Staff report
CARIBOU, Maine — It’s been almost a year since the Caribou Secession Committee formally announced their intentions to lead rural Caribou in an attempt to lower taxes by seceding from the city to form a new municipality, the town of Lyndon. To do so the Secession Committee began circulating a petition this past summer.
After the committee ended their petition circulation in early December they submitted the petition to the city on March 9, and the committee has stated that all 44 petitions were logged in and accepted by Caribou’s town clerk. The petition contained 1,315 signatures in favor of starting their own town.
After acquiring the necessary signatures the committee has secured a public hearing to discuss the secession. The public hearing is scheduled for Thursday, June 11 at 6:00 p.m. at the Caribou Performing Arts Center. A video copy of the hearing will be made available to run on Time Warner Cable’s public access channel following the hearing, according to Caribou City Manager Austin Bleess.
According to state law, “the purpose of the public hearing is to allow municipal residents, officers and residents in the secession territory to discuss secession.” The law also stipulates that the hearing must include a formal presentation by the committee members, and that presentation will include a description of the problems that have led to the secession effort.
Those who attend the public hearing will have an opportunity to discuss secession related problems and their potential solutions — so long as those solutions could stave off secession — and to talk about the impact secession would have on both Caribou and the proposed Lyndon.
Should secession efforts continue after the public hearing, the next step would be to put the effort before the state legislature and request permission to conduct a referendum vote.
Secession Committee Spokesperson Paul Camping has 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.
Lyndon, or the “secession territory,” would encompass most of Caribou. It takes up about 80 percent of the Caribou and includes 30 percent of its population, 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 has said that 5,099 residents would remain in the city of Caribou — but the city would be 20 percent of its former size.
The secession committee has made provisions for highway maintenance, both summer and winter, law enforcement, and fire and ambulance and other services like solid waste disposal.
The residents in Caribou are taxed the same rate, and the committee has explained that people in rural areas pay more in taxes because they live on farms, or lots that are subdivided from farms, and their land parcels and homes tend to be larger and more valuable that property owners in the downtown area, who have smaller houses with less land.
Leaders of the secession movement have maintained that Lyndon’s selectperson government could run the town with a mil rate of $15.90 per $1,000 of property value — 25 percent less than Caribou’s current $22.30 mil rate. The combined savings for all Lyndon taxpayers could easily exceed $900,000 annually.
