The MAGIC touch | How fights over Millinocket's economic development strategy are scaring away new business
Millinocket has earned a reputation over the past few years as a mill town with more than its fair share of political angst.
Newspaper headlines have trumpeted Millinocket's internecine spats. Online forums have bubbled with allegations against town councilors of back-room dealings, conflicts of interest and improprieties; even claims of anti-Semitism and past drug histories have been slung like so much mud. A worldwide audience can even view screaming matches at Millinocket Town Council meetings on YouTube.
The source of all this bickering? Economic development efforts.
The irony is that everyone doing the bickering wants the same thing: To pick up the pieces of a town shattered after the 2003 bankruptcy of Great Northern Paper Co., which was the town's largest employer.
The divisions are often boiled down to easy-to-characterize sides — those who say tourism is the best way to turn around Millinocket's struggling economy versus those who believe that what the town needs is more manufacturing jobs. Or, the characterizations are even more simplistic, pitting locals against newcomers.
But it's never so black and white, and the conflicts are seeded in the deeper complexities of the town and its history, according to several people interviewed for this story. Dan Corcoran, who worked for Great Northern for 30 years and now owns North Woods Real Estate in town, says the political angst is merely a function of growing pains. "All of the negative press that's come out is nothing more than that internal struggle in a community going through changes," Corcoran says.
But while the town and its residents struggle to find a path to economic recovery, the fear is that the divisiveness has done more harm than good when it comes to attracting potential investors to town. Because, as Millinocket Town Manager Eugene Conlogue puts it, "Businesses like to be in places that are predictable and stable."
No one can say for sure to what extent the turmoil has affected economic development efforts, but many agree that the charged atmosphere has caused potential investors to shy away. "I have absolutely experienced that," says Bruce McLean, executive director of the Millinocket Area Growth and Investment Council — a group locally known as MAGIC. McLean relates a story of one potential investor who was considering a piece of land he thought was in East Millinocket, only to back out when he discovered the property was, in fact, in Millinocket. The disputes and controversy in town were the chief sticking point, McLean says. But that's only one example, he says. "I don't know how many untold stories there are out there of people watching [the controversy] on the Web or the news and deciding not to make investments," says McLean, who also is a Millinocket town councilor. "We have so much going for us, yet we make it harder on ourselves than it has to be by not getting along."
It's widely agreed in the town that ending the divisiveness and squashing petty disagreements is necessary for the town's rebirth. "The negativity has done its share of scaring off people," says Kathy Gagnon, a lifelong Millinocket resident.
Pointing fingers
MAGIC, it turns out, has been the epicenter for much of this divisiveness. Does it deserve the blame? Well, that depends who's talking. Critics say MAGIC, which was formed in 2001 to support economic development in Millinocket, East Millinocket and Medway, hasn't held up its end of the bargain for Millinocket. They point out that half the storefronts on Penobscot Avenue, the town's quaint main street, are still empty, that Millinocket has one of the state's highest unemployment rates — 8.6% in February, compared to 4.4% for the state — and that per capita income has fallen well below the state average. "Do we look like we're a bustling town?" asks Alyce Maragus, a Millinocket resident and vocal opponent of MAGIC.
For his part, McLean is at a loss when confronted with many of the criticisms leveled at MAGIC. McLean says he wants to see Millinocket flourish as much as the next person. He says MAGIC has worked to bring manufacturing jobs to town, and has touted tourism as a way the region can pull itself out of its economic funk. "When you look at the region and what has the quick potential to create jobs and opportunities, you have to say tourism," he says.
But not all Millinocket residents see tourism as an economic silver bullet. In fact, MAGIC has faced criticism that it focuses too heavily on tourism at the expense of attracting better-paying manufacturing jobs to the area. While tourism is generally welcomed and brings money into the town, the gripes are that the wages it provides are not comparable to manufacturing jobs and often dependent on the weather.
To combat what some perceive as MAGIC's impotent role in local economic development, some residents, including Gagnon and Maragus, in February decided to take economic development into their own hands and launched the Millinocket Community Action Committee. The group feels MAGIC hasn't succeeded what it set out to do and that something needs to be done. "I'm afraid we're running out of time," says Sally Bouchard, a native of Millinocket and member of the community action committee. "We wasted time and money we didn't have."
MAGIC was formed before Great Northern's bankruptcy, when town residents recognized the need to diversify Millinocket's economy. Until then, the paper company was the only game in town, and even went so far as to limit the kinds of companies coming into Millinocket to preserve the depth of its labor pool. (For more on Great Northern's role in Millinocket's economy, see "A great party while it lasted" below.)
The organization enjoyed widespread support at the outset. But controversy began in 2004 when MAGIC was a co-applicant with the Wilderness Society on two privately funded grants totaling $25,000 to explore creating a business park in the Millinocket area. (The park, which would have used a wood-fired biomass boiler to provide electricity to the park's tenants, hasn't been built, but McLean says MAGIC is close to finalizing a deal to locate the park in nearby Medway.)
But the Wilderness Society became "persona non grata" in the town, Conlogue says. The Washington, D.C.-based conservation group had a reputation for challenging forest-based industries in other parts of the country, and Millinocket residents viewed the group as a threat to their way of life. "We're woods people," says Bouchard. "So when [MAGIC] brought in the Wilderness Society I felt threatened."
Residents were so outraged they voted nearly three to two to decrease the town's funding for MAGIC from $50,000 to $25,000. "That was an issue that boiled over on the stove for a lot of people," Conlogue says. "MAGIC never really recovered from that."
The controversy over MAGIC again bubbled up last November when residents voted by a narrow margin to reduce Millinocket's contribution to MAGIC's 2007 budget from $60,000 to $30,000 — a big step down from the $80,000 Millinocket contributed to MAGIC in 2005.
And next year, it's unclear whether MAGIC will get any money from the town. Conlogue has included $30,000 in the town's fiscal-year 2008 budget for economic development, but it's up to the seven-member town council — which is split three to three between MAGIC supporters and detractors since McLean recuses himself from such deliberations — to decide what that money will be used for.
Defining success
While the results of MAGIC's work are not as apparent to his critics as McLean would like, there are some recent successes, he says. A project he's been working on for nearly five years to bring a $70 million biomass plant to town is getting close to fruition, though he declines to say any more on the subject. And, in January, the region received a $30,000 cluster enhancement grant from the Maine Technology Institute and Northern Forest Center to look at what kind of products could be manufactured from the byproducts of the local forest industries.
But a few attempts at bringing manufacturing jobs to town have ended poorly, and MAGIC critics have seized on those failures. For example, Millinocket in 2004 applied for and received two $250,000 Community Development Block Grants to attract two companies, Brims Ness Corp. and Allagash Valve and Control. Brims Ness never was able to attract the capital it needed to commercialize its product and has since headed to the Midwest to raise venture capital. Meanwhile, McLean says Allagash, which is currently located in town, has not taken off the way it had expected.
Those grants were contingent on each company creating a certain number of new jobs. Neither met those job requirements, meaning someone is responsible for paying $500,000 back to the state. Under the agreements signed with the town, the companies are liable for the funds. "The trick is if the company doesn't survive the town will be out that money," McLean says.
Despite the fate of Brims Ness, McLean doesn't believe it should be a reflection of MAGIC's ineffectiveness. "People have a hard time distinguishing between my successes and companies' failures," he says. "Failure in my book is when you give up."
But MAGIC is still a controversial topic in the town, and some are concerned that such controversies complicate the fairly simple goal of economic development. "It's very hard to have successful economic development when your economic development organization is involved and embroiled in a political battle," Conlogue says.
Meanwhile, some are working on their own to fuel growth in Millinocket's local economy. The Millinocket Community Action Committee has circulated an informal survey among residents asking what kind of businesses they'd like to see and whether Millinocket should have its own economic development director. The group is also working to spruce up Peddler's Hill, a dirt lot along the major road into town where area vendors hawk their goods in the summer. "The whole town needs an emotional uplift because we've been battered and bashed for so long," Maragus says.
But it's unclear whether the town can stop the infighting and repair any damage and negative attention from those disputes. Corcoran, for one, thinks Millinocket has so much potential — from its natural beauty to its people — that economic recovery is inevitable. "Economic development is going to happen despite all our efforts because the opportunities are here," he says. "It's just a question of how soon it'll happen."
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