Saddleback drumming up supporters

RANGELEY — Supporters of the Saddleback Ski Area in its land dispute with the National Park Service over protection of the Appalachian Trail corridor mounted a campaign this week to garner public opinion.

“Saddleback Ski Area is fighting for its life against the threat of federal eminent domain condemnation by the National Park Service,” Charles Cushman, executive director of the American Land Rights Association of Battle Ground, Wash., said Tuesday at a meeting on the issue. “The park service is threatening to use federal condemnation to take a trail corridor so wide that it will strangle Saddleback,” Cushman said.

The goal of the park service and the Appalachian Trail Conference, a nonprofit organization with 30,000 members representing 31 hiking and outing clubs in 14 states, has been to drag out the Saddleback issue to weaken the owners and jeopardize the ski area, he added.

Cushman spoke Tuesday night to a gathering of 25 residents at the Rangeley Lakes Regional School. It was the first such appearance of a seven-day campaign throughout the state. Other appearances include speaking engagements tonight in Ashland, next Monday in Bangor, Tuesday in Lincoln. The visit was Cushman’s sixth to Rangeley since February. He also received a resolution of support Monday from the Franklin County commissioners in Farmington.

In response, Pamela Underhill, park manager of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail for the park service, said by telephone that she doesn’t know where Cushman’s assertion of any condemnation action is coming from.

“He’s saying that,” she said recently of Cushman’s assertion. “There’s no basis for that whatsoever. There’s nothing that indicates we’re threatening eminent domain. We’re busy trying to sort through the public comments of the environmental assessment report to bring this to a conclusion,” she said. The park service received nearly 5,000 responses during the comment period that ended Aug. 30, and she is reading them all, Underhill added.

After Tuesday’s meeting, Cushman said he thought the park service’s taking the land by eminent domain still was possible. “They [the park service] could say no to eminent domain on Friday and file for it on Monday,” he said.

The park service has said it intends by the end of the year to resolve a dispute over protection of the Appalachian Trail, where it crosses Saddleback Mountain in western Maine. As part of its plan, the park service released an environmental assessment that presents several options for protecting the 2,160-mile footpath from Springer Mountain, Ga., to Mount Katahdin.

The park service held public hearings in Maine in August to help it decide which of four options it should pursue in trying to resolve the debate, which has left the 3 miles of trail that cross the mountain as the only unprotected portion of the national scenic trail in the state.

The assessment offers four options: a park service acquisition of 2,860 acres; acquisition of 893 acres by the park service, which is also endorsed by the Appalachian Trail Conference; Saddleback’s proposed donation of 660 acres; and an “optimal” ski area development scenario that involves increasing the area’s capacity tenfold.

Underhill said she is working with U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe’s office to set up a third-party mediation effort to negotiate an agreement between the park service and Saddleback owner Donald Breen of Boston, Mass., in the 15-year-old land dispute.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Cushman claimed that the park service is planning to use the “balloon concept” to condemn a corridor at Saddleback, parts of which are up to 2 miles wide.

Based on the National Trails Act’s amendment of 1978, “the park service asserts that it can use the average of 125 acres per mile for the whole 2,000 miles of the trail to acquire Saddleback,” leaving a swath up to 1,000 feet wide for the trail, he said.

“That’s like taking a dozen eggs and dropping them on Saddleback instead of spreading them out the whole Appalachian Trail,” Bea MacLeod of Rangeley said at the meeting about the concept.

Cushman outlined the three kinds of land condemnation, the first step in taking land by eminent domain. He thought the most likely one used in Maine would be a declaration of taking.

“In this state, the park service might very well try to take the land by declaration, only because they don’t want the controversy or the publicity,” he said, explaining that it could be done quietly by going through congressional committees.

David N. Startzell, ATC executive director of Harpers Ferry, W.Va., who attended the session, called Cushman a “master of hyperbole.”

“You have a penchant for taking a grain of truth and making it into a conspiracy,” Startzell told Cushman. “There are a lot of pieces of truth about what Chuck has outlined about condemnation this evening, though,” he said. Startzell agreed that declarations of taking once were overused by the government. They were intended to be used in situations where there was an immediate threat to a resource, he said.

The balloon concept, Startzell said, is based on the fact that there is no limit on the extent of the boundaries when the seller is willing to sell.

“That 1,000-foot corridor that we speak of, or the 125 acres per mile, is a limitation only in cases where condemnation is applied,” he said.

Note: See related stories on this issue elsewhere on the ALDHA Web site.

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