Gov. Paul LePage’s goal to re-evaluate the Land Use Regulation Commission seems reasonable and prudent on the surface. Government agencies benefit from independent reviews by qualified evaluators.

In July, LePage and Republican leaders in the Legislature selected a 13 member LURC Reform Panel to decide the future of LURC and oversight responsibilities of 10.4 million acres of forestland under its jurisdiction.

The governor, Senate President Kevin Raye, R-Eastport, and Speaker of the House Robert Nutting, R-Oakland, claim that they and the panel are open-minded about changes to LURC. If so, why did they select a biased 13-member panel to ostensibly obtain public input?

Seven panel members testified for the abolishment of LURC during the last legislative session. That should have been grounds for disqualification. Several have an ax to grind with LURC for previous run-ins with the agency, including panel member Hank McPherson, who clashed with LURC over his Grace Pond development project in Upper Enchanted Township in the 1990s.

Department of Conservation Commissioner William Beardsley, chairman of the panel, stated in a mid-December press release announcing the panel’s final recommendations the need to “Reword LURC’s purpose and scope to value both conservation and economic viability.”

Incidentally, Beardsley unsuccessfully ran for governor last year on a platform that called for LURC’s abolishment.

Not surprisingly, the panel’s final recommendations marginalize LURC’s regulatory powers by handing land use oversight authority to six county commissioners. No other Maine state regulatory board allows its members to be elected by local constituents due to inevitable pressures to acquiesce to local interests and politics.

Empowered county commissioners will advocate for unsound projects to boost their electability and to appease county constituents.

An unbiased LURC is needed to protect a statewide vision of lands under its jurisdiction.

If the final recommendations are approved by the Legislature following public hearings in January, McPherson and other developers will have a green light to forever alter northern Maine’s undeveloped lakes and forests with disgraceful second home projects.

The Republicans have a credibility problem; they’ve stacked the panel with avowed LURC opponents and they’re now asking Maine citizens to believe that the panel’s final recommendations are in our best interest.

If the governor and Republican legislative leaders were genuinely interested in reforming LURC, they would have constructed a panel of bipartisan, qualified individuals.

Appallingly absent from the panel are retired wood products industry foresters and retired state biologists — professionals who have worked most closely with LURC’s regulatory process and who could have added substantive reform recommendations.

Former LURC members would have added additional credibility to the panel.

Collectively, natural resource professionals and former LURC commissioners could have offered the governor invaluable feedback, had that been the sincere goal of Republican leaders.

Since 1970, LURC has withstood corporate landowner lobbying to abolish the agency. Their complaints have been listened to and dismissed by six governors, including Republican John McKernan Jr. However, corporate landowners and developers finally have allies in Gov. LePage, Raye and Nutting. Were the previous governors wrong to ignore calls to weaken LURC?

Republican leaders have stated repeatedly that revamping LURC achieves “balance” between conservation and economic development. If LePage, Raye, and Nutting had read LURC’s Comprehensive Plan, developed with input from major landowners in 1976, they would have discovered that balancing the economic needs of landowners and conservation was addressed in plan revisions in 1983, 1990, 1997 and 2010. The plan states, “The Commission has a dual mandate . . . protect the natural environment and other important values from degradation with the need for  . . . reasonable new economic growth and development.”

A restructured LURC isn’t about balance. It’s about appeasing corporate landowners who sit on millions of dollars worth of shorefront properties on northern Maine’s undeveloped lakes and rivers.

Clearly, to Republican leaders in Augusta, “reasonable new economic growth and development” is an impediment to business growth.

Gov. LePage’s LURC reform panel’s work reminds me of a passage from George Orwell’s classic fictional book “Animal Farm” in that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

LePage is promoting Orwellian citizen elitism that benefits a select few to the detriment of the majority.

Regrettably, the governor’s LURC reform plan is not fiction.

Camden resident Ron Joseph retired after a 33-year career as a state and federal wildlife biologist in Maine.