Claiming Territory for a Localized Makers Community
If the local makers do not represent themselves- No one will!
I am taking a longer break between posts because I am working on a sample video for a series based on a book I self-published and then unpublished. I thought it needed editing. Ten years ago, I didn’t have the where with all to do that large and unpaid job, but this political moment is ripe for releasing a video series that tells the history of Maine’s transformation from a Home Rule state to a centrally managed industrial state. Perhaps once I produce a sample video, I can find collaborators, but for now, it involves teaching myself some new skills. I thought of using an AI narrator, but decided that an imperfect, amateur human voice tops an AI voice,
Last time I posted, the discussion in the Boothbay Register comments included the observation that the opportunity for a broader discussion was cancelled by the two-million-dollar campaign contribution made by the anonymous donor group and accepted by the school boards, without input from the public. Thereafter, I wrote a Letter to The Editor of the Boothbay Register titled Industrial Park option for industrial job training. I thought it highly unlikely that anyone else was going to introduce an option related to the Industrial Park, created as a TIF zone at 17 million dollar prompt from the leader of the anonymous investors group, and then abandoned in favor of staking out the territory of the public high school for industrial job training, so if the concept of locating local industrial job training in the newly established TIF zone was going to be introduced, I had to do it.
Dear Editor:
Recently it was announced in this paper that Boothbay Region High School technology educator Chip Schwehm is soon to retire. Schwehm is the school’s STEAM teacher and holds a special industrial arts and technology certificate that allows him to run the shop and technical education program.
The CSD School Committee approved moving forward towards a possible partnership with Bath Tech to create a satellite Career and Technical Education exploratory program at BRHS. Bath Tech can hire someone under a CTE umbrella who has industry experience, such as a carpenter or welder, even without the technical certificate. see BBH eyes exploratory program for tech education.
Bath Tech is not a public high school, it is a non-profit high school. This makes more sense than teaching industrial job training in a public school funded by municipal tax payers as municipal taxes should be reserved for the common good rather than special interests. A non-profit is funded by donations made by individual choice.
A TIF zone was recently created in Boothbay which includes the Industrial Park. TIF zones are instruments of economic development and so it makes sense to locate industrial job training in the Industrial Park as a non-profit school similar to Bath Tech.
In the public school discussion, there is much talk about networking with the University of Maine. A project has only to be deemed, by the University, to be using its facilities “more than incidently” for the University to claim intellectual property ownership over the work products of the project. (See Statement of Policy Governing Patents and Copyrights, and scroll to the end.) Such a policy would dissuade authors and creators rather than encourage them.
Public and private Institutions can have non-profit or for-profit subsidiaries allowing a private industry to form a non-profit subsidiary for its industrial job training.
An industrial training center completely separate from the public educational system would be better protection for innovative enterprises and fairer for local taxpayers. This would also be a plus for the Industrial Park.
Jack Straw, a person who had not previously participated in the online forum, responded with a comment that begins with “Dear Editor,” suggesting that he submitted his response as a new Letter to the Editor and a new topic of discussion rather than as a response to the topic I introduced. That is only speculation, but accepting that premise, the Boothbay Register chose to post it as a comment to the discussion I started, which makes sense since Mr.Straw is responding to what I wrote. Sometimes I wonder how I came to have the unconscious assumption that all are created equal, as it seems at odds with the world in which I dwell. A simple distinction, such as writing a letter as opposed to replying to a letter, appears to hold inordinate importance to some, which is how I interpreted those two words “Dear Editor” in the response. It’s about who gets to frame the narrative, and who doesn’t.
I introduced a new narrative in my letter because I knew no one else would, and it matters to me that local makers are recognized and have their own space in this Town. The school boards talk about “making spaces,” but it is being negotiated under the cover of §5654. Conditional gifts and the corporate power tower that the boards presented as their idea of a replacement school does not suggest that they are negotiating with local makers, but that they seek to align our public school system with larger-scale corporate interests and this at a time when the looming burst of the AI bubble threatens to collapse the entire economic system which is top-heavy in only seven tech corporations that plan on leaving workers in the dust and which are phenonemally over-leveraged with dept.
How the AI Bubble Will Burst and What It Will Mean for Most Of Us
It is said that the collapse of the AI bubble will make the Dot Com bubble burst look like a minor blip in the wave function, but our governor is pushing legislation to teach workers how to code. Does she not know that entry-level coding jobs are where the job market is collapsing the fastest? Or maybe she is way ahead of the curve and calculates that when the AI bubble bursts, society will start needing human coders again. More likely, she is just looking to fill the needs of Maine’s industrial state.
Judging from the location of many donors in the anonymous donors group, outside the state, let me guess, it’s intrastate corporations that the boards are secretly coordinating with - but that’s none of the public’s business to speculate about.
The TIF zone is not the most beautiful location. The short-term rentals and tourist industry have claimed those locations.
Once, Andersen Design tried to establish a beautiful location for a small makers’ space when my parents tried to expand on the land they owned across the street from our house, which is now the MillPond overlook. It would have been a maker’s space with a view that looks out on the Mill Pond and out to sea. My Dad, having grown up on a farm, imagined there would be animals grazing around as well, though it seems a little close to the road for that. But the typically hostile Town leaders would not hear of it!
My Dad said that stopping him from building was the only way the old boys’ club had to control him. If you ask me, the Town leaders never considered the pros or cons of my father’s idea but were outraged that one who bootstrapped his business into success could now afford to own the land and build on it. How dare he!
When I found the series of letters by the two gents my father approached for a Business-to-Business relationship in 1956, I knew what Dad was talking about. People care more about who controls whom than about doing something innovative and interesting.
I believe that innovation and creativity need a heterarchical social structure, not a hierarchical one, but while the government of Maine reiterates the current popular focus on innovation, the state is instrumental in establishing a hierarchical order across the entire state, which is conducive only to the narrowest government-controlled range of innovation and oppressive to everything else. The state is literally trying to set up a ubiquitous housing grid to be identically implemented across every municipality in Miane, as it rushes to lead the world in the new dystopia
Back to the Letter to the Editor :
Mr.Straw exclaimed that Bath Tech is not a nonprofit:
The letter claims that “Bath Tech is not a public high school” and is instead a non-profit funded by donations. This is incorrect. Bath Regional Career and Technical Center (Bath Tech) is a public institution, governed by RSU 1 and regulated by the Maine Department of Education. Like our own high school, it is funded by taxpayer dollars because the state recognizes that trade skills—welding, carpentry, culinary arts, and more—are essential to the “common good.”
Let me say that I define the common good as that which mutually benefits everyone, such as roads, and in terms of education, giving the student a general education needed to be an informed citizen of society, which includes history and philosophy, and physical education, which encompasses such areas as mathematics, language and literature, sports, and all the arts. That's a lot.
But industrial job training for a specific industry is a special interest that benefits some industries at the expense of others. This is what it sounds like is transpiring with the secret negotiations taking place that we, the public, are not supposed to know about, “the work product”, “The making spaces”, the only thing we saw in the published images of the school design was the power lobby inside the tall glass tower, no school rooms.
And it is well published in the legislative statutes that the public schools will be used for industrial job training from Pre-K all the way to grade 16. The students, like the workers, are just the instruments of the state, not beings in their own right who might have their own ideas about what they want to do with their lives.
My letter contains a link that opens to https://bathtech.rsu1.org/
In fact, AOS98 and Bath are both funded by both local property taxpayers and non-profit contributions. Maybe that needs to be thoughtfully considered within well-established guiding principles consistent with constitutional law.
Then Mr. Straw wrote:
The suggestion that industrial training should be removed from public education and relegated to a private, donation-funded non-profit fundamentally undervalues the trades. Vocational education is not a “special interest”; it is a vital part of a comprehensive public school system that prepares students for the workforce.
I didn’t get into commenting on that part in my response, as there was already a lot to comment on. In a sense, he makes my point by saying it is “a vital part of a comprehensive public school system that prepares students for the workforce.” When did our public school system become that? The idea is that the educational system does not exist to serve the students but that the students are to be trained as instruments of the industrial state.
How does my suggestion undervalue the trades? I think it is quite the reverse. The state is taking over the role of industrial job training rather than industries teaching it, suggesting that the state knows better how to train the private sector than the private sector does. Doesn’t that devalue the private sector? That also demonstrates how it is a special interest in only industries that find nothing objectionable to the state’s plans would participate, and that is a special interest category excluding businesses that innovate a product, such as Andersen Design. Andersen Design receives no recognition or support from the Town, County, State.
Or even the100 Women Support group, my being a woman notwithstanding, for receiving a response from that newly created organization. As with many of the organizations on their supported organization list, I wrote to all the members, excluding one, and received no response, except for one, which interpreted my letter as looking for investors rather than for collaborators, which is the actual starting point, before one seeks investment.
I responded to Mr Straw by identifying that I come from an undervalued trade background myself, having been raised in this Peninsula in a business in a home that taught STEAM Skills on the job since 1952, paid property taxes and payroll taxes, and developed a national and international market and a body of collectors that continues to be active.
So from my perspective of coming from an accomplished background in an industry that is completely undervalued by my community and state, I think it is undervaluing private industry to put the state in charge of our job training insteadof ourselves, Even though a cluster industry of ceramics sprouted up after Andersen Design was the first such industry in this community, I have never heard ceramics included in trade categories other than under the generalized category of “and more” It seemed to me that in addressing his response to the Ediror rather than me, Mr Straw was exemplifying the issue that the corporate state has with small businesses. Small businesses are not under the state’s thumb, but with the state taking over industrial job training rather than supporting it as for and by private industry, the state gets to put small entrepreneurs under their thumb, while also advantaging larger industries with free training facilities in our public schools.
I know that the state cannot teach the skills of my industry, especially since the state does not recognize that ceramic slip casting is an industry, let alone ceramic surfaces and body development.
And since Andersen Design innovates new bodies and glazes, that activity should not take place in a public school as was suggested by the vampires at Fractured Atlas, when FA said that Andersen Design would not be approved as a making company but could be approved as a school where we would be prohibited from teaching how to make our product but would be allowed to teach the world to make our original ceramic glazes and bodies so that they could be used on anyones product except our own.
What small innovative makers need instead of state-controlled job-training is our own zone in the community where we are in control of teaching the skills we have to others in an environment that protects the real author’s intellectual property rights.
What better purpose is there for the TIF zone than making it an area where short-term rentals are dissallowed and businesses in residents are allowed? This is consistent with the recently enacted H.P. 644 - L.D. 997 An Act to Allow Residential Use Development in Commercial Districts, were it not for the fact that an act authorizing residences in commercial spaces takes care to specifically exclude businesses in a home. What is that all about? See more in my next post!
§4364-D. Residential units in areas zoned for commercial use A municipality shall allow residential units within buildings located in an area zoned for commercial use, including, but not limited to, buildings that are vacant or partially vacant retail property, except when a municipality determines that flooding or other natural hazards in the zone makes a building located in an area zoned for commercial use unfit for residential use. For purposes of this section, "commercial use" means the use of lands, buildings or structures the intent or result of which is the production of income from the buying or selling of goods or services. "Commercial use" does not include a home-based business, the rental of a single dwelling unit on a single lot or incidental sales of goods or services as may be allowed by permit or standard.
Sponsored By:Representative Marc MALON of Biddeford
Cosponsored By:Speaker Ryan FECTEAU of Biddeford
Representative Cheryl GOLEK of Harpswell
Representative Cassie JULIA of Waterville
What kind of gobbeldy-gook is that? It sounds like they are tailoring state-wide municipal ordinances to short-term rentals and trying to exclude everything else by inventing an excluded category called business in a home. Is not a rental apartment a business in a home? Are they attempting to exclude productive businesses in a home as opposed to landlord businesses in a home? By what authority is the State Legislature expanding its control over locally created municipal ordinances? No one has questioned their authority to do so, and so the Maine Legislature keeps asserting more power over local ordinances,
A TIF Zone is zoned for economic development, so a TIF Zone should exclude vampire industries like short-term rentals and embrace business in a home, since they are being targeted for exclusion by State-wide municipal ordinances.
This article comes at the perfect time, its so interesting to read about community and local politics. I'm curious, what finally swayed you against the AI narrator idea?
The tension between state-directed industrial training and locally-driven maker communities is underexplored in most discussions around workforce development. Your point about TIF zones being ideal for independent maker spaces rather than state-controlled job training is solid - economic development zones should nurture entrepreneurial ecosystems, not just pipeline labor for established industries. The exclusion of home-based businesses from commercial-to-residential conversion law is weird policy. That specific carveout seems designed to favor landlords over productive enterprises, which runs counter to the stated goal of activating underutilized commercial space. When state legislatures micromanage muncipal zoning like this, theyre often solving for someone's specific lobbying interest rather than coherent policy. The IP concerns around university partnerships are legit - alot of makerspaces avoid institutional collaborations precisely because "incidental use" clauses can strip creator ownership.