Residents in the picturesque community of Rockland, Maine may have thought their coastal beauty only attracted tourists — but it has proven to be an unwelcome lure for big box stores as well. Here’s a update report from Rockland activist Ron Huber: “Several years ago, we kept a Super Wal-mart from locating on the Penobscot Bay coast here in Rockland, Maine. Among other things, concerns about traffic impact (congestion that would block access for emergency vehicles to the local hospital), stormwater runoff containment, and visual pollution
(the bay here is a major windjammer destination ) kept the company out. Now a Home Depot is seeking to build on the same site. This time, the apparent achilles heel for the company is its inability to control the stormewater going into Penobscot Bay from its vast proposed parking area. I haven’t heard anything yet about the traffic issue. With Penobscot Bay the home of the nation’s richest lobster grounds, this is something of reasonable concern. The Maine Dept of Environmental Protection appears to see it that way, evidently.
Sprawl-busters in Rockland are also concerned about the amount of exterior lighting Home Depot typically throws off from its stores, the number of
lumens of light, or whatever info on that subject is available. If readers have any information on this subject that would “cast light” on the night-time ‘visual footprint’ of one of these places, please forward that information directly to Ron Huber at [email protected]. Huber says that the elevated coastal location the company has chosen would be visible across much of Penobscot Bay, and would in fact be on the same height as at least two light houses, effectively
masking their lights at critical points of entry and departure from several
shoal-ridden rocky harbors.
