CARIBOU, Maine — At Monday night’s City Council meeting, a group of citizens formally announced their intentions to lead rural Caribou in an attempt to lower tax levels by seceding from the city to form a new municipality, the town of Lyndon. To do so, the 20-person group, calling themselves the Secession Committee, began circulating a petition yesterday.
“The objective of our petition is to initiate the process of secession,” said Secession Committee Spokesman Paul Camping. “We intend to remove a certain tract of rural land from the jurisdiction of the city of Caribou and form a new municipality, which will be known as the town of Lyndon.”
Lyndon, also referred to as the “secession territory,” would encompass most of Caribou. It takes up about 80 percent of the Caribou map, excluding the downtown area, or “compact urban zone.”
The borders of the “new” Caribou would start just north of the Buck Road and extend east to the Aroostook River and west to the Washburn/Woodland border. The eastern border would follow the river’s natural boundary, jetting out to keep the Caribou Industrial Park in the city before turning back west — keeping the hospital in the city — and meeting back up with the proposed northern border line, which sits just above the Caribou Airport and continues to the Woodland town line. The Secession Committee says that 5,099 residents would remain in the city of Caribou — but the city would be 20 percent of its former size.
Camping stated that there are approximately 2,063 registered voters in the proposed secession territory, and half of them would need to sign the petition in order to move it forward.
Should the Secession Committee get enough signatures on their petition, State law stipulates that Caribou’s City Council will be required to hold a public hearing on the subject. After that public hearing, the succession territory has a year to get permission from the State Legislature to continue with its attempt to break away from the city; to do so, a secession territory representative would have to submit legislation to the State Legislature, and legislators would have to approve it.
If the legislature gives the secession attempt the green light, Caribou would have to conduct a referendum vote at the next regularly scheduled election.
(The procedure for secession is outlined in MRS 30-A, subsections 2171 and 2172 and can be viewed online at www.mainelegislature.org/legis/statutes/30-a/title30-Ach113.pdf)
The overall process for the proposed “Town of Lyndon” to secede from Caribou has a lot of hurdles, but Camping and other Secession Committee members believe their views and mission are popular.
“We believe there is overwhelming support for a new, more representative and fiscally responsible government in the secession territory,” Camping said. “Our vision for the future town of Lyndon is a place where citizens have all the service they need and none they don’t.”
Camping also stated that the Secession Committee knows that change of this magnitude won’t come easy.
“We know that breaking up is hard to do. We anticipate fierce opposition. But please understand, this is not some half-baked publicity stunt,” he said. “This course of action was undertaken only after many months of thoughtful contemplation and consultation. We are committed to seeing this through to the end,” Camping added. “It is the only way the citizens of rural Caribou can free themselves from the death grip of taxation you currently exert over us,” he told the councilors.
According to the spokesman, the Secession Committee began working together last December.
“When it became abundantly clear that you were going to raise our property taxes, yet again, we formed an Exploratory Committee to study the issues of excessive taxation here in our once prosperous city,” Camping said.
Citing that the citizens are powerless to protect themselves from being “taxed into oblivion,” Camping told the council that the group chose to exercise their natural rights as citizens of Maine, and Maine state law outlines steps for secession of a territory from a municipality.
As outlined by Camping, Secession Committee members expressed that they have met the necessary requirements to circulate the petition to secede: they’ve outlined the physical boundaries of the secession territory, identified the residential population and non-residential population, and named people who will serve as representatives of the secession territory — Maynard St. Peter, Freeman Cote, Doug Morell, Milo Haney and Camping.
Demographically, Camping said the territory makes up about 80 percent of Caribou and includes 30 percent of its population.
The name “Lyndon” harkens back to Caribou’s earliest history, when Caribou was a village in the town of Lyndon back in 1859. In 1877, the town of Lyndon was changed to Caribou. Caribou became a city in 1967.
Camping explained that the Secession Committee is attempting to reverse the 1869 annexation of plantations Eaton, Forestville and Sheridan into Lyndon, in order to regain the rural character and lower taxes for the original town of Lyndon.
He also described how, after 145 years, much of the rural land in the secession territory remains unchanged. “Farms and woodlots dot the landscape. Original lot lines still exist and a good deal of the land is owned by descendants of the very first settlers,” Camping said.
The Secession Committee launched their Facebook community page, “Caribou Secession Committee” yesterday, which can be viewed for those seeking additional information.
The spokesperson told the council that early indications were that the Committee has received strong support from the affected residents, many of whom did not know that secession was even possible. “Details are still being worked out but it appears that the property tax mil rate for the new town of Lyndon could be as much as 28 percent lower than Caribou’s new mil rate of 22.3. The combined savings for all Lyndon taxpayers could easily exceed $900,000 annually,” Camping said. “The reason for such a drastic reduction in property taxes is directly attributable to a smaller, more efficient town government providing only basic, essential services and making extensive use of shared services and contractors to provide them.”
As Camping presented the intentions of the Secession Committee during the public comments portion of the regularly scheduled council meeting, the city council didn’t discuss the group’s intentions during the meeting.
The next meeting of the Caribou City Council is slated for Monday, Aug. 11 at 7 p.m. in the city council chambers.
