf course and housing project to come within 250 feet of the Cathance River.
But Wasileski hadn't reckoned on John Rensenbrink, a Bowdoin College professor and the co-founder of the Green Party in both Maine and the United States, who lived with his wife Carla about a mile downriver from the proposed golf course. The Rensenbrinks and several others mobilized a citizens' group called Topsham's Future to oppose Wasileski's development project.
All the elements were in place for a classic “developer vs. NIMBY group” conflict. That never happened, in large part because Wasileski met with the Topsham's Future group, which came to the meeting with a landscape architect who'd prepared an alternative plan replacing nine holes of the proposed golf course with a nature preserve and a 1,000-foot buffer between the Highland Green housing project and the river.
Wasileski decided to pivot, agreeing to a compromise that allowed him to go before the local planning board with the Topsham's Future citizens group as allies, not opponents. He figures the compromise allowed his project to gain approval in half the time it would have required otherwise. He got a nine-hole golf course and a 150-home retirement community and the town got not only a nature preserve but an educational nonprofit called Cathance River Education Alliance that was launched with seed money from Wasileski. Local students now regularly come to the preserve to learn about vernal pools, dragonflies, “habitat holes,” creek chub, wild mushrooms, fishers and beavers and the difference between pools, riffles and rapids.
We're eight months into our improvised experiment of encouraging those who are walking with us to relax, wonder, touch, listen, see and bask in the filtered sunlight of a mixed forest with the sound of rushing water as it flows toward the sea. At least half the people who've joined us on these walks are residents of Highland Green. If you go to the retirement community's website, the first thing you'll see on the home-page is a picture of the Cathance River's rapids as seen from the trail that follows the river's twists and turns within the preserve.
Who would have guessed 16 years ago that the compromise John Wasileski reached with the Topsham's Future citizens group would some day offer him such a great marketing opportunity for selling homes within Highland Green? An environmentalist, or a capitalist? Or both?
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