Zinke might recommend Katahdin monument be national park

Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke said Thursday that he might recommend that Maine’s Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument be upgraded to a national park. Asked on the second day of his fact-finding tour of northern Maine if he might advise Congress to transform the monument into the state’s second national park, Zinke replied, “Certainly.” “The executive [branch of the federal government] does not have the authority” to create a national park, “so the driver would have to be from Congress,” Zinke said at a breakfast with Katahdin area political and business leaders at River Driver’s Restaurant & Pub. If Zinke urges Trump to ask Congress to make Katahdin into a national park, that would surely reignite the debate that has split environmentalists and northern Maine forest products industry stalwarts for about 20 years. The most recent campaign to make the area a park died in 2015 when it became clear to Lucas St. Clair that no one in Maine’s congressional delegation would introduce such legislation...more