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By ALAN CROWELL
Staff Writer 10/14/2007

Staff Writer

In 1987 Maine people agreed to borrow $35 million for an experiment called Land for Maine's Future.

That money, the largest non-transportation bond in the state's history, bought iconic pieces of Maine like Mount Kineo on Moosehead Lake and a section of the "Bold Coast" in Cutler.

But the program had a limited mission and an even more limited tool box. It could do only one thing -- buy land with state money.

Later there were more bond issues -- in 1999 and 2005 -- and over time, the Legislature broadened the program's mission, giving it the ability to work with local land trusts and to buy development rights to farms so farmland could grow crops, not houses.

Since 1999, the program has leveraged four dollars of private and federal funds for every state dollar.

With only two full-time employees, Land for Maine's Future has spent about $72 million -- the rest of the approximately $98 million raised for the program is tied up in pending projects -- and conserved about 445,000 acres, virtually all of which are open to the public, at an average cost of less than $170 an acre.

Born out of a time when surging real estate prices started to push Maine people off waterfront property and land they had hunted on for generations, the Land for Maine's Future program has also been a political success -- passing bond issues by two-to-one margins and winning bipartisan support in the Legislature.

Tim Glidden, director of Land for Maine's Future, said the program gave Maine people a "seat at the table" at a time when developers were dramatically changing the landscape.

But even its proponents say it has a weakness -- the price of land has increased much faster than the program's funding.

"The bottom line is we are falling behind," said Glidden.

Next month, voters will go to the polls to decide whether to issue another bond that includes $17 million for the program. Land for Maine's Future funding is the largest single component of the $35 million bond issue for land conservation, water access, wildlife habitat, other outdoor priorities.

In southern Maine, ever-climbing land values have put increasing pressure on open space and restricted the public's access to water. In the North Woods, seismic shifts in land ownership have begun to threaten a tradition of access centuries old.

Meanwhile, the amount of money the program has to spend each year has declined, on average, while the overall state valuation of the organized portion of the state has roughly quintupled since 1987.

"We have gone from $10 million a year (in 1999) to effectively $5 to 8 million and if you look at that in terms of buying power ... we're looking at something like 20 to 30 percent of the buying power we had in 1999," said Glidden.

'UNFORGETTABLE PLACES'

"Charting Maine's Future," a report by the Brookings Institution released last year, calls Maine's "unforgettable places" the state's ace in the hole.

The report calls for increasing efforts to conserve land and farms and protect traditional access to Maine's forests and lakes. It recommends funding the Land for Maine's Future program with $90 million over 10 years, and providing another $5 million to promote outdoor recreation.

The Natural Resources Council of Maine, the state's largest environmental advocacy group, calls for funding the program with $20 to $25 million a year. Without that level of funding, the state will continue to lose farms, snowmobile trails, shoreline and hunting grounds, according to NRCM.

Cathy Johnson, North Woods project director for the Council, says the program has a good open process for evaluating potential purchases. After two decades, it has avoided becoming tainted with politics, she says.

"It is something that benefits all the people of Maine, regardless of their political persuasion," said Johnson.

A CHANGING LANDSCAPE

Clinton "Bill" Townsend, a Skowhegan lawyer and one of the elder statesmen of Maine's conservation movement, said that first bond issue in 1987 addressed problems that started with rising land prices in the 1960s, about the same time that he and his wife Louise bought a 200-acre farm in Canaan.

"We paid $12,000 for the farm and that included a tractor and a hay rake and a plow," he said. After selling the farm equipment, Townsend estimated the price for the real estate was probably about $10,500.

Within about three years, he estimates the price tripled.

Not long after he bought his farm in 1966, Townsend remembers a neighbor offering him about 190 acres of land that abutted his own for $20 an acre. Townsend didn't have the money, so he had to turn the man down, but about two weeks later, his neighbor was back, this time to talk to Townsend in his professional capacity.

"'I found a buyer for that piece of real estate; would you make me a deed?'" Townsend recalls the man saying.

"I said 'Sure, how much was the selling price, $3,800?' He said 'No, $7,000."

"Even then the light bulb didn't go off over my head," said Townsend.

About a month after that, however, the man who bought the land from his neighbor dropped in and announced he had sold the parcel again and needed another deed.

"I said, 'how much, $7,000?' And he said, 'no, $17,000,'" said Townsend.

Then, the light bulb over Townsend's head did go off.

Maine was being discovered by out-of-state investors.

By the middle 1970s and early 1980s, land speculation and development were literally changing the state's landscape. Lakefront property that was once affordable to Maine families was suddenly out of reach.

Lobstermen who had grown up on the water were being pushed away from the coast.

Favorite hunting spots were being posted and houses were sprouting up in areas that had served as backwoods playgrounds for generations.

The Patten Corp. made headlines by buying up and reselling large pieces of land in the unorganized territories.

Sir James Goldsmith, the English billionaire, bought Diamond International, which owned pieces of properties throughout the state, and started selling off company assets one by one -- including timberland and mills that had supported Maine families for decades.

What Maine people were witnessing was a sea change.

Land held for generations as a corporate asset -- forestland to support paper or lumber mills -- was being acquired by real estate investment companies or corporate raiders looking to squeeze the most value possible out of it, often by subdividing it and selling off marketable pieces for house lots.

"There was a lot of concern on the part of a lot of people about this land speculation, but nobody knew what to do about it," said Townsend.

DO SOMETHING

Department of Conservation Commissioner Patrick McGowan sums up the mood this way: "The people of Maine said, 'For God's sake, do something.'"

McGowan was a second-term legislator in the Maine House of Representatives when he told Townsend he was going to sponsor a proposal for a bond issue.

"He said, 'I am going to put in a bill for a $5 million bond issue'," said Townsend, who remembers responding, "Pat, it has got to be $50 million."

What eventually went to voters was a proposal for $35 million to create the state's first land acquisition program.

The economy had just started to go into a recession, said McGowan, but voters still overwhelmingly approved it.

Many of those first purchases were of dramatic pieces of land away from population centers, but later the focus of the program broadened to include improving access to parks, trails and water bodies that people could use every day.

Land for Lake George Regional Park in Skowhegan and Canaan was purchased. Other purchases included land for trails in Portland, as well as old railroad beds for snowmobile and all-terrain vehicle trails in Aroostook County and from Newport to Dover-Foxcroft.

The program has also helped locally-based land trusts access federal and private funds to protect local lands.

In the 1980s, only about 4 percent of Maine was public land. Now, almost 8 percent of the state is publicly owned, with about 6.25 percent owned by the state, federal or municipal governments and about 1.5 percent in conservation easements.

Add to that figure the acreage held by land trusts and about 18 percent of the state is in conservation, according to figures provided by Land for Maine's Future.

That land is an important investment for a state with a multi-billion dollar tourism economy, said McGowan, who said the program has never strayed from its goal of saving land for traditional uses.

What the program has not been able to do is keep up with the need, said McGowan.

"We are running very, very hard and we are not keeping up," said Glidden.

Alan Crowell -- 474-9534, Ext. 342

acrowell@centralmaine.com

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