Maine hobbled by obsolete boundaries
The Bottom Line Column, by Charles Lawton
Maine Sunday Telegram: May 27, 2007
To be truly radical is to make hope possible not despair convincing. - Raymond Williams
Maine has, for the past 10 or 20 years, been in the grip of a whirlwind of change the likes of which it hasn't seen since the industrial age began along the banks of the Saco and the Androscoggin in the 1840s.
Jobs and businesses that were our lifeblood for generations have disappeared overnight. Easy access to the beauty of our coast, lakes and streams has declined as property values have soared. Our commitment to local schools and health care devour our tax revenues and make every season's budget sessions more acrimonious, both locally and in Augusta.
I have written frequently about how this whirlwind has produced what the Brookings Report called a "surprising" pessimism about the future. For those who have endured the dislocation of this change, pessimism is hardly surprising. Maine is not the way it once was, and many are not happy about that. Change is leading us away from the way things were. We must resist it.
One of the consequences of responding to change with fear and resistance is a narrowing of our definitions of common interest.
Since change seems to be so negative, I am less able to support activities that don't support me directly. I am less able to see that what benefits you directly benefits me indirectly because you and I share a community.
In my own community of York last Saturday, less than a quarter of the eligible voters returned ballots. On Article 38, they rejected the children's librarian by 14 votes. On Article 39, they approved the senior center by 697. Is it surprising to learn that our median age is eight years above the national average? Or that outside the polls, others were circulating a petition urging rejection of any merger of our school district?
I also have written regularly, following the Brookings Report, that we in Maine actually have reason for optimism. If we adopt an outward and forward-looking rather than an inward and backward-looking orientation, a positive rather than a negative attitude, we would see that we are well positioned to take advantage of globalization and build a prosperous (but economically very different) future.
But we can hope only if we have some sense of potency, some sense of our ability to control enough of the changes coming our way to capture some of the gains. We will invest -- give up something today in hopes of getting a return tomorrow -- only if we have some optimism about tomorrow, some sense that the odds against us are not overwhelming, that the risk is worth taking.
Some say that our tax rates and our business climate are the reason for our "surprising" pessimism. But there's more to it than taxes. Business investment is made with a global and regional perspective. Product markets are worldwide and labor and transport markets are regional, far beyond the relevance of our municipal government structure.
Yes, all business must ultimately be located in one town, but its political boundaries are irrelevant. Workers, suppliers, shoppers come from far beyond town borders. And so, increasingly, must the public investments necessary to accommodate the needs of larger scale business enterprises.
Transportation, housing, environmental impacts all ripple out beyond town boundaries, yet town boards and bodies have little ability to understand or affect these larger impacts. Is it any wonder town managers have so hard a time recruiting volunteers to serve? Even residence is increasingly blurry with more and more of us living here part of the year and Florida or Arizona or somewhere else the rest.
This is where the discontinuity arises. Any major business investment in Maine requires cooperation from regional and state agencies to arrange their public service needs.
Our 18th-century local government structures are simply irrelevant to the scale and personal geography of the 21st-century economy. And they are not conducive to the negotiation process that is called for. The judicial and regulatory approach to investment, the up or down, yes or no, approach breeds both animosity and cynicism.
The fix must have been in. You can't fight city hall. Neither attitude promotes hope, optimism and investment.
The issue is not local control, but personal efficacy. We must find a way to structure our democracy so we focus our attention on things that matter. One reason local politics is so vicious (and so few people vote) is because there is really so little at stake.
The more I struggle with this issue, the more I urge people to be optimistic, to have an outward orientation, to think of the future in terms of investment, the more I think this emphasis on attitude is only part of the story.
To achieve the Maine that the Brookings Report sees as surprisingly possible, we must change not just our individual attitudes, but also our collective interaction, our vehicles for creating community.
We cannot achieve our full 21st-century economic potential one by one, each in our own little castle secure from the threatening winds of change that surround us. We can achieve that vision only when we build a shared political institution in which we can once again feel that another's gain helps me as well.
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