Friends of Midcoast Maine Advocacy Group Launches Smart Growth Initiative

”If we don’t control growth, not only will our businesses suffer but our quality of life and that of our children will suffer as well,” warned Boothbay builder Steve Malcolm at a New Castle forum, where his Friends of Midcoast Maine advocacy group launched the Lincoln County Smart Growth Initiative to fight the region’s sprawl and preserve its character, livability and ecosystems, while working with business and land trust leaders, municipal planners and concerned residents to nurture local economies.

”We need to approach smart growth,” he said, ”in a practical way that speaks to developers and to land trust members, in a way that will allow housing and business to grow but not at the expense of the environment.” Friends of Midcoast Maine executive director Margaret Murphy pointed out that ”coastal communities are changing rapidly because of market forces and unplanned growth,” with altered demographics, a bigger income gap, affordable housing shortages, and farmland and open space losses posing threats to a better future.

The forum keynote speaker, Lisa Henderson of the Workforce Housing Coalition, reports Lincoln County Weekly writer Jennifer Brockway, encouraged the county to follow the lead of New Hampshire’s Greater Seacoast region and use Voluntary Smart Growth Endorsement Criteria for evaluating a project’s impact on a community, infrastructure and the environment. Friends of Midcoast Maine will form an exploratory committee to determine the viability of the Smart Growth evaluation criteria in their region.

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"Uncontrolled growth can erode all the values that brought us here … but controlled it can make a community more appealing," said Steve Malcolm, a Boothbay builder and member of Friends of Midcoast Maine, a sensible-growth advocacy group.

The Lincoln County Smart Growth Initiative is the group’s latest effort to combat sprawl in the region. It aims to develop a collaborative of concerned citizens and community leaders empowered to combat unplanned growth. Gathered for the meeting were builders, realtors and bankers, land trust leaders, municipal planners and concerned citizens from around the county.

The initiative’s goals are to help preserve the region’s traditional character, livable communities, and healthy ecosystems, and to nurture the vital local economies by developing collaborative solutions, according to Margaret Murphy, executive director of Friends of Midcoast Maine.

"We believe coastal communities are changing rapidly because of market forces and unplanned growth," said Murphy.

Murphy cited Lincoln County’s changing demographics, increasing income gap, decreasing housing affordability and loss of the working landscape and open space due to unplanned land use and rising taxes as threats to a healthy future.

"If we don’t control growth, not only will our businesses suffer but our quality of life and that of our children will suffer as well," said Malcolm. "We need to approach smart growth in a practical way that speaks to developers and to land trust members, in a way that will allow housing and business to grow but not at the expense of the environment."

A possible solution may be Voluntary Smart Growth Endorsement Criteria, a method of evaluating proposed developments for their affordability as well as for their impacts on community character, infrastructure and the environment. The criteria are developed and applied by a board of community volunteers, and a positive endorsement could help a developer through the municipal approval process.

The system is in place in the Greater Seacoast region of New Hampshire, where a housing shortage has reached crisis proportions, according to keynote speaker Lisa Henderson of the Workforce Housing Coalition.

Development of a similar system for Lincoln County will be the first order of business for the Initiative. Murphy said a steering committee will be formed to explore whether a voluntary criteria system could work here, and to draft criteria "that express the values of each community."

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— Lincoln County Weekly