The Knickerbocker Lake Association of Boothbay — a group of property owners on Knickerbocker Lake — is officially requesting the Boothbay Planning Board deny the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens’ current $30 million expansion proposal, now under review. While recognizing the value and positive impact the Gardens provide the Boothbay region, our group’s position on CMBG’s expansion is not to malign them, but to express our collective alarm and concern at the imbalance of existing infrastructure support to the size and nature of their proposal. We view a proposal of this magnitude as a poor fit for a general residential zone, and believe the Garden needs to apply for contract zoning, which would require review and approval by the town voters. The Boothbay Planning Board has made this recommendation and was ignored. We thank the Boothbay Planning Board for hiring an independent environmental consultant to review the garden’s submitted plans, particularly regarding the potential for compromising our region’s water supply.

About a quarter of the 270 acres comprising CMBG is within Knickerbocker Lake’s watershed. Each summer upwards of 50 million gallons of water is pumped from Knickerbocker to supply the region water throughout the prime tourist season. Those of us who have lived on the lake for decades have witnessed plenty of development on and near the lake. We’ve also seen the bottom of the lake change from mud to a bottom covered in green slime and growth. Daily summer swimmers attest to its decline in overall clarity. Knickerbocker Lake has been monitored and evaluated to be a low quality lake. Everything done within this watershed does impact water quality — if not very viability — of this lake. In short, our lake has never been more vulnerable, while at the same time serving as an increasingly essential commodity for the region.

As shorefront property owners on our summer water supply, we are alarmed at CMBG’s proposed leach fields tasked with handling 16,000 gallons of sewage per day, and up to 12,000 in the Knickerbocker Lake watershed zone — generated by the hundreds of thousands of projected visitors, and particularly by the 50,000 visitors expected within the six-week period of Gardens Aglow. The safest and most appropriate handling for this amount and intensity of sewage is to hook up to the Boothbay Harbor Sewer District. During the very first weekend of this year’s Gardens Aglow event, the public toilets backed up and some 6,000 gallons of sewage sludge from their primary settlement tank had to be pumped and transported to the Boothbay Harbor Sewer District treatment plant. It is a given that the Gardens has botanical expertise, and excels at growing things and creating an enticing environment for visitors. Not so convincing is their management of essential infrastructure, particularly when sewage can be connected to a competently run treatment facility that is currently under-utilized during winter months. This seems to be the time for CMBG to invest in hook up to town water and sewer.

Beyond the issue of sewage, we also seriously question the safety and long-term impact of the Gardens clear-cutting approximately 17 acres of forest in a sensitive wetland area to add phosphorus-laden, paved parking lots, comparable in size to a Walmart parking lot. The run-off from an estimated 900 parking spaces for up to 350,000 visitors per year drains toward sensitive vernal pools, streams, and underground feeds to Knickerbocker Lake; there is a 70’ drop in elevation over the 600 yards between the edge of CMBG property and our lake, directly downhill from the Gardens and just 3/8 of a mile away.

Some of us have attended the Boothbay Planning Board meetings to listen with an open mind and generous spirit towards CMBG. We heard testimony and heartfelt accounts from the Anthony family, as direct abutters to the gardens, expressing how certain elements of CMBG will detract from the quality of their decades-old homestead in an isolated wood on a dirt road. We listened to a planning board member admonish the Gardens’ track record of proper and timely notification of development, pointing out their protocol failure at alerting abutters and neighbors.

We also listened as CMBG’s Wright-Pierce engineer presented a state of the art filtration system for run-off. If approved, it is possible that in the next couple of years Knickerbocker Lake may not be destroyed or adversely affected from the loss of trees and the extra phosphorous load occurring from parking lots and leach fields at the Gardens. However, most compelling is the warning issued by the Boothbay Region Water District — who are charged with protecting and providing water for the entire region — that it is just as likely that down the road there will be a serious price to pay for this current expansion proposal. BRWD’s director has repeatedly stated their objections to major elements of CMBG’s current expansion plans as submitted to the Boothbay Planning Board.

For the sake of the lake and all the Boothbay residents dependent on the region’s water supply, the Knickerbocker Lake Association is stating its strong objection to CMBG’s current proposal as it stands.