Welcome back (continued) BY ALEX IRVINE

In 2003, CEI’s Elizabeth Sheehan spearheaded the creation of the Working Waterfront Coalition (WWC), a broad assemblage of governmental authorities, fisheries groups, environmental and land trusts, and other coastal stakeholders. The point of the WWC, she says, is to create a "toolbox" rather than a single programmatic approach. Portland’s exacting waterfront zoning, for example, won’t work in some other places, where it might be more appropriate to work out a public-private partnership to keep waterfront access open to commercial fishing. Sheehan sees "overlapping economic, environmental, and social goals" among the groups involved, and believes that getting everyone at the same table is the only way to put together a lasting solution to the development and access pressures spreading up the coast.

The basic problem is, as Sheehan puts it, "How do you protect something when you don’t know its value?" That is, how do you make informed long-range choices about what you should do with Maine’s waterfront when you don’t have a clear idea of what that waterfront contributes? To remedy this lack of information, the WWC and USM’s Charlie Colgan have done an economic study — to be released on June 24 — comparing the current activity on Maine’s waterfronts with the projected activity should those waterfronts be converted to residential use.

The result? "If you convert it all to housing, you get a lot of construction activity" while the houses — which Colgan assumes would have an eye-popping average price of $700,000 — were being built, but the impact disappears when construction stops since houses don’t put money into the local economy beyond property taxes. Working waterfronts, on the other hand, pump money into town and state coffers as long as there are fish.

The study leaves some questions unanswered, though. What about the secondary economic impact of all of those people moving into converted condominiums in old fish markets? "It’s a reasonable question," Colgan says, but it introduces a huge variable: If everyone moving into that housing is a retiree, the overall wealth creation is negligible, while if the Downeast shores suddenly filled up with telecommuting stockbrokers, the economic impact increases dramatically. There’s no way to know which would happen. Assuming a mix of retirees and workers, "If you add them to the workforce and you take out the people in the working waterfront, it’s an even trade in terms of the impact of dollars earned" — with a significant loss of Maine tradition and culture.

Highest-and-best tax policies, which tax a piece of land according to what it would be worth if it was built out as housing or commercial development, are the mortal enemy of traditional land use. In recent years, states have begun making exceptions to the highest-and-best standard, mostly to preserve farmland. These exceptions, broadly known as "current-use" taxation, offer a possible remedy to the waterfront/coastal sprawl problem. A 2000 state referendum to apply current-use to working waterfronts failed, and did so in an illuminating fashion.

"Where they lost the vote," says Bill Crowe, "was in Eastport and Jonesport, where those guys have the most to lose. Some of those guys have never crossed the Hancock-Sullivan bridge. They have no idea what’s coming."

The Lobster Coast makes this point as well. "Downeast Mainers live on what is perhaps the final stretch of undersettled and underdeveloped coastline on the entire US eastern seaboard," Woodard writes, adding that "if the experience of Hancock County and the Midcoast is any guide, change will be swift, bewildering, and permanent."

Charlie Colgan agrees. "In the past decade, the fastest growth in second-housing development on the Maine coast has been in Washington County. So I expect Washington County to be increasingly put under pressure."

Faced with this Downeast Alamo, people are taking action. Senator Damon and a "coastal caucus" in the Maine Legislature "tried to introduce a piece at the end of the last session that mirrored the current-use proposal of the previous session." The proposal would have included a circuitbreaker to cap property taxes at five percent of income, an increased homestead exemption, and a ramp-up to school funding, "based on an increase in the sales tax of one cent." Despite strong support from the coastal caucus, the effort failed. Geographic divisions trumped party loyalty; another manifestation of the Two Maines, perhaps.

They’re going to try again, though. "I’m still smarting over the failure in the last session to effect any change," Damon says, but he’s forging ahead. "This whole legislative thing is a beast unto itself. It’s cumbersome and difficult to move and frustrating as the devil, but at other times you say maybe it was good that we went slow on this particular thing."

Crowe, as is typical, takes a more blunt approach. "The only way this is going to be solved is through legislation."

Charlie Colgan believes that the current uptick in the national economy will actually decrease development pressures on the Maine coast. "The movement of people to the shoreline has occurred in every decade for the last 50 years, towards the end of each expansion cycle in the overall national economy. As the economy grows, people’s wealth builds, and they start looking for places to stash that wealth." What’s different now, though, is that after the dot-com bubble burst "people took large amounts of capital out of the stock market and looked for safe investments, and coastal real estate in Maine is among the safest long-term investments you can make." Together with this flight from the market, low interest rates "have made it more affordable to buy your piece of the Maine coast."

But what goes up must come down. "We’ve been witnessing the steepest upswing ever," Colgan says, but as the market improves and interest rates to up, "the intense pressure will begin to abate over the next couple of years. Prices will not fall, necessarily, but the price rises will begin to mitigate."

And Mainers will have time to catch their breath and get ahead of the next onslaught, which means planning. "You’ve got to have comprehensive plans for your waterfront," Colgan goes on. "You can’t just rush out and do moratoria on waterfront development because you’ve got a crisis. From an overall economic point of view, a fisherman who gets displaced from his favorite boat-launching ramp to his second-favorite boat-launching ramp is not a big impact. It’s a pain in the ass for the fisherman, but it’s not an impact as long as he’s still fishing. People need to figure out what’s important and essential, and what’s just nice." CEI is in fact doing this, surveying harbormasters and town officials to ascertain where the most critical facilities are and focus on their preservation.

Elizabeth Sheehan professes optimism. "Local communities are doing stuff," she says, and environmental groups are beginning to see where their "conservation goals overlap with commercial fishing. There’s a patchwork" of solutions evolving. "It really does happen place by place."

"This is a manageable problem if people will work at it," Charlie Colgan says. Will they? "Like the cycle itself, willingness to work on the problem comes and goes. The crisis will come back, and only if we’re prepared for it when it happens will we be able to make a difference. It’s being able to sustain interest in this issue when it’s not so much a crisis that will determine whether we’re successful or not."

Woodard has a similar concern. "As with the problems of sprawl and development on land," he writes near the end of The Lobster Coast, "shoring up Maine’s working waterfronts will require taking a longer view and planning more carefully for the future. There’s a great deal at stake for the cultural fabric of coastal Maine, where fishing has long provided the essential thread. At this writing, the incredible abundance of American lobster is holding Maine’s fishing communities together, but, as rural Mainers know, it’s risky to have all of one’s eggs in a single basket."

He goes on to "wonder if, 20 years from now, Maine will look and feel any different from any other low-density suburb in the great East Coast megalopolis"; whether, in the end, "Maine’s practical, independent-minded civic character" will be overwhelmed by this latest generation of Great Proprietors. If so, The Lobster Coast will stand as a wide-ranging and deeply felt memorial to the history of the people who have clung for centuries to this stretch of rocky and inhospitable Eden.

Alex Irvine can be reached at airvine@phx.com