I gave Roxanne Quimby the benefit of the doubt in an earlier article I wrote in which I pointed out that Quimby had failed in her bedside manner since becoming a wealthy land baron and now that she needs the support of the Maine people to build her a national park, she is struggling to get it. The benefit I gave her was as it relates to how she treated Maine residents concerning access to her land. We are now finding out, Quimby has serious ill perceptions of Maine people and the lifestyle’s they choose to live.

Quimby, a self-made multimillionaire and co-founder of Burt’s Bees, used the success of her entrepreneurial skills to amass wealth. With that wealth, she invested in real estate, some of which involved several tens of thousands of timberland in Maine. As are the rights of any landowner, she limited access to that land and evicted camp owners who had maintained leases with the previous landowners. In short, she angered a lot of people.

Quimby has a dream of giving away 70,000 acres of her land for a national park. Some see this as a good thing and some see it as bad, and not in the best interest of the Maine people. In order for Ms. Quimby to get her park she has to convince the Maine legislature that it’s a good idea and consequently she has to entice the Maine residents themselves.

Having already angered a healthy population of the state, Quimby is reported to have had several unbecoming things to say about Maine and the people in an interview she did with Forbes. The Bangor Daily News covers the story.

Her list of grievances with Maine include: calling Maine a welfare state, the people obese, and too old. She describes the lumbering industry as: “a very tight-knit group of industry people who own, manage and call the shots over ten million acres of land”. In addition she says that the wood products industry as a whole as a failure and poorly run, and “they’re in complete denial”. She described a certain percentage of the population as “oxycontin abusers”, as well as, “tone deaf” to the environment. She even went so far as to attempt to evaluate Maine’s schools, in particular the town of Millinocket near where much of her land exists, saying the town has “trouble keeping schools open”, and that Millinocket schools are “a total economic disaster”.

It certainly puzzles me why anyone who feels this way about Maine would spend their money investing in it. She probably had similar feelings about Maine when she moved her Burt’s Bees business out of Maine to North Carolina.

The Bangor Daily News article projects Quimby as having nothing good to say about the state of Maine at all. I couldn’t care less actually. Quimby owns land and she can do what she wishes with it within the laws the rest of us must abide by. She can give it away, sell it, develop it or anything else she chooses. She can prohibit people from accessing her land or share it only with those she hand selects. That’s her business. She can dump on the Maine people and call them anything she wants. She can offer bribes to win support for her park, again that’s her business.

But you cannot act this way and expect that when you need Maine people’s support you’ll have it.

For those who might not know, Roxanne Quimby was hand picked by President Barack Obama to sit on the Board of Directors for the National Park Service. Perhaps Obama sought out someone who thinks like he does. If you will recall that during the presidential campaign of 2008, Barack Obama, in a speech he made before what he must have thought was private, called the people of Pennsylvania bitter people stating: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

To me, Roxanne Quimby’s statements about Maine people are very similar to those made by Barack Obama. Coincidentally, Obama lost Pennsylvania in the primaries that year because of his nasty, elitist and snide comments about the people there.

For a woman scrambling around looking for support for her national park, she has once again reinforced her isolation and driven a deeper divide between her and the Maine people.

Tom Remington

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