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Greenville's Survival Tied to Plum Creek

February 06, 2008 - GREENVILLE -- Enrollment at Greenville schools has dropped more than 100 students - greater than 25 percent - in the last decade, said Superintendent Heather Perry on Saturday. Speaking on hehalf of the Greenville School Gommittee at a public bearing on Plum Creek's plan to create 975 house lots and two resorts on 20,000 acres around Moosehead Lake. Perry spoke of the struggle her community faces as enrollment drops and shrinking state subsidies shift costs onto the shoulders of local taxpayers. Unless there is change, Perry said, that challenge will only get more difficult.

While Perry spoke neither for nor against the Plum Greek plan, her comments underscored the hunger for economic growth in a community that is struggling to maintain a critical mass of people and jobs to support its schools and hospital. Saturdays hearing was the fourth and last of a series of pubhc hearings held throughout the state by the Land Use Regulation Commission. Participants spoke for up to three minutes in the Greenville High School auditorium while commission members listened from the stage, where they sat in front of a huge painting of Moosehead Lake.

Next week, the commission, which serves as the planning board for the unorganized territories, will hold four days of party sessions, when lawyers and experts from groups with legal standing in the process will question witnesses. Those sessions - the last scheduled for the Plum Creek plan - will be held at the St. Paul Center on State Street in Augusta. The public is welcome, although no public comment is allowed.

Saturday, supporters and opponents of the plan were divided largely by whether they saw it as an economic good, or a profit grab that would forever mar an area that has long served as a mecca for sportsmen and nature lovers. As a group, Greenville residents appeared to be much more in favor than against, with 11 Greenville residents supporting the plan in the flrst half of the meeting while two were opposed and two others said they were neither for nor against. A total of about 50 people spoke between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.

Greenville is the largest town near Moosehead Lake and the area's service center. Edward Olivier, who serves as the chief financial officer of G A Dean Memorial Hospital in Greenville, said the small hospital is under utilized and can't get any smaller without ceasing to be a hospital.

"The simple solution for GA Dean is more patients. The Plum Greek plan will bring jobs and will bring new tourists and new residents, some of whom will need services at the hospital," Olivier said.

Olivier said health care is a critical resource that is at least as important as the natural envirormient to the people who live and work in the community.

"If you approve this plan, you vastly increase the chances that the people of this region will continue to have access to quality health care," he said.

Representative Stacey Fitts, R-Pittsfield, said the Plum Creek plan is critical to the area's economy.

"This is the only place I have ever seen where a McDonald's sits boarded up," said Fitts.

Fitts said the plan had the support of economic development groups, municipal officers, legislators and most of the people.

Elaine Bartley, of Greenville, said the areas that Plum Greek's plan would develop also supported housing or resorts in the past. In 1885, the Kineo Hotel could accommodate close to 400 people, and tourists held regattas, yacht races and other sporting events on a daily basis. Seasonal people even had their own baseball team, she said.

"All we want is the opportunity to eventually recapture a portion of what we once had," said Bartley.

Many who attended the hearing, however, came from far away to advocate saving a place with storied past. Joan Welsh, of Rockport, former president and CEO of the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School, said Outward Bound has been taking students into the North Woods and contributing to the local economy for decades. Staff and students are drawn to the area by its beauty and remoteness, said Welsh. If the wilderness environment becomes compromised because of sprawling development, the integrity of courses taught in the North Woods will be jeopardized, she said.

Nevin Christensen, of Simsbury, Conn., came to the hearing after visiting Moosehead Lake over the summer.

"I am your token yuppie Connecticut flatlander come to say 'Hi,'" said Christensen, by way of introduction. "As I used to go to school, cows used to cross the road and the bus had to stop," said Nevin, describing his home town. Now, he said that rural environment is replaced by urban sprawl and it is unsafe to even ride a bike. This summer, he spent two hours in a thunderstorm on Moosebead Lake's Spencer Bay with his two children. It was an "amazingly intense" experience, he said. Christensen said he came to the hearing because he promised his 3-year-old. "So I could look him in the eye and say I did what I could to preserve Moosehead Lake," said Christensen.


SOURCE: KENNEBEC JOURNAL

DATE: 01-20-2008


Lakes: Moosehead Lake
Regions: Moosehead


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