Decentralize and localize LURC with more county representation? Allow a county to opt out of LURC oversight? Remove centralized management of a forest asset that drops billions of dollars a year into the Maine economy?
Imagine North Woods resources as an affiliated, sprawling string of factories. (Maine people legally own most of our rivers, streams, larger lakes and 100 percent of our wildlife. Degraded or inappropriately altered, this property loses it revenue generating capacity.) Proposed revisions to decentralize LURC have the same effect as allowing each factory in its own location to decide its own fate, although the product line depends on coordination of all factories into one productive unit.
No sane board of directors would dismantle a central planning system that delivers the economic goods.
It is our ignorance of those “goods” that allows us to even contemplate weakening professional oversight of our assets. Fishing is $257 million per year. Wildlife recreation: $1.1 billion. Lakes: $1.8 billion per year. Just one mountain region delivers $5-6 million. Stumpage fees: $180 million. Biomass chips: $60 million per year. Outdoor recreation: $3 billion.
This is just a partial list. Not one of these resource “factories” is contained within a single landowner’s boundary or a single county. It is sheer madness to fragment planning for this asset.
Maine is about to escalate what has been a backdoor process for years: collaboration between LURC project applicants and local and county governments willing to sell their approval. If we change the way LURC is run to increase county representatives who are not even vetted by legislative review, then the applicant foxes get to pack the hen house with compliant hens and then pluck them for all their worth.
We have proof of this financial cooperation. Plum Creek seduced approval from county government and local chambers and civic organizations with PowerPoint presentations and offers of financial support even before its application was officially delivered to LURC. I could not find one selectman, county commissioner or chamber member who’d read the application before he or she voted to support the applicant. They were too excited by hospitals and civic events funded, offers of free land for low-income housing, offers to build a new landfill.
Wind power executives offer up the same monetary inducements, always targeting the greatest need: more teacher pay, lower taxes, infrastructure projects.
Proposed LURC revisions give more cash-strapped local players more control of project review. Serious examination of a project’s impact won’t be possible with that much money on the table.
Is this all bad? Governments are strapped for funds. Why not make it simpler for developers to stream funds to these local entities? It’s already happening now, just slowed by a regulatory process that supports a deceptive public input process.
Rural government entities and civic organizations testify to the value of significant, transforming development without disclosing exactly how they’ve been bought and paid for. (Plum Creek paid legal and consulting fees for organizations that claimed to offer “independent” hearing testimony.)
Reforming LURC into a “local control” rubber stamp agency packed with members eager to receive developers’ donations is a mistake. Allowing one county to opt out of an integrated resource base is a mistake.
In my hometown of Boothbay it might make sense to locally permit a fish packing plant, but everyone knows local government is incapable of making sure the entire Gulf of Maine continues to be productive.
Maine’s North Woods, as with the Gulf of Maine, is a systemwide multibillion-dollar asset. Its productive forests, river systems, lakes, fish and wildlife populations, recreational attractions and trails respect no neat boundaries. The collusion of single-minded corporate profit-taking with opportunistic, ill-prepared and shortsighted local control will destroy our most enduring economic asset.
It’s ironic that at a time when most of the country is outraged by obscene profit-taking at the expense of securing an enduring economic engine, we are ready to hand over the keys to our own economic treasure and let people who have not passed any kind of economic license exam drive it away.
Sandra Neily is the author and editor of “Valuing the Nature of Maine” and “Watching Out for Maine’s Wildlife.” She lives in Greenville.
Neily, a former Audubon activist, is trying to deceptively re-package her radical preservationism as if it were for “the economy”, the same failed marketing scheme exploited by Quimby. They don’t dare openly announce their preservationism the way they used to.
“Centralized management drops billions of dollars a year into the Maine economy”? Is that some kind of joke? Central government planning suppressing private property rights and economic freedom has uniformly failed all over the world and still is in Maine. It’s a notion taken right out of the ideology of 1930s dictatorships. Rural Maine is surviving — to the extent it is at all — despite the controls and restrictions, not because of them.
Neily’s purple prose — such as “collusion of single-minded corporate profit-taking with opportunistic, ill-prepared and shortsighted local control will destroy our most enduring economic asset” — is dripping with sneering leftist hatred for private property, economic prosperity and democratic self-government accountable to the people governed — while claiming collective ownership of other people’s private property she deems to be “our asset”. She sounds like the BDNs editorial denouncing locally accountable self-government as “pandering to voters”.
In this country the right of private property, economic and political freedom, and self-government are no longer supposed to be debatable, but this country was not founded on Nealy’s failed 1930s totalitarian ideology or on Audubon’s radical forced mass preservationism. She should be embarrassed to be seen in public still promoting such anti-democratic politics.
Remember the 26 million acre four-state Greenline Park agenda they pushed so heavily? Remember Audubon VP and Restore Board member Brock Evans’ infamous “take it all” speech? They evidently are still counting on people not taking their threat seriously precisely because their radical politics are so alien to normal people that’s it hard to believe it could happen in this country. But that is what these little tyrants still want and is why they are apoplectic about the prospect of losing any of their iron grip control over the people of the UT through LURC.
Greenville has their own LOCAL planning board for Mz. Neily to apply to for anything she might want to do with her property. I have no desire to have a say in what her LOCAL planning board allows her to do.
Why does she and every environazi organization in the state (and the entire country,it seems) feel that they should have a say in what I do on my property in the UTs?
We, the people of rural Maine have the ability to oversee development in the UTs, but the liberal viro left seem to think that they know better.
Their elitist attitudes and their atempt to control what is not theirs is the reason LURC needs to go.
Abolish LURC.
DO IT NOW !
Sandra Neily is opposed to private property rights, but not to her own control of her own property. Property rights are too broad for her — it means everyone has rights as a matter of principle. She’s an eco-feudalist. Nothing must happen around her, for hundreds of miles. She wrote in her headline “it’s all about the money” — her money to lobby to control other people for her benefit.
Maine needs to send LURC packing…!
Much like Quimby, The Nature Conservancy, The Conservation Law Foundation and the Penobscot River Restoration Trust,,,, LURC has only existed to expand and enforce its own agendas here in Maine.
These groups focus has centered on nature above man and to remove us from Northern Maine all together. Through unfair regulations on small businesses, forcing a park designation on an area that has clearly opposed it, these groups will have achieved their goal of cleansing Northern Maine of its residents.
We need to take back our state and vote for those that will commit to openly oppose these groups
I love how the anarchists refer to any attempt to prevent the ruination of our public resources (the waters of the state, etc.) as “radical preservationism.” It has been demonstrated over and over again that people and businesses cannot be trusted to look out for the public interest. Regulation is the only answer, and regulation of impacts to state resources should be handled at the state level. Disbanding LURC is a foolish and shortsighted idea.
The “earthling” creature has been smearing people as “anarchists” and a lot more throughout his reactionary attempts to block reform of LURC. Other people’s private property are not his “public resources”. “People” and their “businesses” are not supposed to live for what he claims is the “public interest” of wilderness preservationism. Private property rights are not “anarchism”. The “earthling” is a little ideological tyrant opposed to political and economic freedom who tells us that we must be ruled by centralized bureaucratic power because “people cannot be trusted”. Send him back to the 1930s European dictatorships where his ideas came from.
If you had any ability to see beyond your narrow-minded and shortsighted viewpoint, you might notice that I specifically referred to the PUBLIC resources. Waters of the state. Wildlife. The state owns the lakes, and the state owns the water in the rivers and streams,and the state owns the fish in the water and the deer in the woods. The reason is that water moves around, and what touches your property one day touches mine the next, and the fish and the deer move around too. I don’t want your crap floating up on my beach. I don’t want your poor construction techniques, and your poor choice of a building site to kill the fish that I like to catch and eat out of the lakes and streams. I don’t want your inept timber harvesting techniques to take out all the deer wintering areas. Your fanatical opposition to government oversight of PUBLIC property and the impacts that private development has on those PUBLIC resources shows your complete disregard for anyone but yourself. I’m a tyrant? YOU are the moral equivalent of a five-year-old, kicking and screaming when your parents tell you it’s time to go to bed. If you think people can be trusted to do things correctly, that tells me you certainly haven’t spent much time on the lakes and in the woods, or else you simply don’t have a clue as to what constitutes appropriate development.
“Earthling” dishonestly pretends that he can change the subject to pollution, misrepresenting what everyone else is talking about it. The reform of LURC is to protect private property rights and representative self-government accountable to local people, not to allow harmful pollution, which no one has advocated. The “earthling” thinks that is “anarchism”.
“Earthling” is a radical preservationist who has repeatedly demanded LURC and Federal, National Park Service control taking over other people’s private property for his massive wilderness preservation political agenda at the expensive of human values and rights.
“Earthling” is radical ideological ecologist who thinks “water moves around” and “touches everything” so he should be able to control everything — and therefore every person — through a centralized viro bureaucracy — which is right out of the mid 19th century German Hegelian ideology of ecologism. “Earthling” concludes that anyone rejecting his totalitarian social controls is the equivalent of a “five year old anarchist” daring to defy him.
“Earthling” is a misanthropic control freak throwing a temper tantrum himself over the moral and political rejection of the radical statist ideology contrary to the rights and freedoms of human individuals, which in this country, if not in totalitarian German tradition, we are all supposed to be guaranteed.
I have NEVER advocated for Federal or National Park service control of ANYTHING. If you paid attention instead of ranting and frothing you’d know that. If you paid attention, you would have noticed by now that individuals and businesses IGNORE the effect their activities have on anyone and anything else. Of course no one advocates for pollution, they simply don’t pay attention to the consequences of their actions. This is why regulation and oversight are necessary.
Your paranoia is showing again when you claim I have “massive wilderness preservation political agenda”. You are, as usual, full of crap. You think water and animals pay attention to property lines? You think your activity up the river doesn’t affect someone down the river? Human values and rights – how about my right to hunt and fish without having to worry that you have destroyed the habitat for the deer and the trout? How is it even possible that you don’t understand this? What is wrong with you? No one wants to “take” anyone’s property away. The intelligent course of action is to REGULATE development so it does not destroy the PUBLIC RESOURCES upon which we depend. There is such a thing as cumulative impact. Individuals do not, in the vast majority of cases, consider consequences of their actions beyond their own four walls. If you don’t know this yet, you must be very young indeed.
You rage on as if I’m somehow standing outside your door about to throw your family into a snowbank. This is called PARANOIA. You really need help.
The Quimby/Restore National Park Service takeover agenda repeatedly supported by “Earthling” is a massive wilderness foreced preservation agenda. So is the viro agenda for LURC. “Earthling” repeatedly supports far-left politics in its comments on a variety of articles. Does the “Earthling” also support the Audubon “Beginning with Habitat”
agenda to prevent normal use of private property? How about the “bird
habitat” scam already imposed?
“Earthling” has admitted it wants to control everything because “water moves around” and “touches everything” and “Animals” don’t obey “property lines”. That is the stock line of radical ideological ecologists out to destroy private property rights. They want everything controlled and “regulated” by central viro bureaucracy under which there are no rights, only permission at the discretion of the bureaucracy under non-objective law the way LURC and DEP are increasingly operating.
That ideology is not based on human rights, including the right not to be poisoned by harmful pollution. “Earthling” continues to confuse perservationism with preventing pollution harmful to humans. Civilization is not pollution. A “human footprint” is not evil. “Earthling” does not have a “right” to strangle civilization so it can “hunt and fish” anywhere it wants to the way primitive tribalists did in pre-settlement times, animals do not have “rights”, and “Earthling” has no right to force other people to provide “habitat” it wants. That “nature” ignores propertly lines does not mean that radical preservationists like “Earthling” can.
Bravo. More voices like yours are needed. But this legislature can do whatever it wants. And, we can do nothing until we can vote them out.