Skowhegan's whitewater voyage | The former mill town puts the Kennebec River at the center of a unique economic development plan

A recent transplant from Boston, Jeff McCabe was thrilled to find a handful of great fishing spots around the Skowhegan Gorge, a half-mile stretch of the Kennebec River that skirts Skowhegan's downtown district. But the gorge itself was difficult to access and cluttered with mill debris and trash, as well as the remnants of an old walking bridge destroyed during the flood of 1987. Its steep embankments mean that McCabe frequently experiences "a good wipeout" on his way down to the water's edge. He sees the access problems as symptomatic of the region's attitude toward the gorge.

"Down [in Boston], you have these kinds of places and you almost exploit them or make them a major focus," says McCabe, who is executive director of the Somerset County Soil and Water Conservation District and also works seasonally as a whitewater rafting guide for North Country Rivers in Bingham. "But here, people don't utilize the gorge as well as they could."

If McCabe and a handful of others have their way, though, in five years the gorge will become not only a well-utilized regional tourist attraction, but a significant engine of economic development. Their plan: Build a whitewater park along an 1,800-foot section of the Skowhegan Gorge by installing man-made boulders and other devices in the river to create artificial waves, eddies and swirling holes of whitewater ˆ— features that for kayakers are akin to fresh powder for snow bunnies. Then spread the word to the thousands of kayakers and whitewater rafters who each weekend during the spring and summer flock to hot whitewater spots on the Kennebec and Dead rivers just north of Skowhegan.

"It's a good thing for Skowhegan," says Greg Dore, Skowhegan's road commissioner and chairman of the Run of River Project, as the whitewater park has been dubbed. "It would give us a future before all the mills close."

The Run of River committee sees the whitewater park as an economic linchpin for Skowhegan, even though the project is in its embryonic stage. Organizers are hoping it will be completed by 2010, in time to be considered as a training venue for the 2012 Summer Olympics. But during the next five years, there are no assurances that the park will be built. A host of potential roadblocks stand in its way, including complex regulatory issues, a difficult construction environment and a price tag well over a million dollars. Even if the park is built, organizers then must develop a strategy to catch the attention of the whitewater enthusiasts and weekend warriors heading to the rivers north of Skowhegan.

Despite the challenges, Katie Ouilette is convinced that the whitewater park will happen, and its impact on local economic development will be significant. Ouilette, a 74-year-old Skowhegan native who is a member of the Run of River committee, says she's seen the town's fortunes rise and fall over the years. She recalls the lumber trucks arriving to collect logs that had been floated into town on the Kennebec; every truck meant money for Skowhegan. Ouilette says the town started deteriorating when the timber came out of the river after the last log drive in 1976.

But she also believes that the river ˆ— and the whitewater park ˆ— can offer the town a rebirth. "I think this is the little acorn that the mighty oak will grow from," she says. "In the long run, people are maybe going to look at us as being pioneers."

Driven by adrenaline
The Run of River Project got underway in early 2003 after Dore was approached by Gary Bailey, an engineer and avid whitewater kayaker from nearby Canaan who showed Dore a magazine article about whitewater parks. "He came to me and said that Skowhegan should think about something like this," says Dore.

At first blush, the concept of installing man-made features in rivers seems strange. But during the past 30 years, dozens of such parks have been built in Europe, Australia and North America. There are currently dozens more in the planning stage, in cities from Willimantic, Conn., to Vienna, Austria.

The demand for whitewater parks has been driven by a significant increase in the number of kayakers who flock to such locations. Michelle Barnes, marketing director for the Outdoor Industry Association, a Boulder, Colo.-based trade group, says the number of kayakers in the United States grew 125% to 9.9 million during the six years through 2003.

Though OIA reports that less than 20% of those kayakers were classified as whitewater boaters, Barnes says that number is poised to rise as novice paddlers become more comfortable with the sport. "A lot of people start on the sit-on types of kayaks, and when they get into kayaking a little bit more they get the adrenaline and want to get more aggressive," she says.

As the number of whitewater kayakers grows, cities and towns are discovering that whitewater parks can be strong economic development tools. The East Race Waterway, a South Bend, Ind., whitewater park built in 1984, is largely credited with reinvigorating a formerly run-down industrial area by bringing in tourism dollars, real estate and business development and revenue from the park's operations. Paul McMinn, assistant recreation director for the South Bend Parks and Recreation Department, says the $5 million project has generated more than $58 million in economic development since it opened. "It used to be a junky area, a real eyesore," he says. "But now, there's an apartment complex, an accounting firm, restaurants ˆ— all kinds of businesses that weren't there. You can't have a better project than that."

That's what Dore would like to see happen in Skowhegan. He hopes a whitewater park will be a magnet for kayakers and canoeists, but also says it will provide recreational and educational opportunities for a wide variety of visitors. The course, he says, could be used for whitewater rescue classes as well as for beginning paddling lessons for school kids.

But Dore also sees the opportunity to add something to Skowhegan's economy, which in recent years has moved steadily away from its manufacturing roots. Adam Fisher, assistant to the commissioner at the Maine Department of Labor, says Skowhegan's employment base, to the town's credit, has become more diversified during the past decade. The number of jobs in traditional manufacturing industries like shoes and wood products has declined, while the Skowhegan area has gained white-collar jobs in such sectors as financial services and health care. Meanwhile, construction and transportation jobs are growing, and the service sector in Somerset County has heated up (it was listed as the region's fastest-growing employment sector in the 2000 Census). A whitewater park "will help bring Skowhegan in a different direction," says Dore.

Local officials seem to agree: A week after his conversation with Bailey, Dore brought the whitewater park idea to members of the town's chamber of commerce, recreation department and planning board, who Dore says responded enthusiastically. Soon thereafter, he began assembling the 15-person Run of River committee, which includes town officials as well as kayaking enthusiasts and proponents of economic development.

The committee's first step was to commission a feasibility study to figure out, in broad strokes, whether this was a plan worth pursuing. To raise the $20,000 needed for the study, the committee organized local events ˆ— spaghetti dinners, auctions and an outdoor recreation expo ˆ— that helped raise about $10,000. A $10,000 grant from the Ellsworth-based Maine Community Foundation provided what Dore calls "a big shot in the arm" for the project.

With the funds in hand, the committee last spring hired Pittsfield-based Kleinschmidt Energy and Water Resource Consultants to draft the study. "Skowhegan is looking to reestablish themselves," says Allison Murray, a project licensing coordinator at Kleinschmidt who headed up the study. "They're at a crossroads and are thinking very broadly on how to reinvigorate their economy. Skowhegan is the gateway to so much outdoor recreation that it was a natural; it was one of those 'why didn't I think of that?' ideas."

Throwing boulders in the river
Last June, Dore received the completed feasibility study from Murray. The study offers potential construction strategies that would minimize environmental impacts, as well as an overview of fisheries and wildlife resources in the Skowhegan Gorge; liability concerns, access issues and recreation trends also are included. But is the project feasible? "It's a cautioned yes," says Murray. "It's a great idea, but there are a lot of potential issues. We haven't found any red flags yet, but we're really just scratching the surface."

Murray says there are a handful of issues that could potentially sink the project, including prohibitively expensive construction costs in the wide and sometimes wild Skowhegan Gorge. Because of the steep inclines on either side of the gorge, heavy machinery would need to access the site via temporary roads, and staging areas for materials would have to be set up on the banks of the river. What's more, construction could be complicated by big shifts in water flows in the gorge, which can range from 3,000 cubic feet per second during the summer to more than 50,000 cfs in the spring.

Both Murray and Dore expect the project will cost between $1.2 million and $1.5 million. That price tag is roughly in line with what other similarly sized whitewater parks have cost, though some large-scale parks ˆ— including a new park on the Catawba River near Charlotte, N.C. ˆ— have cost $20 million or more. The Run of River Project's cost will include the construction of a scale model of the river that will replicate water flows and show how added features would affect river currents.

The feasibility study suggests a handful of construction strategies for the river features, including a series of pre-cast "boulders" made out of 25-foot-diameter concrete shells that would be anchored into the riverbed. (Some whitewater parks are fully man-made affairs ˆ— South Bend's East Race Waterway is an old industrial waterway ˆ— while others, like the Truckee River Whitewater Park in downtown Reno, Nev., use thousands of tons of boulders and other materials to create a whitewater course in an existing river.)

But before construction can begin, the Run of River Project faces intense scrutiny from a number of federal and state agencies, ranging from the Army Corps of Engineers to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. According to Jay Clement, senior project manager in the Maine Project Office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Run of River Project will have to clear what he calls a "laundry list" of public interest factors, including potential impacts on the natural environment, the aquatic environment and the human environment. For example, construction that alters the river's flow patterns could cause erosion to fisheries habitats or property downstream. Clement's office has been involved in preliminary planning meetings with the Run of River committee, and expects to offer additional input during the planning process.

The approach of involving permitting agencies early on is a good one, according to Rick McLaughlin, principal at McLaughlin Rinc�n, an engineering and design firm in Denver, Colo. McLaughlin has more than a decade of experience designing and building whitewater parks, including the Olympic whitewater course on the Ocoee River in Tennessee. "You can't go out and think you can throw some boulders in a river, but if permitting is properly approached, it's not that difficult," he says. "What I've tried to do, early in the project, is to bring in a lot of stakeholders that are more than just boaters."

A question of funding
Dore and the committee are doing just that, soliciting input from the community through a series of town meetings this winter. "As a group, our vision is rather broad," says Dore. "We wanted to see what everybody's concept was and hear anybody's concerns so we could address them."

A mid-December meeting generated largely positive reactions from the community, though there was some negative feedback, focusing primarily on liability issues and concerns from anglers about sharing the river with boaters. As for liability, Dore says it's no different than going to a lake; the town ˆ— which will own the whitewater park per a request from the Army Corps of Engineers ˆ— would only assume liability during events in which the river is closed off to the public, such as a kayak rodeo or a whitewater canoe race.

Others were wary about how the project will be funded, raising concerns that townspeople would end up footing the bill for the Run of River. But while Dore doesn't seem worried that the committee still has to raise $1.5 million or more to see the project through to completion, he also says that taxpayers won't end up funding Run of River. Congressman Mike Michaud and Sen. Olympia Snowe are behind the project; both have submitted million-dollar-plus appropriations requests in the House and Senate. Those appropriations haven't been finalized, but Dore says he's confident that other federal funding sources or private donations will get the committee the money it needs before construction begins.

Dore says he expects to bring a comprehensive vision statement for the project to the next meeting in mid-February. From there, the committee will begin evaluating designers. Meanwhile, the committee is working to conduct an economic impact study of the project that includes a survey of locals and tourists. Because of the project's shoestring budget, Katie Ouilette has approached Colby College in Waterville to arrange for a group of students to conduct the study, which Dore hopes to have completed by mid-March. (Dore says a Colby student a few years ago did a bang-up job on a watershed study of nearby lake, saving Dore's lake association roughly $40,000.)

Dore says the study aims to figure out just how many tourists drive through Skowhegan each spring and summer with kayaks strapped to their roof racks, and, if they stop in town and open their wallets, what that will mean for local hotels, restaurants and other services. The feasibility study from Kleinschmidt cautions that while the whitewater park could provide a big economic boost to Skowhegan, the town needs to "understand, anticipate and plan for the possible influx of visitors and tourists to the area."

A crush of visitors might inconvenience some people or put a strain on the town's infrastructure, but Ouilette believes Skowhegan can handle it, just as it did when logging trucks rumbled through the downtown area. "Skowhegan was born because of the river," she says. "Now, if we can reclaim the river as an economic base as it once was, then Skowhegan will rise from that. I like to call it a phoenix."