WILDLANDS ZONING BOARD DENIES BURNT JACKET SUBDIVISION:
LURC ENDORSES RECOMMENDATION BY RESTORE

(Dover-Foxcroft, ME) The Maine Land Use Regulation Commission (LURC) voted today 5-0 to deny a petition to rezone 246 acres for a 70-lot subdivision on Burnt Jacket Mountain on Moosehead Lake.

LURC staff presented the commission members with an 18-page document detailing how the application failed to meet the legal requirements for rezoning.

Following a presentation by LURC staff about the project,
representatives of Burnt Jacket, LLC, tried to persuade the
commissioners to overturn the staff recommendation and to approve the rezoning.

Of the four groups who had intervened in opposition to the project
only RESTORE: The North Woods addressed the commission today. Jym St. Pierre, RESTORE's Maine Director, praised the thoroughness of the staff write-up and urged the commission members to vote to deny the application.

None of the commissioners argued for approving the rezoning. The
unanimous five to zero vote represented a decisive rejection of the
subdivision proposal. One LURC commission member was absent; one abstained because he is new.

Following the vote, St. Pierre said, "I have been watching LURC for 30 years, both from the inside and the outside. This is a watershed. It will be a touchstone for future decisions by the commission for years."

At a public hearing on the project in February, RESTORE and others presented a compelling case for protecting Burnt Jacket Mountain rather than developing it. The majority of citizen comments at the hearing also supported protection over subdivision
.
St. Pierre, former deputy director of the agency, publicly thanked
all the parties--the LURC commissioners and staff, the applicant, the intervenors, and members of the public--for a high level of
professionalism throughout the proceedings.

"I believe this decision will have historic significance," St. Pierre
said after the LURC meeting. "It raises the bar to a whole new level. Others, such as Plum Creek, who want to develop in the Moosehead region will have to do a lot more than air pretty TV ads and say 'Trust us.' They will have to demonstrate with substantial evidence that developing remote shorelands and hillsides will not have undue adverse impact on existing resources and traditional uses.

."MORE INFORMATION"

For a copy of the LURC decision, see:
http://www.maine.gov/tools/whatsnew/attach.php?id=17258&an=1

To view RESTORE's PowerPoint presentation on the project, see http://www.restore.org/Forests/burnt_jacket.ppt1.htm
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RESTORE: The North Woods is a nonprofit membership organization working to restore, preserve and defend the natural integrity of the North Woods of the United States and Canada through advocacy, public awareness and citizen activism.