The reports found that communities adjacent to national parks or national parks and recreation areas outpaced the U.S. average and Penobscot and Piscataquis counties for economic growth, including population, employment and real personal income. Regions with only a recreation area showed mixed performance.
“A national park and recreation area has the potential to stimulate tourism and attract new people, including a younger population,” said Ben Alexander, associate director for Headwaters Economics. “There’s the potential to create, directly and indirectly, more than a thousand jobs over time. A more conservative estimate suggests that attracting just 15 percent of the visitors to Acadia National Park would create about 450 jobs.”
Headwaters Economics is an independent, nonprofit research group with a mission of improving community development and land management decisions. Headwaters’ work was reviewed by prominent Maine economists and public policy experts, who helped to inform the way the research was conducted and to ensure that it is accurate.
To create the report, the researchers worked on the assumption that there would be up to 150,000 acres of land donated to the National Park Service, of which 75,000 acres would be a national park and 75,000 would be a national recreation area.…