Moosehead Lake, part of the largest stretch of wilderness east of the Mississippi, is a gem of the North Woods.
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Recent action by the Land Use Regulatory Commission (LURC), the agency in charge of maintaining the undeveloped nature of the unorganized territories, could be good news for protecting Moosehead Lake from Plum Creek’s massive development plan.
Plum Creek’s “framework” green windowdressing
As a precursor to reintroducing its plan, Plum Creek announced a “conservation framework” to accompany its unprecedented development plan for Moosehead Lake. While this “framework” has been very successful at garnering positive press for Plum Creek, most of its conservation promises are illusory. In order to highlight the discrepancies between Plum Creek’s public relations campaign and the facts of its development and conservation plans, Environment Maine Research & Policy Center wrote and released Hollow Framework: Plum Creek’s Doublespeak.
The report warns that the impacts of Plum Creek’s proposed development are harsh, certain, and irreversible, while Plum Creek’s “framework” lacks guarantees, is limited in both scope and scale, and allows for even larger-scale development at Moosehead Lake down the road. Real problems with the “framework”
• First, the “framework” is not a conservation deal; it is a document of purchase options.
• Second, even the framework’s purchase options come with strings attached—the framework becomes null and void if the State of Maine does not approve Plum Creek’s development plan.
• Third, Maine simply gets the option to use taxpayer dollars to buy Plum Creek’s land in exchange for its approval—Plum Creek is not giving these lands away.
This flies in the face of LURC regulations that demand compensatory conservation to offset proposed development.
Plum Creek’s bait-and- switch
Meanwhile, Plum Creek has been using their multi-million dollar public relations campaign to spread half-truths about their “framework” to burnish their public image and make it look as though their “framework” would offset their development proposal.
Using some of the same arguments outlined in Environment Maine Research & Policy Center’s report, LURC requested that Plum Creek clarify whether or not the “framework” is to be considered as part of their development proposal. LURC did not buy Plum Creek’s bait and switch, and our citizen outreach staff is working to ensure the public does not either.
Smaller development at Moosehead Lake denied
LURC denied the Burnt Jacket development proposal, which would have put 70
house lots on the shore of Moosehead Lake. Similar to the subdivision proposal by Plum Creek, this proposed development would have been located in wild forests
away from existing towns and services. In denying this proposal LURC reiterated its mission by stating that the Burnt Jacket proposal did not fulfill the agency’s requirement that development be located near existing development and be of similar type, scale and intensity. Perhaps the most powerful statement that LURC
made in its decision was that “rezoning is not an entitlement, petitioner purchased this land with a full understanding of . . . restrictions on development.”
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