Smoke and Mirrors and General Impressions or Eyes Wide Open in Taking Back Ownership Equality!
To regain ownership equality, pay attention to the details, consider all options, and contextualize the long-term effect.
Public politics is the art of general impressions, words said with nonspecific meanings meant to suggest something that may or may not be true. In times of general stability, this can be an innocuous way of dealing with the impossibility or impracticality of telling everybody everything all of the time but when practiced over a long period of time the moral integrity of public officials disintegrates and public trust evaporates.
An elected representative tells us that he lied about everything in his background, but, no big deal, cuz I can still govern, ya know! Pay no attention and just follow the bouncing ball!
On the Boothbay Peninsula, we are not in stable times, we are in a time when hidden actors are plotting to repeal and replace our entire culture using the tried and true method of smoke and mirrors.
And so I decided to download the Articles of Incorporation for The Boothbay Regional Development Corporation on the Maine Secretary of State website.
But I did not receive the download, instead, I see this on the Maine.gov screen:
This has never happened before when ordering a file download from Maine.gov, but nothing is normal with the BRDC.
But wait! While looking for something else, I found the articles of incorporation in my own files.
Back in November, I contacted the Secretary of State’s office to ask for help in finding the Boothbay Region Development Corporation. The agency could not find a corporation by that name but it found the Boothbay Regional Development Corporation.
I paid three dollars to download the articles of incorporation but the file downloaded to 98% and failed so I contacted the office again and received the articles by email.
At first glance, the articles did not look significant. The only name is the name of the clerk. There can be three to seven directors and no members. The corporation is a public benefit corporation according to Attachment A
The agent wrote that when the articles of incorporation were filed, they attached information indicating that they were being formed for 501-c-3 purposes.
Filing as a 501 C3, allows the corporation to collect tax-deductible contributions.
The BRDC is strategically timing when to apply for a 501 C3, doing things that are prohibited by 501 C3 status before taking that step. A 501 C3 is not supposed to influence legislation so Erin Cooperrider, the VP, and spokesperson for BRDC wrote the framework for LD 2003, before BRDC was incorporated. LD 2003 requires building concentrated housing zones across the entire state of Maine, transforming and conforming the character of many diverse communities in one foul strike.
A month after the enactment of LD 2003 Cooperrider is heading up a corporate housing development corporation on the Boothbay Peninsula, initially said to be a 501 C3, but it isn’t that, not quite yet. First BRDC must utilize all the advantages of not being a 501 C3 - such as advising the Legislature on the law and grabbing up community TIF Funding.
The Maine statutes link property tax exemption to 501 C3 status:
(a) "Nonprofit housing corporation" means a nonprofit corporation organized in the State that is exempt from tax under Section 501(c)(3) of the Code and has among its corporate purposes the provision of services to people of low income or the construction, rehabilitation, ownership or operation of housing source
I would not have found the Boothbay Regional Development Corporation in the Secretary of State’s Corporate Name Search had I not contacted the office directly because the publicly used name and the legal name are different.
On the first try, the download failed but recorded my payment. On the second try the download never started, the record confirmed that I paid but said I had paid nothing! That is a strange shenanigan.
The first time I received the file by email. The second time the record creates doubt as to whether I paid or not, but bank records are on a different server and confirm my payment.
This could all be a coincidental technology glitch but I don’t believe so. You can try it for yourself. If you do, please post the results in the comments.
I then searched on Google for the Boothbay Regional Development Corporation. My search produced a presentation by the Boothbay Town Selectmen. The document, 2022.09.26, Town Selectboard Presentation.pdf came up immediately in my search, but a few hours later when repeating the search the file vanished from the results and so I uploaded the file to my own server. You can access it at the link above. The Cover says in large black letters. The Boothbay Regional Development Corporation.
Why are the Town selectmen doing the work of the BRDC, I wondered. They talk publicly as if the BRDC is independent of the town. Later I realized that identification of the authorship of this plan is non-existent, there is only the title of the pdf file, typical of the obscure identification of the Boothbay Regional Development Corporation.
The selectmen’s presentation identifies the “BRDC” as “a non-profit organization formed to tackle the housing crisis in the Boothbay region”.
You don’t have to read deeply into the selectmen’s report to suspect that the BRDC is the Boothbay Region, Development Cabal and that it is a public-private cabal. Despite the statement, that the BRDC was formed to tackle housing, the selectmen are already saying it will be involved in community economic development, and speculatively it already is, as a master plan that includes the school, the housing, and hidden financing, which is likely corporate financing all serving a common agenda.
I came across an educational reform bill that was passed in April. It is LD1845 An Act To Amend the Education Statutes. It amends 35 educational statutes. I haven’t read it yet but it appears to involve repurposing public schools as research institutions similar to the University of Maine. The word “restructuring” is repeatedly struck out and replaced with “innovation”, so they are not restructuring public education, they are innovating it. That is the new newspeak.
The statute includes this classic totalitarian instruction:
A. The development of comprehensive educational goals establishing community expectations for what all students should know, the skills they should possess, the attitude toward work and learning they should hold upon completing school and the role of the school in the community;
That is of course bullshit because in practice leadership class does care what the community thinks. Currently, our Town selectmen are plotting how they can repeal and replace the school charter without giving the public a vote and not even telling us what is in it.
Reading carefully the statute says the Legislature (the State) is establishing community (local) expectations, bulldozing the Home Rule Amendment deeper into the ground, which constitutionally establishes community expectations.
What happened to diversity? Has it been replaced with conformity? How can innovation flourish in a rigidly controlled environment in which government decides everything from what size unit you live in, what job you should pursue, and what your attitude should be? And who will be in charge of that- the town selectmen who have been trying to kill off small entrepreneurs for years? Way to go to encourage innovation!
It’s time to repeal and replace the town selectmen.
The idea that the community should manage an individual’s attitude is a psychological manipulation concept similar to psychological ownership, a product of the academic system in partnership with industry, a merger that is furthered in LD1845. Schools are becoming extensions of industry. The lower educational system will be modeled on the University of Maine which claims to own the intellectual property rights of its users because it owns the facilities. That is why we need diversity in educational options and in working spaces but such diversity does not serve the corporate purpose.
Instead, diversity serves the interest of the innovator. A working-class innovator’s assets for making it into the ownership class are talents and skills. Innovators need places to work where their intellectual property rights are protected, a space where one is not required to feign a collectively directed social attitude. Where one is free to be one’s self and activate one’s innovative potential.
In theory, community economic development makes sense but in practice, it doesn’t work. The hierarchy mentality creates too much interference. It is a waste of time and energy when one thinks a resource exists and it actually doesn’t.
Perhaps if there were diversity more people could find the growth and developmental support they need simply because of a greater variety of options, but central management narrows the options as it benefits some at the expense of others, The untargeted sector subsidizes the targeted sector and that is how the wealth divide becomes the ownership divide.
The BRDC ’s assumption is that a corporate-controlled society means growth for the community versus a rural community where small enterprises and businesses in a home can thrive. Could two such ideas co-exist? Only if there is a check on the self-entitlement of central management. That requires taking back our rule of law. Laws are not being upheld. TIF financing, for example. How does the roundabout deliver revenue to the town? Did they forget to add the toll gate?
The town’s revenue is from property taxes which in turn are used to pay for public services. It should be as simple as that, but when governmental leaders are wheeling and dealing in matching funds, corporate financing, and backroom deals, it isn’t.
The articles of corporation of the BRDC indicate that the corporation has plans to become a 501 C3. That should be heeded by stipulating that If the BRDC is awarded TIF financing it cannot become property tax exempt until it has generated enough property tax revenue to justify its TIF financing. Or it can become a 501 C3 now and raise the funds through tax-exempt contributions, which beats quid quo pro.
We need a Town Charter that limits select board power so it can’t just self-expand. The principle in the Home Rule Amendment calling for a public referendum on municipal bonds could be extended to any public project financed by any means.
If there were a community where “working class housing”, as opposed to “workforce housing” includes businesses in a home- and not as structures built en masse by developers but as individual structures consistent with the way Maine was in the past, it would be a unique community and a beacon for people looking for something that corporate culture doesn’t offer. Workers are seeking a way out of the corporate order in such growing numbers that a small peninsula can gain a lot of social stimulus by catering to that social movement.
Growth through the roots
Imagine a community- not densely packed but with comfortably spaced structures grown by the natural affinity between people who like to work. An interest in work levels the field and creates a common ground for a shared experience.
We just have to vote down the 100 million dollar school and the extended TIFF zone for the corporate-owned concentrated workforce housing zone. Let the BRDC pay its own way. Why is a corporate-owned overcrowded housing development entitled to have 40% of its capitalization costs covered by the public? Did we say we wanted that? Were we even asked?
Let’s take a look at what the concentrated housing zone means BEFORE it is constructed.
There are a lot of charts and data in the selectmen’s plan that does not add up to useful information from the human perspective. For example, a chart of household area median income goes from 30% of median income to 100% by household size. It says that the median income for a single-person household is $56,400, and for a two-person household it is only $64,400. There can be a lot of explanations for that very small difference. The data invites more questions than it informs about median income.
But that is a different consideration than that of the selectmen and the corporation whose work the selectmen are doing in this report. I want to know why the income barely increases for a two-family household over a one-family household but the chart is for figuring out how many houses at what size household does the corporation need to realize its highest profit margin to attract the equity investors? The chart doesn’t care if the two-person household is two people each making a lower income than the one person in the one-person household- or if it is one person making a higher income and a caretaker that does not make an income. The purpose of the chart is to determine the dollar value of the household for the corporation.
Based on a questionnaire, which is always determined by the questions asked, the report tells us that the number of households that currently commute and would like to live on the peninsula if affordable homeownership/rental housing were available based on initial outreach is 85.
In a Register article, Erin Cooperrider had this to say:
Phase 2 is a “proof of concept” for affordable home ownership targeted to households between 80% and 100% of area medium income. Her research showed household income between $64,000 and $87,000 for a family of four met the criteria. ….The group envisions selling 1,200 square foot homes at a below-market, subsidized cost. source
I do not know what “ below-market, subsidized cost” means but I’ll guess. It means if the corporation capitalization is publicly subsidized by 40% it can afford to sell “eight of the homes priced at $287,000 each, while retaining ownership of the rest, raising the question, if the BRDC is not publicly subsidized would it be forced to sell more of the homes to the occupants?
Not A Deal! A 1200-square-foot home is about 50% of the standard comfortable average house size for a family of four quoted at 2400 square feet in numerous sources. Ms. Cooperriders’ “density bonus” idea is borrowed from the cities of the Industrial Revolution and applied to rural dwellers during the Airbnb Revolution.
And the price per foot is high for Maine:
Maine
$300,000 buys you: 2,002 square feet For $300,000, you can get a five bedroom, three-bathroom bay-side home. You can watch the sun rise over Nova Scotia with a short walk from a Cape-Cod style home in Eastport. Talk about relaxing! How much house you can buy with $300K in every state
That works out to about $150 per square foot making the cost for a 1200 sq home $180,000.00 but for another $100,000, dollars you can get the same size home in a suburban housing concentration zone, with no land, in the middle of a coastal rural Airbnb community, thanks to you Ms. Cooperrider because you decided not to include the effect of the short term housing industry in your “study”! How innovative!
Or for $100,000 less you can get the same size home with some private land around it, off the peninsula.
$287,000.00 is 63% more than the average cost of a 1200 ft home in Maine, which is half the comfortable size for a four-person household. Is that worth it to live on the Boothbay Peninsula? Since LD 2003 requires every municipality in Maine to build housing concentration zones, why build in a community where the cost of housing is so much higher than average? (factor in the rest of the master plan for that rationale).
Maybe the question should be would those people commuting here to work be willing to move here if there were homes for sale that are half the size of what an affordable price will afford elsewhere?
“It will create eight for-sale homes priced at $287,000. Future phases may include multi-family apartment buildings, single-family homes, and condominiums. The goal is creating a range of choices, both for sale and for rent, and affordable to our workforce at a range of income levels,” she said.
If the BRDC is not a legally filed 501 C3, it cannot accept tax-deductible contributions, but BRDC doesn’t need to file until it is ready to rent. It just needs to raise the funding in Phases one and two. Grants in Phase two are enough to cover the infrastructure costs being targeted as TIF funding. However, the BRDC does have the option of filing now and raising funds through tax-deductible contributions.
As long as the Boothbay Regional Development Corporation has not filed as a 501 C3, it is relying on funding from government grants and the means provided in the Maine Statute on Municipal section 9 Fiscal Matters conditional gifts and unconditional gifts. 501 C3 funding offers the donor a tax deduction but conditional gifts are a quid quo pro opportunity struck between Town leaders and big money and the leaders aren’t telling the public what those deals are.
§5654. Conditional gifts is a state statute that imposes no limits on what conditions can be imposed by the donor allowing the statute to function as a non-disclosure agreement that must be honored by the Town in perpetuity.
§5654. Conditional gifts is a case of public law being written to say that private law can supersede public law. Maine Freedom of Access does not mention a statutory exception for §5654. Conditional gifts
The lack of restrictions on conditions that the donor can impose means a corporate donor can make a deal with a public school demanding that it incorporate industrial training equipment specific to the corporation’s needs repurposing the public school as tax-payer-funded training for the corporation.
Or the donor can demand that the community provide workforce housing for the corporation’s employees. Perhaps even following the Martha Vineyard model in which the employer manages the workforce housing and only the employees of the corporation can occupy the housing.
And so it is clear that the purpose is to solve the housing crisis in the service of the corporate ownership class because the solution does not create a pathway to ownership for the working classes. Ownership as a relevant social issue of these times was not considered in the study.
The selectmen’s plan includes extending the infrastructure to serve the development site, which is what the TIF funding would finance and so If BRDC were to file for 501 C3 now the selectmen would have a problem justifying the TIF district as revenue-producing.
As representatives of the BRDC, the selectmen serve two masters, the corporation and the public, but their lack of public transparency tells that they prioritize corporate interests over the public interest.
The TIF district was established in 2012 for a 30-year term; A TIF allows local governments to invest in public infrastructure and other improvements by using increased property valuation revenues derived from development. BRDC requested two warrant articles for May. One is for expanding the district. The second seeks $1.25 million in TIF funds for BRDC’s infrastructure project. Source
Can “the trickle-down effect” be used to justify a 15 %, population expansion that does not add revenue to the town?
The selectmen’s BRDC plan expands the power of town leadership to central managers of economic development, claiming greater control over every aspect of our lives as the State has been doing since 1976. LD 2003, escalates State control to the new level of controlling community character, housing density, and personal living environments.
The trickle-down effect is a proven fallacy and justification used by central management since it took over Maine’s economy in 1976. Wealth has trickled up not down.
Why does the trickle-down theory exist unless it is acknowledging that the true measure of economic development is equitable wealth distribution, measured by the size of the middle class?
Short-term rentals and corporate-owned single-family homes are drivers of the housing shortage but If a group wants to build a corporate-owned single-family home development they have as much of a right to do so as anyone, except that LD 2003 takes fairness out of the field of opportunity. LD 2003 is an open invitation and special advantage to developers to build densely concentrated corporate-owned single-family homes in every Maine municipality, allowing the short-term rental industry the space it needs to expand into existing residential homes.
I really admire your tenacity in reporting on what's going on in BBH, as well as the details you provide. Is anyone involved in this travesty responding to you? Are members of the community paying attention to what you're writing? The community had better wake up soon, before everything they know and love will be gone, and the town won't be recognizable.