AUGUSTA — The staff of the Land Use Regulation Commission, which is essentially the planning board for the 10 million acres in the state’s unorganized territory, has just completed its first round of public meetings on a draft land-use plan that timberland owners are calling a “confiscation” of their property rights.

Advocates for a more restrictive plan, including the powerful environmental group the Natural Resources Council of Maine, say it recognizes there are residential development pressures that need to be controlled on the largest block of undeveloped forestland in the Northeast.

Their argument is being bolstered by a coincidence of timing.

The Land Use Regulation Commission, or LURC for short, is beginning its formal public review this week of Plum Creek Timber Co.’s proposal to rezone 20,000 acres around Moosehead Lake to build at least 975 homes and two resorts. It is the largest subdivision ever proposed for the North Woods.

While the Moosehead Lake development is getting most of the headlines, the review of LURC’s Comprehensive Land Use Plan, which under law is supposed to be updated every 10 years, could have more far-reaching effects on the area.

The territory, which serves as the “wood basket” for Maine’s pulp, paper and timber industry, stretches over half the state and encompasses what people refer to as the North Woods and wildlands of Maine. The unorganized territory touches 12 different counties, but is largely contained in eight — Aroostook, Penobscot, Somerset, Piscataquis, Washington, Franklin, Oxford and Hancock.

Pros and Cons

Don White, president of Prentiss and Carlisle in Bangor, a forestland management company that represents timberland investors and land owners in the unorganized territory, said his problem with the proposed Comprehensive Land Use Plan (CLUP) is that it devalues the land his clients own, by essentially blocking future development.

He points to the first section of the plan, which outlines a vision for the area, to make his point.

“The commission’s jurisdiction will forever retain its unique principal values and will exemplify a sustainable pattern of land uses,” the vision reads.

“Look at terms like ‘forever,’” he says. “Give me a break.”

White argues that the desire to keep the area exactly as it is today, highlighting values such as “remoteness” and “primitive” recreational pursuits, blocks his clients from any development or even selling conservation easements, because a development ban would make them worthless.

“Most of our landowners have not developed our land. That’s a hell of a long way to giving up the right to develop it. You’ve eliminated value,” White said.

“It’s saying, ‘Let’s paint that picture in permanent colors.’ They’re penalizing the guys who have been the best and most responsible stewards of the land,” he said.

“The CLUP really should be the economic development engine for the unorganized territory. They’ve turned it into a confiscation easement,” said White, who refers to the plan as “a blueprint for a national park.”

Diano Circo, the North Woods policy advocate for the Natural Resources Council of Maine, says landowners are using exemptions in the current land use rules to try to push through large-scale residential developments like the one proposed for Moosehead Lake.

“No one is saying there shouldn’t be any development,” Circo said, but the current rules limit the commission’s ability to say where development should happen.

He cites statistics in the current draft plan that say 72 percent of dwellings permitted by the commission since 1971 — when the LURC essentially came into existence — were built on lots that did not have to go through the subdivision review process. The lots either existed before LURC came into being or were created through an exemption to the zoning law.

Circo would like to see the plan go even further and prospectively zone some areas completely off-limits to development and restrict or eliminate some exemptions.

“This is a region that is of national importance. It is the last, largely undeveloped forest in the Eastern United States,” he said. When the Legislature created LURC to oversee development in the area, he said, it recognized the territory’s future was a concern for the entire state.

Two-in-Five Rule

The most talked about exemption and one landowners say the draft Comprehensive Land Use Plan appears to want to modify, if not do away with altogether, is the so-called two-in-five rule. It is a statewide statute allowing landowners to split off one lot from an existing parcel once every five years, thus creating two lots over five years time.

The rule allows building lots to be created without subdivision review.

Catherine Carroll, executive director of the Land Use Regulation Commission, says timberland owners are blowing up the issue.

“We have no intention of doing away with two-in-five, and we can’t. It would take an act of the Legislature, which the commission is not,” Carroll said.

Nor is it the commission’s intention to ban development in the region in other ways, Carroll said.

“It wasn’t our intent to close the door and lock the jurisdiction up for development. They (commissioners) were created by the legislature in the late ’60s and their purpose is to allow guided development,” she said.

Patrick Strauch, executive director of the Maine Forest Products Council, doesn’t buy the argument that the commission staff is being misinterpreted. Instead, he believes, the plan is laying the groundwork for the Legislature to make changes, including eliminating the two-in-five rule.

“What we understand the CLUP to be and what we see it doing is kind of cuing up the next legislative issues that need to be resolved,” Stauch said.

And the draft plan, he says, speaks for itself.

Strauch’s group has put together a long list of examples of language in the report that show what he believes is a bias against landowners’ rights.

One example says:

“Gone are the days when industrial owners, whose primary focus was on supplying timber to their mills, were the dominant landowners in the jurisdiction. Financial investors…have replaced industrial owners as the dominant landowners in the jurisdiction. Financial investors focus on maximizing the asset value of timberlands. “Given rising land values and steady demand for recreational property, financial investors are increasingly likely to seek revenue from non-timber sources, if they will generate a higher return.

“If left unchecked, these pressures will continue to drive a pattern of dispersing residential development and lead to a day when the jurisdiction is no different from many other parts of Maine.”

Carroll said she knows some have interpreted the report to mean the commission wants to block development, but that isn’t the case.

“Some people have reacted, ‘Oh you just want to do away with two-in-five. You want to lock up the jurisdiction to development.’ We need to ease that anxiety,” she said.

Written comments on the draft report are due June 6, and the plan will then be rewritten where necessary. It will then go out for a formal public review process, before it is ultimately presented to Governor John Baldacci.

“We realize we have a lot of work to do. There’s a lot of misunderstanding in our message,” Carroll said.