Picture a summer cottage on a Muscongus Bay island with traditional shingled walls and six-over-six windows. Or picture a woodsy, compact and energy-efficient home near other houses, within walking distance of Tenants Harbor village, where there is post office, store, restaurant, plus a town pier and float for boat access to Penobscot Bay.
Nostalgia for the old Maine? No, these images are the visions of two different developers who believe you can respect local tradition and preserve natural habitat, even if that means scaling back profits. You might call it the greening of development.
Two planned Midcoast subdivisions appear to be taking a fresh approach to development. The 10-lot Old Woods Farm project in Tenants Harbor would set aside 84 acres as conservation land, while the 45-acre Flying Passage subdivision on Bremen Long Island would protect another 140-plus acres on the island from development, with public access permitted.
Developers want to make money, so is this a sincere commitment to be environmentally responsible or ploy to placate irate townspeople?
Many longer-term coastal residents are alarmed and angry at the rapid rise in land prices, loss of waterfront access and mega-homes built alongshore. Peninsular hamlets such as Tenants Harbor in St George feature roads that are fast becoming ribbons of commercial sprawl, interspersed with suburban houses that don’t belong to a particular village. The result is alienating and erodes the sense of community. The small town of Bremen doesn’t want to follow suit.
Jan Wirth has done a lot of research on what makes for “green” development. She has restored old houses and sailed the Maine coast in a classic family-owned yawl. She spent 30 years in Aspen, Colorado, before moving to Maine in 2001, and one year ago she and her sister, Jill Buschmann, bought an old house and 100 acres at the head of Tenants Harbor.
Their plan is to protect the bulk of their property from development through the Georges River Land Trust, and to allow 10 homes on the remaining land with requirements for size, native landscaping, energy efficiency, sustainable building materials and the number of outbuildings. Prices on lots are not yet available, but Wirth has already had inquiries. The sisters will restore the old house beside the main road for themselves.
Wirth, who has joined the town Comprehensive Plan Committee, acknowledged she wants to make money with her development. But protecting wildlife habitat and the local community are also important to her. “I’m most interested in the preservation of the community,” she said.
She hopes to develop other properties in the future, to help provide affordable housing to St.George and to help protect the town’s working waterfront.
Camden-based Friends of Midcoast Maine, a group promoting “sensible growth,” gave Old Woods Farm its “smart growth” endorsement. The St. George planning board approved the Old Woods Farm subdivision on May 9. But that same day, developer Dan Goldenson of Bremen and Cambridge, Massachusetts, was encountering rough seas. The Bremen Planning Board has been reviewing his 10-lot proposal for Bremen Long Island, and some residents are angry and unhappy about it.
Among the 30 residents at the planning board meeting was Blair Pyne, a local marina owner with a home on Bremen Long Island. “I don’t think Mr. Goldenson has a clue about island living,” he said.
Goldenson and his wife, Suzanne, renovated a waterfront homestead on the mainland once owned by lobster dealer Bernard “Bunny” Zahn, who towed the Maine-built five-masted schooner CORA CRESSY to his pound in the 1930s. The vessel has nearly disintegrated. The property isn’t far from the 257 acres Goldenson bought on Bremen Long Island last summer. He now owns about a third of the island.
Pyne said he has lived on the island for 50 years and Goldenson’s planned piers “will basically destroy the only cove without a dock.” He said there is a “perfectly good” dock on the other side of the island, and people who build on the new lots could get there by a path from the existing pier.
A day before the Bremen planning board session, Bremen lobster dealer Melanee Osier Gilbert and home designer Dennis Prior, both from old Bremen families, submitted a petition seeking a six-month moratorium on residential and commercial development on the waterfront. Gilbert said she was most concerned about a marina Goldenson planned on the mainland because “there isn’t room in the harbor.”
Karl Berger, chairman of the town’s board of selectmen, said the town clerk has certified petition signatures but the board had not yet acted on it. Goldenson does not want to get into a community fight and believes a moratorium would hurt many people as well as general property values. Goldenson was caught off guard by the claim that he was not protected under existing ordinances after filing a complete application March 1. He has received approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Goldenson feels he is on the same side as his opponents, since preservation keeps things from changing rapidly. He has an excellent relationship with the fishermen at the adjoining Lobster Coop that once was part of his own property. They now want to help find a resolution for all concerned, and are in a position to do so.
Goldenson envisions modest island cottages on concrete piers rather than full foundations, assuring that they will not turn into year-round homes. With no power or roads in the subdivision, Goldenson feels he is demonstrating his concern for the environment.
A retired medical publisher and a one-time developer of office and research buildings in his former hometown of Princeton, New Jersey, Goldenson said he is now more interested in preservation work and environmentally-conscious development. In 2003, the Goldensons gave 50 acres of mainland property to the nearby Hog Island Audubon camp to expand their environmental education program. The gift was only recently made public.
“We’re as concerned about all of these local issues as the people who have lived here for generations,” he said. “We love it here.”
Making Peace
An island developer and his local opponent in Bremen appear to have made peace. Melanee Osier Gilbert, a lobster dealer who helped circulate a petition for a moratorium on development, said she talked with developer Dan Goldenson for an hour May 16, and he agreed to drop plans for a mainland marina and parking lot for access to his Bremen Long Island subdivision.
Gilbert said Goldenson told her he will sell the shorefront property rather than fight with fishermen. Gilbert’s father’s pier flanks the lot along with another commercial pier owned by the Prior family.
For his part, Goldenson said he would inform Bremen town officials that he was withdrawing plans to develop the shore access lot in favor of a deal with the Bremen Lobster Pound Co-op, whereby he would assist the co-op financially in return for shore access for the island development.
“Basically, we never wanted this to rupture the community,” he said.
Said Gilbert, “He’s finally come to understand how passionate we feel about our waterfront.” He told her he would seek another site for mainland access to the island.
Would her father, or the Priors, sell their land? “They wouldn’t take $20 million,” she said.