If you’ve driven from Waldoboro to Thomaston on Route 1 in recent years, you may remember the signs as you passed through the pastoral landscape of southern Warren. There you found yourself on “old” Route 1, a quiet two-lane road meandering through woods and hayfields, a 1930s-era highway where lots of trees and many homes cozy up to the pavement and the 21st century seems to have vanished around the bend in your rearview mirror.
But for the past three years, signs reading “Stop the Widening” and “Don’t be Fooled: Wider is Not Wiser!” stood in the yards, fields and woodlots along a two mile section of road that the Maine Department of Transportation had slated for improvement. Given the explosive growth of midcoast Maine – and Knox County in particular – DOT projected that traffic flows would grow and Route 1 needed to grow as well. But, like other growth-related projects on the coast, the $3 million widening plan became a battleground for competing visions of what the Maine Way of Life really should be.
Last summer, work crews arrived and things in Warren reached a crescendo. Anti-widening protestors held protests and vigils. In mid-June, workmen found two dozen protestors guarding the trees they had been sent to clear. Sixteen people were arrested, including the residents of several of the nearby homes. Some had climbed into high branches and had to be removed with cherry pickers; others had chained themselves to the trunks of larger trees.
DOT’s plans to straighten the road, and provide it with eight-foot shoulders had strong support amongst Warren selectman and the Rockland area business community. “Rockland and Thomaston have now become true destinations rather than just drive-through locations,” says Bob Hastings, executive-director of the Rockland Area Chamber of Commerce. “The first issue with the widening was for our families, friends and visitors to be able to travel safely.”
But for other area residents, the project was seen as a dinosaur, an ill-conceived “upgrade” that would only hasten the ongoing suburbanization of midcoast Maine. “Cut back everything twenty feet from the road, move the poles, and widen the shoulders and you’ll encourage people to drive fast and commute farther,” says Stephen Burke, a leader of the protest movement who moved to a farmhouse along route 1 in Warren from Cape Cod in the mid-1970s. “I saw [the Cape] get all subdivided and hacked up,” he says. “A lot of people who are fighting these battles come from out of state and know how fast your community can be eaten up by sprawl and growth if you’re not careful.”
Growth-related conflicts have been heating up all along coastal Maine in recent years as suburbanization pressures have spread from the southern counties to the midcoast and beyond. Plans to build a bypass around Wiscasset – an increasingly congested bottleneck on Route 1 – quickly came up against sprawl-fearing opposition in rural Westport, Edgecomb and Alna, located on or near proposed routes. The Lincoln county fishing town of Bremen has placed a cap on building permits in an effort to slow an influx of wealthy retirees. In Belfast, a town transformed by the recent arrival of credit card giant MBNA, voters rejected Wal-Mart’s efforts to open a store, while Rockland lobstermen stopped a large marina development over the harbor’s lobster grounds.
“What you see in many of these debates is that technical issues about economic changes or highway safety get dressed up and are masquerading for fundamental visions of what Maine is and ought to be,” says Charles S. Colgan, a community planning specialist at the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service. “Maine has a strong sense of place and when anything comes along that challenges that, people get motivated.”
Despite that defiance, southern and midcoast Maine is rapidly transforming from a rural landscape of working farms, woodlots, and waterfronts to a sprawling suburban region complete with subdivisions, commuter traffic, strip malls, office parks, and marinas.
While Maine’s population grew slowly in the 1990s, coastal counties have experienced marked growth. York County grew by 13.5 percent, three times the state’s overall growth rate, while Cumberland, Lincoln, Waldo, Knox and Hancock all grew by between 9 percent and 11 percent, according to the 2000 Census.
What has sprawl-haters concerned is that the growth hasn’t been taking place in the traditional population centers, but rather in traditional farming and fishing hamlets in the backcountry or down the peninsulas. During the 1990s, larger towns like Portland, Brunswick, Rockland and Belfast barely grew or even shrank. Meanwhile, rural communities like Bremen, Alna and Warren grew by nearly a fifth, Belmont, Searsmont, and Hope by more than a quarter, and the fishing town of Cushing by more than a third – a growth rate on par with fast-growing outer Portland suburbs like Scarborough, Falmouth and North Yarmouth.
“People moving to Maine probably have an image of living in the quiet countryside, on the lakes and the coast,” says sociologist Richard Sherwood, a census expert at the State Planning Office, who notes that approximately one in ten residents of most southern and midcoast counties in 2000 lived outside of Maine in 1995. “We’re spreading out,” he says.
“People are leaving the big towns and villages and moving out to their two-acre plot in the middle of the woods,” says Amanda Russell, vice chair of Edgecomb’s planning board. “That has consequences for our culture and the ways we use the land because breaks up wildlife habitat and cuts woodlots into sizes too small to be economical for harvesting.”
Indeed, rural land is being consumed at an astonishing rate. Greater Portland has the worst sprawl in the entire northeast and the ninth worst in the United States, according to a recent nationwide study conducted by the Brookings Institution in Washington. Between 1982 and 1997 the Portland metro area’s population grew by only 17 percent, but the amount of rural land converted to urban uses increased by 108 percent. From Boothbay to Searsmont, new driveways, house lots and subdivisions appear every few months on rural roads and once-forested shorelines. Based on current trends, Evan Richert, former director of the State Planning Office, has predicted that by 2050 southern Maine will be a suburbanized extension of Greater Boston.
For years, officials at the State Planning Office have been warning local communities of the financial costs of sprawl. As the population has spread into the countryside, so have public services, from the extension of bus routes, roads and utilities to the construction of new schools, police stations and firehouses.
Take schools. Between 1970 and 1995 the number of public school students in Maine declined by 27,000, causing the closure of many schools in places like South Portland and Aroostook County. But during the same period, state government alone spent $727 million on new school construction in fast-growing areas. Similarly, while the crime rate has fallen, the number of police officers continues to grow to cover the ever-expanding suburban zones.
Less talked about is the toll the building boom is taking on the cultural fabric of coastal Maine. As city dwellers, retirees and telecommuters have poured into coastal hamlets, buying farmhouses, lots on the waterfront and in rural subdivisions, they’ve triggered a veritable explosion in property values. After the next property revaluation, many local people are forced to sell homes that have been in their families for generations simply because they can no longer afford the property taxes, particularly if they live on or near the water.
“I can count on one hand how many lobstermen I know who live on the water anymore,” says Mary Brewer, a lobsterman’s wife and longtime editor of The Boothbay Register who has editorialized that rising property values are leading to “the death of the Maine coast native.”
“We’ve got to do something, and not just here but statewide, or all of a sudden the Maine people are all going to be from Massachusetts and New Jersey and Pennsylvania,” she says, noting that she’s seen many families sell their homes unwillingly because of rising taxes. “The people who are moving here are really nice and try to help the community but the fact is they are literally displacing a lot of local people who can no longer afford the real estate in their own home town. I think that’s sad, and I don’t think those [recently-arrived] people want to see that happen either.”
Residents of Great Chebeague Island in Casco Bay were hit particularly hard in a recent revaluation, with some tax bills increasing by 200-300 percent, a major hardship for the island’s mostly middle-income homeowners. Hundreds of island residents swarmed town meetings in Cumberland, of which the island is a part, demanding relief and even threatening to secede.
“The state likes to use fishermen and other Maine people as poster boys and girls for their tourism advertising, but they’re not willing to have policies that will enable people to stay in their own towns,” says island resident Donna Miller Damon, who sits on the Cumberland town council. “Assessments are based on the false premise that all homeowners are willing sellers, when the fact is most people [on Chebeague] aren’t interested in selling but are forced to because of the taxes.”
Brewer and Damon say there must be some sort of statewide tax reform whereby properties that have remained in the same family for a long period of time receive tax relief. Damon suggests a “tree growth-type easement for people” where owners agreed not to sell their properties on the open market, but could pass them down to family. Brewer, who expresses concern about the future of boatyards, fish piers, and other waterfront commercial property, argues for some mechanism by which properties are taxed on their current use rather then their potential market value were they to be subdivided. “I truly don’t know what the exact answer is, but I hope I live long enough to see some changes, I really do,” Brewer says.
Meanwhile, some midcoast communities are making changes to confront sprawl itself. The key, the so-called “smart growth” advocates say, is planning. “First of all you have to get rid of that one or two acre net [of potential house lots] that you’ve cast over your entire town,” says Russell, who sits on the planning board of rural Edgecomb, a still largely undeveloped town at the base of the Boothbay peninsula. “You look at the maps – the soil maps, 911-maps, Tree Growth maps, wetlands – and it jumps at you where there should be growth and where there shouldn’t be.” Growth, Russell and other planners say, can be encouraged or discouraged through the use of voluntary conservation and Tree Growth easements, the lease or purchase of development rights, or zoning changes.
Ed Suslovic, a Portland realtor turned smart growth advocate, says current zoning rules in most Maine towns actually encourage sprawl. “There are a handful of developers trying to do higher-density, village-type traditional neighborhoods, but we make that almost impossible because of minimum lot sizes, road frontage, growth caps, and extensive street-width requirements,” he says. “If Wiscasset village burned down today it would be illegal to rebuild it anywhere in the state.”
While towns can change their zoning, many growth-related problems are beyond their reach. “You see it in the most extreme form when you get a Wal-Mart or Home Depot coming into an area,” says Nigel Calder, an Alna writer and ocean navigator who has been active in planning routes for the Wiscasset bypass. “Big box retailers plan regionally and have region-wide effects on businesses and growth but because of the lack of regional planning [in Maine] these big corporations can just come in and play one town off against the other.” Similarly, the route of a highway bypass like the one in Wiscasset can have significant effects on growth and land use in many towns at once, but there’s no formal mechanism for towns to coordinate planning.
“The problem we have in Maine is that land use planning is fiercely defended at the local level but none of us live locally,” Calder says. “It used to be that you went to work in the town you grew up in, but now where we live isn’t closely related to where we shop, work, or play. We’re planning land use at the town level when most of us are living at the regional level.”
The solution, Suslovic argues, is to create some sort of regional entities through which clusters of towns can plan land use, share services and expenditures like police, fire, or the hiring of tax assessors. County boundaries are arbitrary, he says, but the 35 regional labor markets identified by the Maine Department of Labor might be a good place to start. “It makes sense: people recreate, work, and shop within these regions,” he says. “You can’t solve a regional problem at the municipal level. Until we have a regional structure everything the towns do on their own is really nibbling at the edges of the problem.”
Colin Woodard is at work on his second book, a cultural history of coastal Maine, which will be published by Viking in late 2003. He lives in Portland and maintains a web site located at www.colinwoodard.com.