Picture this scenario: An exotic species of grub has invaded Portland’s historic Deering Oaks park. They’re munching grass and the roots of the Oaks’ majestic trees at an alarming rate. Because the grubs are immune to garden-variety poisons, experts estimate it could cost more than $10 million to eradicate them and save the park for future generations.

Meanwhile, Portland’s city manager is fretting over the city budget. He notices Deering Oaks isn’t generating much cash these days. All the old traveling fairs that once set up camp there and paid the city circus fees are long gone – and that oil rig project in the skating pond, though lucrative, now seems to have been a fluke – leaving the deteriorating park to the occasional tourist, vagrant fisherman and teen up to no good.

Around this time, perhaps by coincidence, a former city councilor shows up, with the governor’s brother in tow, pitching a plan to redevelop the Oaks. The idea: put a hotel in the middle of the park. The governor’s brother’s New Hampshire-based company will foot the bill to kill the grubs in exchange for a deal whereby the hotel pays no property taxes for the next few decades or so.

Hearing the manager grumble about the park’s trickling cash flow, and having themselves held private pow-wows with the gov’s brother and their former colleague, some city councilors decide it’s time to relax zoning restrictions at the Oaks to encourage more private enterprise there and get money for grub-control. They advertise this unique development opportunity nationwide, hoping to attract a wide variety of world-class proposals from companies near and far.

After a few months, only two companies turn in bids. One is the Granite State outfit with local political ties, ties now made even stronger by a new partnership with a former U.S. senator; the other a smaller, local firm owned by a guy whose father used to work with the founder of the other company. Both propose massive projects for the park: hundreds of hotel rooms and corporate offices, fancy restaurants and tourist “attractions.” Neither proposes to give the city much more than dead grubs for the favor of making millions on prime public land.

Rather than greet these proposals with shock, suspicion and outrage, a fair number of respected citizens, newspaper editors and city officials clap their hands with glee, eager to be rid of the costly grub problem and spark commerce in the Oaks again.

Sound far fetched? Well, substitute the city-owned Maine State Pier for Deering Oaks, and the grubs for the ravages saltwater inflicts on wood pilings over time, and the scenario above is basically the same.

Portland City Manager Joe Gray began publicly expressing concern over the state of the deteriorating, marine-industrial pier shortly after a former city councilor and mayor, accompanied by Bob Baldacci, made private pitches to city officials to redevelop it. The council followed suit by relaxing zoning and requesting redevelopment plans from private companies.

One respondent was Baldacci’s employer, Portsmouth-based Ocean Properties, a national giant among hotel developers that snagged former Sen. George Mitchell as a partner. The other plan comes from The Olympia Companies, a Portland real estate development and investment firm whose holdings include the Hilton across the street from the pier.

Both propose to build mega-complexes of hotels, offices, restaurants and retail. And both offer to fix the pier’s pilings in exchange for tax breaks and free rent.

Though the proposals are drawing some early criticism – a few question Olympia’s plan to build another hotel on the pier, or Ocean Properties’ vision of a pier-top parking lot and public market – it seems most folks are too busy oohhing and aahhing over the grand plans to recall the simple rationale that begat them: the city’s need to shore up some soggy timbers and make the pier a nicer place to hang out.

As former Portland Planning Board member John Anton wrote in a guest essay for The Bollard, the city’s quest to fix our public pier with private development “is fundamentally flawed.

“It operates under the premise that the Maine State Pier is a piece of public infrastructure that can and must support its upkeep from revenue it generates,” Anton wrote. “No other piece of infrastructure owned by the city or state is required to fund its upkeep this way.”

As Anton and a few others are beginning to argue, there’s merit in maintaining our most valuable public places with public money, rather than selling them to money-grubbing private developers who offer to fix them in exchange for huge tax breaks.

As dazzling as the two pier proposals seem, let’s not forget there’s still a third on the table: reject both mega-projects and go back to square one.

Chris Busby is editor of The Bollard… for more stories, visit www.thebollard.com

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