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At issue is Plum Creek's long-range plan to develop 975 house lots, four sporting camps, two resorts and a golf course while keeping thousands of acres of the company's property undeveloped in the Moosehead Lake region. The Land Use Regulatory Commission has been holding scoping sessions throughout the state to identify issues and concerns about the plan before it takes any official action. It was during a scoping session in Hallowell last week that a vehicle owned by Jim Lehner, Plum Creek's' general manager in the Northeast region, was vandalized. Lehner said Tuesday that a tire on his GMC Envoy was slashed and the words "Leave Maine" were scratched deep into the paint on one side of his vehicle. On Saturday, an independent logging contractor working Plum Creek land near Elephant Mountain, near Beaver Cove in the Greenville area, discovered that some of his equipment had been vandalized. Tom Adkins of Monson said damage to his equipment was estimated at about $4,000. Gauges were smashed on his fellerbuncher, a machine that cuts trees, and computer wire was wrapped around logs that were moved into the roadway and scattered about. The vandals also left behind the message, "Stop cutting wood," scratched in the fellerbuncher, he said Tuesday. "We really don't know if this is an environmental group doing this or another group that would just like to see the environmentalists get the blame for it," Piscataquis County Sheriff John Goggin said Tuesday. Security will be stepped up at woods operations in general in the future, he said. Lehner said talks are planned with Goggin and the Maine State Police to determine what security measures can be offered to curtail the vandalism. "I think the people who did this [to Adkins] are targeting Plum Creek, but they don't understand that who they're really hurting are independent logging contractors," Lehner said. "They're hurting individual small businesses." Police think the act of vandalism that occurred on Saturday was not connected to the theft of about $5,000 worth of equipment that Adkins reported in July from a work site on Plum Creek land in the Bowerbank area. No arrest has been made in connection to the theft. Nor have police arrested anyone in connection with a break-in in July at Plum Creek's field office in Big Moose Township when three computers and a hard drive were stolen. One of the computers and the hard drive were found later behind the field office. An act of vandalism to the company's Fairfield offices earlier this year also is still under investigation. In that incident, graffiti was painted on the offices and on light motion sensors on the property. |