A bill to develop a network of recreation destinations throughout rural Maine is on the docket in Maine’s House of Representatives this session. Leading the legislation is Rep. Jeff McCabe, D-Skowhegan, the House majority leader, who has worked with numerous organizations and businesses throughout Maine in drafting the bill’s concept.

The proposed legislation, An Act to Create Jobs and Economic Opportunity Through Destination Development in Rural Maine, would task the state government with devoting more state resources to developing and promoting recreational hubs throughout the state. The purpose is to attract not only tourists to these areas but also new businesses and residents.

“We must seek new ways to promote what Maine has to offer — in all four seasons,” McCabe said in a radio address on Jan. 30. “We must embrace Maine winters to succeed and maximize our potential. We must grow opportunity statewide for all our outfitters, lodging establishments, guide services, restaurants and so much more.”

The bill is in the drafting process, and McCabe predicts it will go before the Joint Standing Committee on Labor, Research and Economic Development for review sometime in early March.

“Right now we’re very early on in the process,” McCabe said. “We’ll be having a discussion about what state resources are available and how we might be able to use them better.”

In creating the bill concept draft, McCabe, whose day job is executive director of Lake George Regional Park in Canaan, worked with a wide variety of Maine businesses and organizations, including the Maine Woods Consortium, an open association of nonprofit organizations, businesses and government agencies dedicated to promoting tourism and development in the Maine woods.

Promoting Maine communities as recreation destinations is not a new concept. In 2009, the Maine Woods Consortium launched Maine Woods Discovery, a project to support network-based tourism packaging and promotion among Maine Woods tourism providers. And a year later, the consortium established the Maine Woods Tourism Training Initiative, which has since organized 98 workshops for local tourism businesses to improve their skills in things such as social media and customer service.

“[The bill] grows from lots of years of work in this arena,” said Mike Wilson, senior program director for the Northern Forest Center and a member of the Maine Woods Consortium Coordinating Team. “None of this stuff happens overnight, but I think we have a greater chance for real success by taking a coordinated strategic approach.

“The specific idea that we’re trying to articulate through this legislation is starting to really designate recreation destination areas and deliver coordinated state services to support destination development in those areas,” Wilson said.

The destination areas would likely be determined through an application process, according to the bill concept draft. Accepted applicants would receive assistance from various state departments to promote and improve their area as a recreation destination.

These assistance programs could include workforce development and training, small business support and training, small business financing, land-use planning, trail system design and development, recreational water access, transportation and wayfinding, downtown development, and marketing and promotion.

McCabe said he thinks these assistance programs could be created by reallocating existing state programs and resources and creating private-public partnerships.

The bill concept draft also states that program implementation will require dedicated funding to support a full-time program director, someone who can develop, lead and promote the program.

“This is something they have been looking at for years,” said Jennifer Peters, assistant director of the Sunrise County Economic Council and a member of the Maine Woods Consortium Coordinating Team. “It’s a coordinated effort to pull together a big portion of the state of Maine.”

Nature-based tourism, as the fastest growing niche in tourism, has long been a topic of discussion in the Maine State House. In 2004, the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development hired FERMATA Inc., a nationally-known experiential tourism development consulting firm, to assess Maine’s opportunities in nature-based tourism.

FERMATA’s strategic plan, released in 2005, included a framework or system of tourist information centers, as well as “new state level staffing and task force creation to support the implementation of the initiative.”

“All of these different initiatives, plans, reports, etc., say that the state needs to create a staff person dedicated to developing nature-based tourism in rural Maine,” said Peters. “Maybe this bill can help implement that.”

“I just know that if we do more to promote some of these spectacular destinations, we’ll see results,” McCabe said.