Rooks: Will Maine’s blue collar jobs make a comeback?

Can Maine build anything big anymore? It’s a question that ought to be asked a lot more often than it is.

As almost everyone knows, the state has “de-industrialized” over the past half century. The mills and manufacturing plants that once provided well-paid jobs for blue collar workers with high school diplomas are long gone, for the most part.

The tourism industry is thriving – with its primary late-pandemic problem an inability to recruit enough workers to keep hotels and restaurants open. But most of us don’t want to live in a state that’s only a tourism/retirement destination – Florida’s already does that.

The real question is, what are the prospects for doing anything to change this course – which fuels massive discontent that’s strongest in the 2nd Congressional District, but exists everywhere in Maine?

The Mills administration is quietly promoting one venture that could be a start. It’s trying to site a prospective wind turbine assembly and fabrication site at Searsport, one of three state-owned ports, with the others in opposite ends of the state, Portland and Eastport.

The plant would build components for the dozens, possibly hundreds of turbines that could be floated offshore in the Gulf of Maine, the one place that justifies Sen. Angus King’s confident prediction of Maine as “the Saudi Arabia of wind.”

The first round of land-based turbines constructed during the Baldacci administration – before Paul LePage helped shut things down – were built with machinery imported from Europe, some of it floated in to Eastport and Searsport. The Mills administration hopes the next round will be built here, and why not?

Maine will probably never have a major automobile or truck plant, but could be a supplier for a burgeoning off-shore wind industry, not just in the Gulf, but all along the Atlantic Coast. The Biden administration is quite serious about promoting this form of renewable energy.

Yet before anything gets going at Searsport, there’s a daunting history that needs to be understood – the tension between those who like to work with their hands, do the physical labor every society requires, and those who see Maine in picture-postcard terms, as a place to visit and retire, with no “development” to mar the picture.

Kermit Lipez, now an active retired judge of the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals, but then a young staffer for Ken Curtis – the most progressive governor Maine has ever had – discerned this dilemma in a profile of Curtis written almost 50 years ago.

Of the second group, he said, “These summer people, many of them wealthy and vocal, have power beyond their numbers . . . Whenever they see their stake threatened -– usually by industry – they can inspire passionate opposition.”

It’s hard to fault anyone who yearns for a “pristine” environment, and, as Lipez recognized, the anti-industry viewpoint benefited as the 1970s “environmental awakening” took place. Yet the wealthy and powerful ignored the effect of their advocacy on replacing “old industries such as shoes and textiles,” to which we can now add paper-making.

Tens of thousands of Mainers, people who have lived here all their lives, have been dispossessed.

That’s why initiatives such as Searsport are so important to rebalancing the economy. No one wants polluting industries, but even the non-polluting kind are fiercely resisted – as in the NECEC line to Canada, various aquaculture proposals along the coast (not all of them sound) and, inevitably, expanding port facilities.

Searsport currently moves about one million tons of freight, compared with Eastport at 380,000. In Portland, thanks to a major port overhaul, container traffic from the Icelandic firm Eimskip has mushroomed, with 36,000 units moved annually.

But Eastport has no land-level access; it’s on the side of a cliff. Portland long ago discontinued rail access, and there’s no room to further expand the existing footprint.

Searsport is where significant growth could occur. It has direct rail access all the way to Montreal, potentially serving the huge Midwestern market. There is Sears Island, a state-owned, 940-acre island governors have repeatedly designated for development, opposite the existing Mack Point facility where all the shipping now takes place.

Yet each time an administration has pushed ahead, it has been beaten back, sometimes by local forces, more often by federal agencies. Whether the current effort will fare any better is far from clear.

Next week, we’ll look in more detail at Searsport and its potential – and at the forces that will be arrayed against it, as soon as it progresses from the drawing board to an actual proposal before the public.

Douglas Rooks, a Maine editor, commentator and reporter since 1984, is the author of three books. His first, “Statesman: George Mitchell and the Art of the Possible,” is now out in paperback.  He welcomes comment at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Rooks: Will Maine’s blue collar jobs make a comeback?