A Theory Why Costs of Proposed School System on the Boothbay Peninsula are Multiplying Exponentially
A Theory Why Costs of Proposed School System on the Boothbay Peninsula are Multiplying Exponentially
Why we need municipal and statutory change that requires private gifts to public education to be channeled through educational foundations.
As a rational human being, I mostly believe the Boothbay Peninsula is a lost cause as a free egalitarian diverse society, but as a whole human being, I leave the windows open for the unanticipated to enter.
Ten years ago would we have anticipated large-scale events around the world to unfold as they have? Many changes have an initial negative impact but spawn unexpected responses. The heroic innovative and competent response from the awe-inspiring Ukrainians is replicated in acts of public resistance to totalitarian regimes worldwide. Perhaps the resistance movement is emergent because the imbalance in wealth and restrictions on individual freedom have reached the point when the masses feel they have nothing left to lose. Protests in Russia, China, and Iran emerge from a place within the common consciousness that is deeper than rational analysis and predictive science. It is the human spirit itself.
My Dad told me about the heightened intensity in London during the war, a phenomenon that emerges in the face of extreme challenges. In difficult times life takes on a clarity of meaning.
At times of slow-moving but culturally calculated transformations, the enormity of the changes underway is not felt with as great an intensely and its motivational impact is correspondently less. Climate change is slow-moving and has to reach a clear and obvious impact before it is taken seriously in our collective awareness.
Have the instigators of a massive culture transformation targeting the Boothbay Peninsula miscalculated the optimum rate of change to achieve their goals on this peninsula successfully?
Their plans are so large but so interdependent, that they have no other choice but to implement the parts simultaneously, which accelerates the rate of change required for implementation, turning up the intensity of public awareness.
The parts are:
The entire public education system on the Boothbay Peninsula.
The development of a large densely-packed suburban block located in the rural landscape to be occupied with corporate-owned single-family homes mostly for the workforce. This housing concentration zone was made possible by the enactment of LD 2003 in April 2022 and written in large part by Boothbay’s own Erin Cooperrider, now the spokesperson for the mysterious Boothbay Region Development Corporation, not to be found in the Maine Secretary of State database.
The Industrial park where corporations lured by tax-payer funded workforce training at the new school system employ the workforce that lives in the concentrated housing zone.
The public has not yet been introduced to the plans for the Industrial Park, but this hypothetical as yet announced component of the massive cultural change planned by “them”- as in a hidden cabal identified only as “community members”, fits the gaps in the explanation for the estimated cost of the proposed school, a cost which rose from “somewhere between $10.8 million and $16.7 million“ in May 2022 to 98 million in December 2022.
As the perfect plan started to go sideways by meeting unanticipated public resistance, the architectural design functioned as the driver of the narrative, begging the question, Who are the actors writing the narrative? Community members! Who are the investors who paid the architects? Community members who want to remain anonymous. Why? Don’t ask because your question will not even be acknowledged. Why? We are sorry that is not for the public to know, now let’s move on to talking about how you want to design the school. The estimated cost has gone up to fifty million dollars, a mere 300% increase from our original highest cost estimate. Trust us. How large would you like the auditorium to be? Don’t worry about the cost. it will be financed through private donations, just like the architects are paid, anonymously!
I submit, as a layman’s analysis, that non-profit giving rules, as it stands today in the Maine statutes, allow corporations to give to public education anonymously, with non-disclosable terms and probably tax-exempt, which we cannot know if the terms are non-disclosable. Anonymous corporate or other private giving is not limited to the construction of the school but can continue long into the future as long as our laws permit it. The school board tells us that they are targeting 50% of the financing of the school through private donations, making our public school system a 50-50 public-private relationship, in which case the private 50% usually dominates over the collective public.
The scale of what is hypothetically being planned is the equivalency of a Chinese Ghost City. An article published in Business Insider on October 14 2021 had this to say:
The best-known of China's ghost cities may be Ordos New Town, also known as Kangbashi, in the region of Inner Mongolia.
The city was intended in the early 2000s to eventually house a million people, a number that was later scaled back to 300,000. But as of 2016, a mere 100,000 people lived in it. Kangbashi eventually managed to lure residents after China moved some of its top schools into the city, Nikkei reported earlier this year.(in an article titled China's largest 'ghost city' booms again thanks to education fever Home prices in Ordos's Kangbashi district soar after top-flight school relocates)(empasis and additional note added by author)
A few years back, shortly after the JECD (Joint Economic Development Council of Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor) spent 79 thousand dollars of public money to purchase a regional plan for our peninsula from New York Consultants, a plan that recommended museums for the Peninsula. I approached the Council with a concept for a Museum of American Designer Craftsmen, not understanding at that time that the Council was not a public service but a public cabal.
I was soon disillusioned by my naive American ideas by Wendy Wolf, the head of the council who did not acknowledge my presentation in any way, form, or manner and advised me to go get help from my own peer group, as her peer group helped itself to my over-charged property taxes to pay the advertising expenses of downtown Boothbay Harbor merchants during the Botanical Garden’s Festival of Lights.
Shortly afterward I was advised through Community Navigator not to approach the JECD directly but instead attend their meetings for a year in silence to show my respect.
The things that are said without embarrassment by the leaders of this community are a reflection of how deeply embedded the club is and how unaccustomed they are to engaging with anyone outside of their own peer group. This applies to the words now embedded in the Maine State Statutes that assert “overcrowding housing is a density bonus”. From my perspective, this statement is so corrupt that I would expect these sentiments to be calculatedly hidden, not codified into law. For a public-private organization, financed with tax-payer money to tell a member of the community to show their respect by silencing their voice is as profoundly dystopian as it is Un-American.
As you can see I have not silenced my voice, but I am as ever excluded from the public-private club that runs this town, as I more recently encountered when I responded to this notice seen on the Town of Boothbay website:
Not receiving a response, I went to the Town Office to pick up an application, wherein I was told by the Town Manager that there is no such committee. Later I learned through LD 2003 that the State was forming a Ten Year Planning Commission and distributing grants to municipalities, in exchange for which the municipalities would form a working group to align municipal zoning ordinances with the State-led centrally managed mission, which arguably uses wealth redistribution to undermine the Home Rule Amendment of the Maine Constitution.
With the revenue that the State is collecting from its 9% sales tax on the aggressively expanding short-term rental industry, it has plenty of funds to redistribute. No wonder the study for LD 2003 decided not to include the effects of the short-term rental industry.
The timing was too synchronized with the enactment of LD 2003 not to believe that the purpose of the “non-existent” Administrative Code Committee notice posted on the Town website was one and the same as described in greater detail in LD 2003 as 3. Municipal Planning Assistance Grant and Incentive Program Fund.
In plain English, I believe that when I went into the Town Office and requested an application form for the Administrative Code Committee and was told that it does not exist, I was lied to. This should be shocking but it isn’t. I have never felt that my Town or State acknowledges or serves my interests and values, and therein might be a case for standing in a court of law, if it ever comes to challenging the constitutionality of enacted laws.
§4364-A. Municipal incentive program
The Department of Economic and Community Development, referred to in this section as "the department," shall develop a program to incentivize review of municipal zoning ordinances and land use ordinances. A municipality may participate in the program for up to 3 years.
1. Municipal incentives. The department shall provide a grant of up to $25,000 to a municipality for each year the municipality participates in the program. To be eligible for a grant under the program, a municipality must commit to:
A. In the first year, establishing a working group to review how the municipality's zoning ordinances and land use ordinances may impact the availability of housing in the municipality. A municipality may satisfy the requirements of this paragraph by creating a joint working group with one or more other municipalities;
If you can’t join them, beat them!
A recent story in the Boothbay Register CSD trustees updated on a school project, motivated me to post profusely in the Boothbay Register Comments.
The story begins with an explanation for why the cost of the school project rose from 80 million on October 31st to 98 million in December, which is the same reason it rose from 50 million to 78 million in the story published on October 31st- on an estimate we were told in May “You can expect that the final number is going to land somewhere between the $10.8 million and $16.7 million.”
The reason for last month’s twenty million dollar increase in cost is that the committee decided to include a middle school for 3.8 million dollars (3.5 million in the October story). Additional reasons are attributed to 8% inflation, a figure roughly attributed to yearly inflation, and because the committee had finally decided it was time to be “realistic” about the costs.
We decided to be real so we are increasing our projected costs by another 20 million for November! Yes! You decided to be real but not forthcoming. Is this the kind of thinking and behavior that should be leading education for future generations on this peninsula? A 3.5 million dollar cost does not account for a fifty million dollar increase and so it raises the question “What are they hiding?” and “Who are they kidding?”
Based on what we know, none of this makes much sense but if concealed plans related to the Industrial Park aspect of the masterplan are being negotiated as private anonymous conditional donations using §5654. Conditional gifts, some of the conditions of donations may be required to be structured in during the school (industrial training center) planning phase, causing otherwise additional costs to be incorporated into the cost of the school.
Since §5654. Conditional gifts are designed to function as an NDA agreement, the board may be legally prohibited from saying anything about the negotiations, even as the costs are escalating and so they come up with ridiculous and deceptive explanations for the rapidly escalating costs of the school. In this case, the boards are beholden to serve the donors at the expense of serving the public.
The proponents of the plan seem Putin-level desperate. Like Putin, they imagined this was something they could easily achieve as they miscalculated the culture they sought to displace. They made a huge investment in time and money, hopes and dreams planning for a project in advance of a public referendum when the public decides if they want this.
The plan, instigated by Paul Coulombe, included finding investors to fund the design of the school in advance of the inconveniently required public referendum, purchasing a permanent spotlight in the Register that unceasingly features stories about the school to spin a dominant public narrative about the future direction of the Peninsula. Get the school involved to create an illusion of a community-driven project. This is easy to do because the school is the surface beneficiary of the project. The subsurface beneficiaries remain unknown but their existence is presumed by extravagant and irrationally unaccounted escalations in the projected cost of the project.
The school board acts as if it has been hypnotized. Their entitled attitudes appear to be fed by the belief that the school will be generously funded by private donations, as codified in Title Thirty of the Maine Statutes, donations that need not be funded through the foundation on the AOS website as provided by Funding municipal education foundations but instead can be funded under §5654. Conditional gifts.
School officials have set a goal to raise about half of the project funds through private fundraising.
That still leaves half the costs up to the taxpayers.
The newspaper story went on to tell that the boards of Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor decided to eliminate the public vote for the new school charter.
In other action, Kahler updated trustees on Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor selectmen’s plans to “repeal and replace” the CSD charter. He reported lawyers were reviewing the latest round of proposed changes. One change both select boards support includes eliminating a town hall-style vote following the public hearing. Both select boards support a school budget referendum. “Once the new charter is approved by the legislature, it’s the law. So only the legislature would be able to change it,” Kahler said. The Boothbay Register
That’s a slippery way of presenting the elimination of a public vote on the school charter as it is immediately followed by a sentence about a public referendum on the budget before switching back to the subject of school charter as if to give the impression that there would be a public referendum to replace the Town Hall vote on the school. Parsing it, I interpret it as meaning that the two boards decided to bypass the public vote on the charter and send the charter straight to the Legislature whereupon it cannot be changed.
The sentence “One change both select boards support includes eliminating a town hall-style vote following the public hearing” does not actually identify that they are talking about the hearing on the charter, but since every other sentence, before and after, except the sentence about the budget, are about the charter, that is how I interpret it.
Accepting that interpretation, the question becomes: What is in the charter that causes the boards to go to such lengths to avoid the risk of a public vote?
This feels like an act of Putin-style desperation. They have invested so much in their plans for the new school system and are already starting to talk about the construction phase. Can they risk leaving everything that they have worked so hard to achieve up to a public vote?
We are in an era wherein the public-private state is moving aggressively to eliminate home rule authority. How do we know that the new charter will not take away the public referendum on the school? Why did the towns decide to redo the school charter now?
In the Register comments, I submitted that the School Charter should require that all donations must be made through the educational foundation.
The Maine Statute, Title Thirty, Funding municipal education foundations fails to stipulate that this is the only means by which a public school can be privately funded. According to IRS regulations, donations to foundations cannot be anonymous whereas donations to non-profit organizations need not be publicly transparent.
§5654. Conditional gifts allow the donors to remain anonymous and can act like an NDA agreement that the public is eternally bound to honor without necessarily knowing what those terms are. There is nothing in the statute limiting what conditions can be placed on the donation, which is to say there are no statutory negotiating terms made in the interest of the public. Anything goes. The assumption is that the donation on any terms whatsoever is in the interest of the public simply because money is a public benefit.
§5654. Conditional gifts like an NDA agreement can protect the donor‘s interest from public knowledge. The stone wall with which questions about the donor’s identities or the channel through which the donation was made are met suggests such an agreement.
Paul Coulombe is the only figure whose name is publicly associated with the whole plethora of developments now underway on the Boothbay Peninsula. My Coulombe is not known for his social or environmental awareness unless he is attempting to use environmental regulations as a weapon against others. His crafted narrative is that he is a generous philanthropist supporting the public good on the Boothbay Peninsula, but his toxic attacks against those that do not bend to his will betray him. Coulombe’s only claim to power and influence is his wealth derived through a pay-to-play background.
In my layman’s analysis, §5654. Conditional gifts accommodate pay-to-play deals that can be hidden from public knowledge. If the school charter requires that all donations to the public educational system go through Funding municipal education foundations, would the school board be so nonchalant about the rapidly escalating costs of their proposal? Is their “The sky is the limit” attitude because they see wheeling and dealing with special interests, negotiating industries promoted through the public educational school system with industrial training funded by the taxpayers as a unique fundraising opportunity similar to but more secretive than corporate welfare deals that have been negotiated by the state for years, to the point where private industry is crafting our laws?
The impression evoked by local current leadership is that the goal of economic development is increasing property values. Increasing property values is the end goal of the three-part plan, which otherwise has no rationale for a Peninsula with an endangered water supply, and confronting what all coastal areas must, the unknown effects of the looming collapse of the Thwaites Glacier which some say will happen within just five years. This is a challenging event to fathom. I have not found specific information on what it would mean for ocean levels to rise three feet, probably because no one knows. It’s never happened before.
In the face of such a looming event, it makes no sense to initiate plans for radically expanding the population and investing in a major development on a coastal Peninsula, scheduled for completion in four years. I know no one wants to think about such possibilities, but it would be wiser to do so. Instead of expanding our population just because developers want to make money, let’s start thinking about what we need to do to protect against rising seas. Whether the collapse of the glacier results in a minor change or a catastrophic event, there is no doubt that as the Thwaites Glacier collapses sea levels will rise, in fact, sea levels are already rising faster than anticipated. (This is me being realistic by acknowledging the background story in which we are living. Should we be prepared? What’s the budget for that?)
But taking that consideration out of the picture, what is the point of expanding our population just for the sake of it- or just for the sake of developers making money? We know this is not being proposed out of concern for the working people. It is now popular on this peninsula for developers to build workforce boarding houses. Communal living for the workforce! Next- why not follow Elon Musk’s example and install beds at corporate headquarters? Think of the density benefit!
As much as developers promote themselves as doing good for the “workforce”, what that term really means is “instrument of the corporation”. The term “workforce housing” is used to signify corporate-owned single-family housing, as the rift separating the working classes from the ownership classes widens.
When the workforce is excluded from the ownership class and corporations own their homes, the workforce becomes the property of the public-private state. Boarding houses for workers is a backward-moving movement, back to the manor, back to feudalism. The workers do not have their own life. They merely exist to serve the property-owning classes. This is where the current culture of the Boothbay Peninsula is headed. Boarding houses are transitional, not real solutions. Corporate-owned developments of single-family homes are only slightly better. The land around high-density housing will be corporate-owned as well and the landscaping will be done by corporate management. That is a downgrade from a rural lifestyle. WHY? Can we come up with better scenarios, suited to this peninsula, not a template designed to be applied everywhere, as brought to you by LD 2003?
Support Alternate Solutions! Donate to Mackenzie's Ceramic Studio Network Plan in Incremental steps! Help me reach my goal for Step One HERE!There is no reason for such a concentrated housing zone on this peninsula outside of the three-part plan. There is a need for affordable housing as once existed on this peninsula before Airbnb. That does not require a corporate-owned grid community. We need to think differently than the current crop of developers and leadership are thinking.
Instead of identifying the goal of economic development as increasing property values, the goal of economic development should be creating equitable opportunities and equitable wealth distribution as it is distributed throughout society by the workings of our economy. A system that allows anonymous private donors to negotiate conditions with school officials in a manner that is non-transparent to the public creates inequitable opportunities and could result in our school systems being used to unfair private advantage. The government’s goal in economic development should be measured by the GINI rating and a healthy middle sector. The three-part part plan is a cultural displacement plan, on steroids, designed to replace our historical middle-class community wherein the wealthy kept a low profile with a culture for the wealthy only, an upstairs-downstairs community with corporate-owned serving class housing located in designated housing concentration zones. We can do better if we try! Legally enforcing a requirement that all private funding for public educational purposes is done through a foundation designed for that purpose is a start!