Legislation backed by advocates of affordable housing that would give residents only 75 days to try and overturn projects approved by local planning boards and councils is being attacked as a Wal-Mart bill in disguise, and opponents vow to use the legislative spring break to rally citizens to oppose it.
Rep. Jonathan McKane, R-Newcastle, was one of a number of Midcoast representatives to vote against the bill, saying residents in his area have spoken clearly that they don’t want big-boxes like Wal-Mart. This bill would make it easier for them to get in, he said.
“Not all communities have as open a planning board process,” as Damariscotta, where citizens just held an election to keep Wal-Mart out by putting a size limit on new stores.
If citizens had not been aware of Wal-Mart plans to build a super-center and had it been approved by local planners, things could have turned out much differently.
“If this bill had been in place…we could easily have those bulldozers out there doing their work,” McKane said.
Rep. Ted Koffman, D-Bar Harbor, was cosponsor of the controversial legislation, along with Sen. Lynn Bromley, D-Cumberland. It passed the House 75 to 70 last week and 24 to 10 in the Senate, but faces another series of votes next week. The bill came out of a recommendation from a special legislative committee looking at ways to encourage affordable housing in Maine that Bromley and Koffman chaired.
While Koffman admits it could affect developments other than housing, “it’s a simple issue of fairness,” he said.
Right now “developers are looking at the abyss” of an unlimited time period when residents can gather signatures for a referendum and overturn planning board or council decisions on land-use, he said. And, that can scare off housing developers and dry up their funding sources.
The bill would give citizens 75 days to hold an election to overturn a permit once its been granted.
“When they’re in step 10 of a 10-step process, that 10th step also needs a boundary,” Koffman said. “The purpose of this law is to put some bounds on that process.”
Koffman said developers won’t risk proposals that require special zoning if there is no end to the appeal process. And that will discourage high-density, in-town neighborhoods designed to keep people close to town services instead of sprawling into the countryside.
He used as an example the Great American Neighborhood in Scarborough, where developers had won approval for 397 housing units off a busy Route 1 intersection, only to have it overturned at the ballot box. The State Planning Office supported the project as a model of “smart-growth” and the Town Council approved it as fitting into its vision of good land use.
Developers ultimately won an appeal in court and have downsized the project, but the planning process has been going on now since 2001.
That project, Koffman said, has become the poster child for why the time limit legislation is needed.
But despite its affordable housing roots, some of the most liberal lawmakers in the House spoke out against the bill last Thursday night.
Rep. Herb Adams, D-Portland, said the bill – numbered LD 1481 – had entered the legislative chambers “under sheep’s clothing.”
“You’ll search the bill in vain for any mention of the words ‘affordable housing’,” he told his colleagues, saying the bill was being pushed by lobbyists for all kinds of developments.
“Michael Jackson does not have more lawyers working for him right now than LD 1481 has working on us out in the hall,” Adams said.
He warned the bill would strip citizens of their right to petition their government and there would be political fallout for those legislators who voted for it.
“You announce to the folks at home it’s illegal for them now to tell their town politicians by petition whatever they want, whenever they want to because some Portland lawyer stopped you in the hallway and told you do it,” he admonished, “and you’ll figure out how quickly lightning strikes can be redistributed.”
Rep. Linda Valentino, D-Saco, saw it differently.
“We have heard that this bill strips the citizens and the towns of their rights. What about stripping developers of their rights along with the hundreds of thousands of dollars and years they have spent on a project?” she asked.
Rep. Chris Barstow, D-Gorham, the co-chair of the State and Local Government Committee that reviewed the bill, said he is no fan of the employment practices of big-box stores, but everyone deserves fair treatment.
He said the 75-day limit, which was raised from a proposed 30-day window, is “a fair and equitable timeline” for citizens and developers. “This is about protecting the rights of the minority.”
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