Few question the repaving of Route 1, the upgrading of sewer lines or the expansion of fiber optic communication lines. We understand that such infrastructure is necessary to support a thriving economy.
Sure, a proposal to widen the Maine Turnpike in Southern Maine 20 years ago was met with an organized opposition and actually defeated at the polls by voters. Public support for such projects often has its own timing; an idea must coalesce around observable problems before a majority agrees the investment and environmental costs are worthwhile. Adding a third lane to the turnpike was approved a few years after the initial opposition.
Ports are different. Most of us have no direct experience with these industrial facilities, which in these post-9/11 days are hidden behind locked and guarded gates. But their role in our economy is just as important as the Maine Turnpike.
Mack Point, a port facility in Searsport that is more than 100 years old, must be understood as an off-ramp from the world’s oceans leading into Midcoast, Central and Northern Maine. With little opposition, and in fact with consistent voter approval for bonds paying for the work, Mack Point has been significantly upgraded over the past 15 years.
Perhaps what’s been attractive to voters is the public-private partnership nature of this development. Sprague, the primary operator of the port (and operator of ports in Portland and South Portland), is in the midst of repaying the state investment that modernized the piers, warehouses and handling equipment.
Yet for many reasons, Searsport has been a lightning rod for opposition to marine-based infrastructure. Most of that opposition has not been ill-considered. Over the past 40 years, Sears Island, the 941-acre state-owned property a stone’s throw from Mack Point, has been in the sights of developers who wanted to build an aluminum smelter, an oil refinery, a coal-fired power plant and even a nuclear power plant there.
So residents of the region had solid historical context for their wariness of a proposal to build a 23-million gallon propane tank at Mack Point. But many of the opponents may not have known that the facility already imports millions of gallons of volatile fuels.
Interestingly, the port facility in Portland is largely accepted as part of that city’s economy and commerce (though recent protests highlighted worries about tar sands being transported through the area). And in Eastport, the other facility emphasized under the state’s three-port strategy, residents seem to understand that transportation links are essential to boost Washington County’s economy.
In Searsport, it’s been a different story.
There surely are reasons to oppose further development of Mack Point—increased truck traffic on Route 1 and increased potential for an oil spill. But like it or not, water-borne freight is the mode of the future, in part because it produces the smallest carbon footprint. And if Maine is to remain economically vital, it must do what it can to buck the end-of-the-line geographical card it has been dealt.
Mack Point, which for the duration of the Cold War was devoted to jet fuel for the Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, is big enough to handle more liquid and dry cargo. No one wants to see a 14-story tank hulking over Route 1 (as the DCP Midstream propane tank project would have brought). But doing more of what the port is efficiently and safely handling now is possible. The possibility of shipping wood pellets that have been dried in a kiln-like plant in Millinocket to Europe holds promise for the inland Maine economy.
Just as that third lane on the Maine Turnpike in Southern Maine eased a possible choke point on the roads, the state’s ports are essential infrastructure and must be understood and invested in as such.
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