Gov. Paul LePage and Lucas St. Clair painted starkly differing portraits of Maine’s national monument as they took one of the north woods’ most divisive issues before its most influential audience yet — Congress — on Tuesday.
In testimony to a House Committee on Natural Resources subcommittee, St. Clair said the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument already was having a positive impact on northern Maine despite being only eight months old. LePage said he didn’t expect that the monument would ever benefit northern Maine.
“Not in this area, not in my lifetime,” LePage said Tuesday, predicting that “very few [visitors] will be in the mosquito area” of the monument this summer, instead preferring to go to Maine’s coast.
St. Clair’s family, including Burt’s Bees entrepreneur Roxanne Quimby, donated to the federal government 87,563 acres of family-owned land east of Baxter State Park. President Barack Obama created the monument from those lands in August 2016.
The Federal Lands Subcommittee examined the monument designation process during 2½ hours of testimony at the nation’s capital on Tuesday as part of what it called an examination of executive branch overreach of the Antiquities Act of 1906. The act allows presidents to designate monuments unilaterally.
St. Clair said the donated land “is a beautiful and amazing place,” and “culturally and historically significant.” He said he worked with four focus groups and conducted 80 independent interviews with Penobscot County stakeholders before the monument designations. Dozens of meetings were held, St. Clair said.
The County is pleased to feature content from our sister company, Bangor Daily News. To read the rest of “LePage, Quimby heir take monument fight to Capitol Hill,” an article by contributing Bangor Daily News staff writer Nick Sambides Jr., please follow this link to the BDN online.
