It was 1853, and the shining gem was Moosehead Lake in northern Maine. But it just as easily could have been 2008, looking down on Montana's Whitefish Lake.
The two waterways have much in common. Ringed by mountains, shadowed by ski slopes, rugged, remote and rural.
Last Wednesday, Maine's Land Use Regulation Commission signed off on a sweeping plan by Plum Creek to develop 975 homes and two private resorts, some 2,000 housing units, on what once was working forest. It's the biggest residential project in the state's history.
It was, all agreed, a historic - and controversial - turning point for Maine's wild North Woods.
Meanwhile, along that other gleaming platter, up in northwest Montana, locals were watching carefully. Because Plum Creek has plans there, too.
“We're starting to talk to the cities and counties up there,” Plum Creek president and CEO Rick Holley said recently, adding that the north shore of Whitefish Lake would make a perfect spot for a combination of “private residences and resort-style development.”
“That sure sounds familiar,” said Jim Glavine. “Just exactly what we're seeing here.”
Glavine is a Maine local and a skeptic, if not a critic, of the Moosehead Lake plan. He founded the Moosehead Region Futures Commission, and “started asking difficult questions at a time when asking questions wasn't popular.”
Greenville, the nearest town, is home to just 1,600 people and one flashing stoplight. It is, in the words of town manager John Simko, “an area struggling economically. Perhaps our economic hunger has driven our desire to see this project go forward.”
The old timber jobs are going and gone, he said, unemployment is pushing 9 percent and the tourism economy hasn't yet matured beyond low-wage service jobs. It's also a place where locals put a high value on property rights.
Whatever the case, Simko said, “I think the town is generally supportive of the project.”
Supportive, but apprehensive.
When Plum Creek bought a million Maine acres in the late 1990s, he said, “a lot of people worried the change in ownership was a precursor to a change in land use.”
And right they were.
In 2005, Plum Creek presented Land Use Regulation Commission an “unworkable” development plan for Maine.
It was a half-million-acre residential subdivision plan “with development sprayed out all over the place,” said Commission member Catherine Carroll. “It looked like someone had taken a shotgun to the map.“
Every little lake and pond in the region had houses on it, down on the waterfront, up on the hillsides, far from the beaten path, right across sensitive habitat, through lynx and moose territory.
“I don't know what they were thinking,” Carroll said, “because these regulations have been in place for 40 years.”
“It took a long time,” she said, “for the company to realize they were going to have to think twice.”
A long time and a lot of rules, to be more precise.
Maine, it turns out, has some of the strongest land-use regulations in the nation, a legacy that goes back a full four decades. Get the development off the water, the rules said. Screen it from neighbors. Pull it off the ridgelines. Cluster it near places already parceled and peopled.
It took three years and three major revisions to craft a plan the commission could approve.
Along the way, a town divided.
“No one wanted to talk about Plum Creek,” Simko said, “because you didn't know if you were going to be crucified for your opinion.”
The homes and offices of Plum Creek employees were vandalized, and two days before the commission's final decision, four protesters were arrested after fastening themselves to state regulators' doors with bicycle locks.
Still, most now agree that the final plan, if not perfect, is far superior to the initial proposal.
“If it weren't for the regulations,” Carroll said, “who knows what we might have ended up with?”
Up along Whitefish Lake, “there are no real rules.”
“We don't have any mechanisms in place,” said Flathead County planner Jeff Harris. “That's a very valid concern.”
The county has no zoning on the 15,000 Plum Creek acres at the north end of Whitefish Lake, and no leverage for enacting land-use controls any time soon. That's because state law enables large landowners to veto zoning, “and Plum Creek owns enough up there to defeat” any attempt at zoning, Harris said.
In Missoula County, a large conservation land sale soon will eliminate the company's automatic veto power, but Plum Creek refused to include the Whitefish lands in that sale.
“The Whitefish lands have a specific potential for opportunity,” company spokeswoman Kathy Budinick said. “They're valuable lands, and we wanted to keep them for ourselves.”
So Harris has been talking with the company about those acres, hoping to learn more about what a “specific potential for opportunity” might look like - “very, very preliminary talks, though. No details at all.”
“We've been asking, too,” said Whitefish planner David Taylor, “but they've been pretty cagey.”
Which is a problem, because the company land sprawls across the city's water supply, on unstable soils. “Any development up there is going to contribute to the turbidity of the water, and a degraded lake,” Taylor said. “A lot of people are concerned about it, but the company's been pretty quiet.”
The closest thing to a detailed plan is Holley's remarks that perhaps half of Plum Creek's Whitefish Lake acres could be suitable for development, with a mix of houses and resorts. The idea, Holley said, could also include a “conservation measure,” protecting some of the lands as perpetual open space.
“That was a key for us,” Carroll said of the Maine land use commission's work. “We absolutely needed the conservation commitment to balance out the development.”
Even after three years of negotiations, she said, the plan the commission approved in Maine did not reduce the initial number of units Plum Creek requested, nor did it prohibit development in a controversial area called Lily Bay.
But it now contains nearly 400,000 acres of conservation easements. About 90,000 of those acres will be given freely to the state; the remaining 300,000 or so will be purchased by private nonprofits, netting the company $35 million.
“But without having the regulating structure in place,” Harris said, “I would say there's very little chance of that happening in Montana.”
What will happen in Montana, Glavine said, can be predicted to some degree by looking at what happened in Maine.
A “salesman” will move to town to provide information on the plan. In Maine, Glavine said, that was longtime Plum Creek employee Jim Lehner.
And although Lehner recently moved to Whitefish, company spokeswoman Budinick said “there's no connection there.”
Then, Glavine said, the company salesman will visit civic groups, with a message about wanting to be a good neighbor.
Lehner already has held such meetings in Whitefish.
Then Plum Creek will start small, with isolated subdivisions on nearby land. Again, that process already is under way in western Montana.
“And then the rumors will start, about bigger plans, for private resorts, but they'll insist they have no plans on the table,” Glavine predicted.
“We don't have any specific plans” for the Whitefish Lake property,” Budinick said, “but we're always exploring our options.”
In fact, the company is meeting with the state to talk access, and already is gathering baseline soil and water data.
Eventually, Glavine said, the company will present a plan that “shoots for the moon,” employing a local face to pitch the project and “hiring a busload of attorneys.”
“They'll know your rules better than you do,” Glavine said.
“My advice,” said Carroll of the land use commission, “is Montana needs to get serious about land-use planning.”
It the same advice offered by Moosehead development opponents, such as Glavine, and proponents, such as Simko.
“If you're in an area that could be developed like this,” Simko said, “then you're crazy not to have these rules in place. I can't imagine Maine's North Woods without those kinds of protections.”
Although Harris doesn't have the sort of regulatory leverage Carroll wields in Maine, he may hold something even more powerful.
“We routinely will have 100 people turn out for a planning meeting,” he said.
And often, those 100 people argue that preserving open space and water quality is a prerequisite to preserving the local economy, which is driven in no small part by unspoiled natural attractions.
That's important, Glavine said, because up at Moosehead Lake the regulations may not have made the real difference. “It was really the community pressure,” he said, “once people recognized the value of the resource we have.”
At Whitefish Lake, people already have carefully assessed the value of their resource, “and it's priceless.”
So said Joe Brenneman, a Flathead County commissioner and sometimes thorn in Plum Creek's side.
Montana might be trailing Maine in terms of rules, he said, but the state appears to be out in front when it comes to recognizing the dollar potential of intelligent growth planning.
By way of example, Brenneman pointed to Plum Creek subdivision proposals outside Kalispell, which were scuttled following local outcry.
“What we hope is that Plum Creek has learned, through all the neighborhood lawsuits on their developments west of Kalispell, that it's better to cooperate than to fight,” Brenneman said. “That doing more than the bare minimum can actually help move things along.”
Because if the company understands that, he said, then there should be something for everybody, enough to go around - all served, as it has been in Maine, on a gleaming silver platter.
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David wrote on Oct 9, 2008 8:00 PM: