Maine’s state government has been called the closest thing to an environmental dictatorship in America, but that may change. Paul R. LePage, Maine’s incoming Tea Party-backed Republican governor, campaigned on lifting environmental regulations that “serve no purpose except to cost businesses money,” reducing or eliminating just about every business-related tax in the state, and bringing cheap energy from Canada.
He gut-punched Big Green environmental activists for pouring millions into Maine to tie up land and kill development: “You can’t harvest timber. No one is going to have the benefit of creating wealth and prosperity from it. I say, look at land for Maine’s future.”
LePage will have his hands full. Maine also has new Republican majorities in its state House and Senate, with freshmen who don’t even know that Iron Triangles exist.
Big Green got its Maine foothold in August 1988 when the Natural Resources Protection Act was passed, creating the state’s Department of Environmental Protection and enlarging the existing Land Use Regulation Commission.
Like most Big Green-inspired laws, the NRPA started with a little mission that got big. This is called “Mission Creep” in the military.
Maine’s unsurpassed Mission Creeper, Theodore S. Koffman, of Bar Harbor, started in 1976 as an administrator at the College of the Atlantic, an environmental liberal arts college so radical it offers credits in “Practical Activism” and “Creative Destruction,” among others.
The job gave Koffman contacts with important Big Green leaders, particularly the Maine Audubon Society (independent affiliate of the National Audubon Society). That guided him into political activism, which gave him a base to run for office in 2000.
He won two offices. Bar Harbor voters elected him as a state representative, and Maine Audubon elected him as a trustee. Koffman thus became two sides of an Iron Triangle in one person.
By 2006, Koffman chaired the powerful House-Senate Joint Standing Committee on Natural Resources. He used that power to pass “emergency legislation” expanding the DEP’s reach.
His law, LD 1981, was a “shoreland protection” bill imposing a 250-foot setback from the tide line for any human activity.
Its “No New Structures” rule crashed waterfront land values. Lots formerly worth $250,000 sank to $20,000. Democrat Rep. Jim Schatz said, “For many of my constituents, land constitutes their retirement. This law is catastrophic.” Lives were wrecked. Lost taxes ran into the millions.
Lubec shore owner Erich Veyhl said, “Our house was built over a hundred years ago about 50 feet above the tide line. DEP could fine me for cutting the grass!”
Koffman’s measure spurred a near-rebellion. In early 2007, his committee held a public hearing at which Roger Yochelson, of Addison, testified that he had obtained e-mails under the state’s Freedom of Information Act showing that Audubon and DEP secretly coordinated their responses to the backlash.
Koffman’s law survived, even overcoming a 2009 repeal campaign.
But just before Election Day this month, DEP — desperate over a likely LePage win — told town selectmen in Maine’s undeveloped areas that LD 1981 also applied to all streams, lakes and wetlands. That meant they had to immediately conform to DEP’s “Revised Shoreland Zoning Ordinance.”
Roger Ek, chairman of the town of Lee, asked DEP for the “protected area” maps, and was horrified by the devastation facing his constituents. DEP sent specialist Stephenie MacLagan to Lee. She told selectmen, “If you don’t do it, I’ll impose it on you.”
Memorable words: I’ll impose it on you. LePage may stop DEP, but Koffman, now executive director of Maine Audubon Society, will keep creeping.
That’s how Big Green’s Mission Creep almost always ends: “I’ll impose it on you.”
Examiner contributor Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
