Lake effect | Plum Creek Timber Co. draws fire for its ambitious plan for the Moosehead Lake region

When a Seattle timber company announced its plan last month to build two resorts and nearly a thousand homes in the pristine Moosehead Lake region of Maine, the announcement made headlines across the state and the country. The proposal ˆ— the largest ever presented for Maine's North Woods ˆ— has galvanized opinion leaders on both sides of the issue, and drawn attention to the area's lack of a regional land-use and zoning plan.

Municipal officials in Greenville, considered the gateway to the Moosehead region, have praised Plum Creek Timber Co.'s plan for the economic development it would bring to the area. But a group of 12 Mainers, including local residents, sportsmen, former commissioners of the Maine Land Use Regulation Commission, a former state planner and a former Maine attorney general, have filed a petition with LURC calling for a moratorium on all large-scale development in the area until LURC completes the regional plan for Moosehead that the agency first committed to preparing in 1997. LURC commissioners will review the petition at their May 4 meeting; if the proposed moratorium is instituted, Plum Creek could see the initial review of its plan delayed by up to three years.

The second-home market
It's easy to get lost in the facts and figures of Plum Creek's sprawling, 570-page plan application, which was submitted to LURC on April 5. (LURC subsequently returned the application to Plum Creek, seeking what is expected to be the first set of several revisions and corrections before it reviews the plan.) But the general outline of the company's vision has been known for several months.

In December Plum Creek announced its purchase of 48,500 acres in the Moosehead and Sebec regions from Hancock Timber Management Co., bringing Plum Creek's land ownership in Maine to 953,000 acres. (The company is one of the largest landowners in the state.) At the same time, Plum Creek declared its intention to develop a "comprehensive resource plan" for 426,340 of those acres, specifically in the Greenville and Rockwood areas. The details at that stage focused primarily on the company's conservation and economic development intentions, but Plum Creek also mentioned two luxury resorts and 6,000 acres of residential development on what it called "already developed ponds" in the area.

The plan as it was presented to LURC in April is not much different than this original concept, with the notable exception that one of the high-end resorts has been scaled back to what Jim Lehner, Plum Creek's general manager for the Northeast, describes as a "family-style" resort. In addition, the company proposes to develop housing, commercial campgrounds and sporting camps, and it has designated a parcel for industrial development. (For more information, see "It's all in the details," p. 35.)

In fact, though the scale is miniscule compared to its latest plan, Plum Creek already has begun to develop its land in the Moosehead region. In January 2002 LURC approved a concept plan for 89 new house lots on First Roach Pond, 62 of which are shorefront lots. At the time, 108 cabins already dotted the lake's shore, a mix of private and state-owned property.

Lehner says the new lots have been selling well. "There's a huge demand for camp lot ownership," he says. "For a lot of Mainers, that is a tradition in the state. And I think it's one that a lot of people dream of."

Plum Creek is targeting the recreational second-home market for both its First Roach Pond concept plan and its new, region-wide plan. In fact, the residential development elements of the two plans are nearly identical: Lots range in size from 1.4 to 6.2 acres; shorefront lots have an average 200 feet of frontage; parcels are clustered in groups of two to six lots; green space and boat launches are planned for sharing between many clustered lots.
Lehner says the First Roach lots have been selling for $65,000 to $100,000, and he expects future sales to be commensurate. "The price is going to depend on the market," he says, "but we've kept the shore frontage to a reasonable size ˆ— fairly small, yet large enough to provide a little bit of privacy.

"And I think for the average Mainer, that's within reach," he adds. "We're not talking about a huge shorefront on the coast. We've purposely made the lots small enough to be affordable."

But at least one broker in the area disagrees that Plum Creek properties are likely to be purchased by Mainers. "Waterfront lots on Moosehead Lake sold last year for $250,000 and up," says Elizabeth Munster, a broker with Rockwood-based Spalding, Melon & Munster. "A few Mainers purchased these lots, but if one were to check the tax rolls in various areas, you would see that the majority of these waterfront property owners reside in other states."

Munster agrees that the projected prices for Plum Creek's lots are "typical for the area, in that the price of real estate has been increasing every year for the past six years." But the Rockwood native worries that the demand for nearly 1,000 new homes in the area may be a myth. "If we do not have the tourism influx in the area to keep businesses alive and profitable," she says, "where does the demand for 575 waterfront lots and 400 backlots come from? Certainly not from tourists nor the average Maine person, because they are not here."

Who makes the plan?
For some opponents of the project, however, affordability is only one piece of a much larger puzzle. And despite the conservation and economic development elements in Plum Creek's plan, detractors say the company should not be given carte blanche to determine the future of the Moosehead region.

"The Land Use Regulation Commission carries out the role in the unorganized territories that municipal governments do in the rest of the state," says Jon Lund, one of the authors of the petition calling for a 180-day moratorium on large-scale development (subdivisions into more than five parcels or lots) in the Moosehead area. "If a municipality announced that they needed to do a new comprehensive plan," he says, "it's unlikely ˆ— in Maine ˆ— that they would bring in a developer and say, 'Here, you do the comprehensive plan and we'll approve all the details.' That's really the closest comparison to what's going on here."

Plum Creek's Lehner contends that "nothing about Mr. Lund's statement could be further from the truth."

"We are the landowner and recognize that many people have interests in this property, and we respect those interests," he says. "We have taken an approach suggested by [the Department of Conservation] and others to carefully plan a long-range conservation and development strategy that covers everything we own within the plan area. We then made these plans public, for all to see, and through the LURC process, [opened] them up for public comment."

Lund, a former Maine attorney general and Hallowell resident who publishes The Maine Sportsman, says the petition is "not an effort to derail Plum Creek's plan." Instead, he says, "It's an effort to give LURC the opportunity to carry out what they said they needed to do in 1997, which is prepare plans for several regions in the state that have exceptional recreation and conservation value."

Of the four regions identified as needing these plans ˆ— Rangeley, Moosehead, Carrabassett Valley and Millinocket ˆ— only Rangeley (identified as the top priority) currently has one. It took seven years for LURC commissioners to complete the Rangeley process.

Lund surmises the delay in tackling the remaining regions is financial. "Probably because the Legislature has been very sparing with appropriations to LURC, they haven't got around to doing it," he says. "I understand the Legislature in its current position has added two positions to LURC, which might give them the opportunity to undertake this work."

But Aga Pinette, a LURC planner, says the commission's timeline, while affected by budget constraints, has been purposeful. "I think the main reason why LURC hasn't initiated prospective zoning for other parts of the jurisdiction is because we first wanted to monitor development trends in the Rangeley plan area to determine whether this regulatory mechanism was successful," she says. "After all, Rangeley was the agency's first attempt at prospective zoning ˆ— we wanted to make sure that this was indeed a useful tool to guide land uses to appropriate places."

Pinette says the results of an initial evaluation conducted by LURC in the Rangeley area last year are "promising." The "prospective zoning" plan for the Rangeley region, Pinette explains, eliminates the need for case-by-case zoning changes by identifying in advance which areas of the region would be most appropriate for development. "The plan includes a long-term vision of what people want the region to be like generations from now, and a strategy for guiding future land uses to designated areas in a way that reinforces the community's vision," she says.

For his part, Lehner says Plum Creek "predicted there was going to be some effort to try to stop" the project. "But I'm an eternal optimist," he says. "I really believe once people dig into our plan, and we have the chance to get out and talk to folks, the moratorium efforts will lose their shine. When the moratorium petition was drawn up, they didn't have the benefit of a plan to look at." (The petition was filed with LURC 18 days before Plum Creek filed its plan; at press time, Lund said he hadn't yet read the plan.)

Lehner also says that while Plum Creek would want to participate in any planning that transpired during a moratorium period, "we own 75% of the land in the area we're talking about, and much of the remaining land is already developed. So really when you're talking about further development, you're talking about Plum Creek. There's really only one landowner that's going to be affected, and that's us."

Into the wild
Though the Rangeley prospective zoning plan took seven years to complete, Pinette says a similar plan for Moosehead wouldn't necessarily require as much time. "Through the seven-year [Rangeley] process, there were times when other pressing matters forced the commission's planning staff to put its attention elsewhere," Pinette says. She estimates that without such delays, the commission could have finished the job in five years. And she contends that LURC has learned from its Rangeley experience. "I anticipate that we could reasonably accomplish prospective zoning in the Moosehead area within a shorter time span," she says. "Perhaps within two to three years."

Plum Creek doesn't have a contingency plan for such a delay, Lehner says. "But again, I'm an optimist ˆ— I don't think the moratorium will pass. And we're putting all our efforts into making sure this plan has all the things in it that are required," he adds, "and that it's going to go through."

When LURC commissioners ultimately meet to determine the fate of the petition, Pinette says, they'll consider two factors: whether the moratorium is necessary to prevent either "serious public harm" or "overburdening of public facilities" from anticipated development.

Despite Lehner's optimism, at least one Plum Creek supporter is convinced that LURC will adopt the moratorium. Aroostook County legislator Henry Joy (R-Crystal) says the state agency is "controlled by the environmental organizations," and "doesn't allow any money to flow to the unorganized territories."

"And unfortunately," he says, "given the way they work, [the moratorium] probably will go into effect."

If the moratorium is enacted, Joy fears Plum Creek will decide to subdivide and sell its land in the region, eliminating any benefits of long-term comprehensive planning the project may have achieved.

But Pinette says it's unclear whether the moratorium as proposed would actually affect Plum Creek's plan. "As the petition is written, it proposes that the moratorium would affect the processing or issuance of rezoning petitions associated with development proposals," she says. "Whether it could be legally applied to an application already in the process of being reviewed is uncertain.

"However," she adds, "should the commission initiate rulemaking, the decision as to what applications the moratorium would impact would be made based upon public testimony submitted."

Pinette says she's unaware of any other specific plan application that could be affected by a moratorium. But, she says, "We receive rezoning petitions and subdivision applications fairly regularly in the area proposed for the moratorium. It's quite possible that such a moratorium would affect other projects."

If LURC rejects the petition, or approves it and determines that Plum Creek's plan is unaffected by the resulting moratorium, the agency will continue reviewing the company's application to ensure that it's complete. When the review is finished, LURC would send the report to state and federal agencies for review and comment. By early summer, if all goes according to Plum Creek's plan, LURC commissioners would hold public meetings in the Moosehead region to discuss the plan and answer questions. Though these are traditional steps for any large development proposal, Lehner admits that, with this plan, Plum Creek is entering wild territory in more than just the physical sense.

"I'm not sure there is such a thing as tradition on this thing," he says. "We're making it up as we go along in many cases, and we're just trying to do what makes sense for us and for the state."