This land is your land | Is a $35 million conservation project Washington County's saving grace or its worst nightmare?
Photo/Courtesy Downeast Lakes Land Trust
A recently completed conservation project will protect nearly 350,000 acres in Washington County
Maine already conserves a larger share of its land than most other states in the country, and it can now add a new, massive tract of protected forestland to the mix. The Downeast Lakes Land Trust, a grassroots nonprofit, and the New England Forestry Foundation in late May announced that they had successfully completed a $34.8 million bid to conserve 342,000 acres covering nearly one quarter of all forestland in Washington County. It’s one of the largest conservation projects in Maine history — a sprawling, wild counterpart to massive tracts vulnerable to private development in other parts of the state. And thanks to equally ambitious conservation efforts in nearby New Brunswick, 1.3 million contiguous acres are now protected from development in this part of eastern Maine and Canada.
The Washington County project is a dramatic testament to some residents’ belief that the best thing they can do for economic development is to protect the forests that support traditional moneymakers like timber harvesting, salmon fishing and outdoor sporting. But this ambitious land trust has also generated its share of skeptics who worry preventing development in perpetuity on that much land will cripple one of the poorest counties in the state.
The Downeast Lakes Forestry Partnership conservation project contains 44 miles of lakeshore, 60 lakes and 1,500 miles of riverfront, mostly in a conservation easement that allows the property’s owner, Typhoon LLC (an anonymous holding company that Down East magazine reported includes the Yale University pension fund), to sustainably harvest the land for timber in exchange for restricting development of the land in the deed. The land can also be used for salmon farming and outdoor sporting. Charles Driza, who co-owns Leen’s Lodge on West Grand Lake Stream with his sister Cecilia, believes the massive project means his business has a much better chance of surviving. His nine-cabin sporting camp on 23 acres is traditional by definition — it has operated as a rustic retreat since 1940 — and Driza believes protecting the acres of forestland around his business from being mowed into a mini-mall will keep businesses like his in this area of the state thriving.
“Access is very important to the business because that’s what we’re all about,” says Driza. “The land trust has ensured that that land will be forever wild.”
Whether forever wild translates to forever prosperous is the question.
Looking for balance
While advocates and opponents of Plum Creek Timber Co.’s proposed 14,300 acre development 150 miles west of Grand Lake Stream trade opinions on whether development makes or breaks a local economy, fans of the Downeast Lakes Forestry Partnership believe here they’ve managed to strike a balance in the contentious push and pull between development and conservation because locals led the charge.
“This wasn’t a project that got dropped down from the outside world into one of the poorest counties in New England; this is a project organized by the county,” says Stephen Keith, one of the six founding members of the group Friends of the Downeast Lakes and the former executive director of the nonprofit it would become, the Downeast Lakes Land Trust.
Keith, a conservation consultant based in Grand Lake Stream, says he and the other members of the original group, including an area teacher and two sporting guides, became concerned in 1998 that the 462,000 acres around Grand Lake Stream that had recently been sold by Georgia Pacific to Typhoon would be subdivided and developed, compromising the wild solitude some of the six relied on for their livelihood.
They decided to try to buy back about 500 of those forested acres along West Grand Lake, but through talks with Wagner Timberlands, Typhoon’s management company, and the Massachusetts nonprofit New England Forestry Foundation, Downeast Lakes Land Trust eventually modified its plan to include much of the lost land — it launched an effort to raise millions of dollars to conserve more than 300,000 acres along Grand Lake Stream, the upper St. Croix River, and land between Grand Lake Stream and the Canadian border. DLLT joined with NEFF and the Woodie Wheaton Land Trust in Forest City to form the Downeast Lakes Forestry Partnership, and the effort to conserve one of the largest parcels in Maine history was born.
Hard numbers on the economic impact of conserved private land are scarce, because most conserved land is publicly held in parks, says Charles Colgan, professor at the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service. Last July, Maine State Economist Catherine Reilly, at the request of the Governor’s Council on Maine’s Quality of Place, co-authored a white paper examining the impact of natural assets on the economy. Reilly wrote that “most studies have found a positive or neutral relationship between the amount of conserved land within a region and population, employment and wage growth.”
But one prominent local worries preventing development forever will hamper the local economy.
“I personally do not think that it helps the town economy because it takes a lot of land along the river out of the development arena and therefore we couldn’t get taxes for development,” says Dorothy Johnson, acting town manager and chair of the town council in Baileyville, a 1,600-person municipality along the Maine-New Brunswick border in which, like the rest of the county, nearly one out of every 10 families lives below the poverty line. Baileyville watched about a third of its total acreage be put in a conservation easement by the land trust. Johnson says residents were told of the easement by DLLT in a town meeting and that plenty of people didn’t like the idea, but that little could be done because there was a willing owner and land trust. “Do you know how much money those acres cost?” asks Johnson. “There’s very little a small town could do against those millions.”
Jon Reisman, an associate professor of economics and public policy at the University of Maine at Machias who has followed the project, believes it damages the county’s economic prospects.
“What’s going on is we’re taking the land base and removing it from the private, for-profit sector as much as possible, and if your goal is to create wealth, that’s not the strategy I would follow,” says Reisman. “Basically, any economic development alternative, other than forestry, is now out of bounds. There’s a noble idea, ‘Oh, we’re going to protect and preserve this.’ But you don’t know what the future holds.”
Reisman points out that most of what he calls “landscape” conservation easements have happened or are proposed for rural northern and eastern Maine, and the stagnant effect those easements have had on those parts of the state amount to “rural cleansing” in which populations once thriving continue to thin out for lack of jobs. Even the ecotourism the land trust purports to protect Reisman believes will be hampered by the easement, since capital improvements tourists rely on — like roads — fall under the no-development restriction. “I don’t know if I’d call it socialism,” Reisman says of the DLLT project, “but it’s definitely not capitalism.”
Supporters, including Washington County state senator Kevin Raye, counter that protecting access to timber and outdoor sporting sustains two prominent sources of income in the area — though agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, according to the state Department of Labor, are actually only the 10th largest industry employers in the county, the first being health care and social assistance. Domtar Industries, which runs a pulp machine in Baileyville, also endorsed the conservation project, and Gov. John Baldacci celebrated its completion. Alan Caron, executive director GrowSmart Maine, an anti-sprawl nonprofit in Yarmouth, says conservation efforts like the Downeast Lakes Forestry Partnership only increase the long-term value of surrounding developable land.
Protection money
As bold as the project is, it required equally bold steps to make it happen. The Downeast Lakes Land Trust raised enough money to purchase 27,080 acres west of Grand Lake Stream, and the New England Forestry Foundation secured the easement for that forest and some 314,000 other acres.
The two organizations collected funds from individuals, public agencies, businesses and foundations — including Elmina B. Sewall of Kennebunk, whose donation of $6.2 million before her death made her the biggest individual donor, and Wal-Mart.
But after concerted fundraising, the groups still hadn’t raised enough to meet the land’s $24.9 million price tag before the purchase option would expire. So the New England Forestry Foundation did something it had never done in its 54-year history. Its board decided to mortgage one of its forests in Groton, Mass., to generate $6 million in loans to close the gap. NEFF Executive Director Lynn Lyford, the former commissioner of the Maine Department of Economic Development from 1989 to 1992, says the conservation project will help the area’s economy. “The mission of this organization is the protection of forest lands,” she says. “We put our money where our mouth was.”
NEFF, which was founded in 1944, owns 130 forests totaling 23,000 acres in every New England state but Rhode Island and monitors over one million acres in easements. The Downeast Lakes Forestry Partnership is the second largest conservation project it has ever helped secure, after the Pingree conservation easement in northern and western Maine. In 2005, NEFF was able to purchase the conservation easement on the land. In May, DLLT announced that the final $2 million for endowments to guarantee compliance with the easements and to manage the purchased parcel had been raised, just in time for sporting lodge owners like Driza to inform their summer visitors that the land they enjoy will be protected for many, many years.
“We see ourselves as securing a resource base that business owners can rely on as they make decisions for the future,” explains Mark Berry, executive director of the DLLT. “We the people who had the vision for this project initially essentially looked at the competition and thought that with our geography and where we’re located and with our resources we can’t compete on equal footing with the majority of the country, but we can protect our natural resources.”
Sara Donnelly, Mainebiz managing editor, can be reached at sdonnelly@mainebiz.biz.
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