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Home > Sears Island Initiative > Preservationists challenge development need for island

Preservationists challenge development need for island

By Peter Taber/Waldo Independent July 21, 2006

Those advocating for a Sears Island preserved in its wild state as a recreational resource have issued what amounts to a put-up-or-shut-up proposition to others who might have other ideas for the 941-acre undeveloped island. Last Wednesday at the third meeting of the state-run Sears Island Planning Initiative steering committee, the preservationist faction challenged those wishing to develop the island to come up with facts and figures to justify imperiling the island’s natural state in the name of a greater public good.

While president of Protect Sears Island (PSI) last November, McLaughlin posted an open letter on that group’s website urging Gov. John Baldacci to honor a promise he made to environmentalists in 2004 to establish a public planning process for the island without such pre-conditions as the DOT’s claim on 280 acres. Soon afterward, the governor removed the DOT as lead agency in such a planning process and substituted the Department of Conservation, a move applauded by the environmentalist community. The current initiative, which grew out of that shift in agency control, includes an understanding that the 280 acres is not spoken for.

McLaughlin’s sentiments even gained the guarded support of John Melrose, the former DOT commissioner under Gov. Angus King who now runs Maine Tomorrow, a transportation industry consultancy agency in Augusta. Fair Play for Sears Island’s core position, like that of the county commissioners, has been that the island should remain totally undeveloped as a non-motorized public recreational area with the understanding that compelling future needs are beyond the scope of present day planners.

The group has even suggested the DOT might retain day-to-day management authority over an island that would still serve a transportation need, namely as a buffer between an industrial Mack Point to the west and a fast-growing upscale residential community on Cape Jellison to the east. This is an idea floated by Melrose at the committee’s first regular session at the end of May when he declared that one person’s undeveloped natural resource area might be another’s port buffer zone.

At one point during a morning session mostly taken up with discussion of familiar legal issues, McLaughlin extracted an admission from DOT lead counsel Toni Kimmerle that Sears Island’s potential role as a buffer area could be considered as a transportation use.

The humorous tone of McLaughlin’s later remarks when he delivered a presentation urging an accommodation if necessary with the DOT to preserve the island clearly indicated his skepticism that development will ever have a future there. “We don’t want to bind up the future in case we decide to go back to high-button shoes,” he said, “but until they have plans for a buttonhook factory on Sears Island and studies showing there’s a demand for it, let us have the island. That’s not an unreasonable request.”

Other highlights of Wednesday’s session included:

  • repeated assurances from Jeff Pidot, who for the past 16 years has headed the natural resources division at the Attorney General’s Office, that the initiative participants don’t necessarily have to live with what administrators and legislators have determined for Sears Island in the past, rather that they are specifically “empowered” if they think it’s a better idea to set a new course for the island;
  • the corollary idea from Pidot that it’s impossible to bind the distant future and that if it’s determined to be in the best public interest, even land set aside for conservation purposes can be taken by eminent domain to satisfy entirely different and perhaps opposing public needs. In answer to one questioner who wanted to know if a future Legislature could be prevented from reversing the action of an earlier one, Pidot said, “I’m going to give you the two-letter answer—no”;
  • affirmation that the island belongs to the state of Maine, not to the DOT, and its purchase in 1997 for transportation-related purposes doesn’t preclude in future other, possibly unrelated uses;
  • admission by Therriault that port development by other parties on Sears Island might offer competition to Sprague’s business in Searsport;
  • the claim by a representative of Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railroad identified only as “Sandy” (filling in for Robert Grindrod, the railroad’s president), the sole person taking part in the session through teleconferencing facilities in Bangor, that island development to handle cargo containers shipped from Montreal over what were formerly the rails of the bankrupt Bangor and Aroostook Railroad constitutes what is “really the only major option for the growth of our company”;
  • a statement on behalf of PSI read by Bob Ramsdell declaring “our vision is to preserve the ecological integrity of Sears Island, building on the state’s commitment to benefit from the lucrative global market for eco-tourism.” Ramsdell offered a list of suggestions including that development be essentially limited to trail development and maintenance, interpretive signs, a welcome kiosk at the entrance, a small fishing pier and up to three composting toilets. PSI also favors encouraging the growth of Mack Point as a strategy to preserve the island;
  • reference by Maria Fuentes of the Maine Better Transportation Association to what she said was $26 million spent on “the Sears Island terminal” (the DOT says $22 million was spent on the cargo port project before its abandonment in 1996). Fuentes said she wants “to protect the taxpayer involvement” in Sears Island and related how she had just heard on the radio that 73 percent of respondents polled support the proposed TABOR tax reform program; and
  • a comment from initiative facilitator Jonathan Reitman, after hearing similar sentiments from Tilberg, that one thing he’s learned from his past efforts in the Middle East working to broker agreements between Israelis and Palestinians is “90 percent of success in negotiations is understanding the other side’s point of view.”
Reitman was scheduled to return to the Middle East next week. The next Sears Island planning session will be held Sept. 12.