Sustainable Finance as a Framework for the Future of a Peninsula!
Examining local issues from a sustainable investment framework and making the case for an alternate vision
I completed my review of the paper on sustainable finance for Humanities and SocialSciences Communications. I can’t talk about that paper but it introduced me to a new popular identifier of a framework that is growing in importance. The core concept is not new but there are of course continually emerging developments related to new tech, scientific research, and society. I can only imagine the new complexities introduced with the new aggression coming out of Russia, that changes the whole picture of globalization as nations question being dependent on other nations. The good news we have new tools to visualize interactions caused by various triggers.
I downloaded the free APP VOSviewer which comes loaded with data about the development of financial sustainability in academic and scientific journals.
But I am going to create my own definition in my own words, Sustainable Finance concerns what is sustainable investment by environment, social and cultural considerations, as an interactive framework, That should be the framework with which we approach community development. Much of that is already in the Boothbay Comprehensive Plan 2015 but much of it has since been ignored and now the State is stamping its foot, for once on the right side of history.
Two new stories of political interest in the local news.
An article titled Appeals board upholds DEP challenge to resource protection zone ruling is a misleading headline since the challenge is still ongoing. The story concerns a building permit for shoreline property on Cross River, but you have to go to the real estate listing to know that because the body of water is not identified in the Register article.
There is also a Cross River Reserve which is property donated to the town of Boothbay in 2014 by the Boothbay Region Land Trust. The website for the reserve describes Cross River as “a tributary of the Sheepscot River and is the longest remaining stretch of undeveloped water frontage on the Boothbay peninsula”
I am surmising that the land under review was purchased by developers to be subdivided and sold in smaller lots.
The story reports that Colin A. Clark of the Department of Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Land Resources is appealing the local board’s approval of the building permit, quoting Clark’s words “Considering the board’s decision violates the town’s ordinance requirements, the state’s shoreline zoning standards in Chapter 1000 and state statutes, the department strongly requests the board reconsider its decision, if legally possible, or revoke the decision and hear it, again”.
If one reads the land use regulations in the Boothbay Comprehensive Plan 2015, it is apparent what Mr. Clark is talking about. The land-use regulations are actually consistent with the philosophy of sustainable finance including protecting the wetlands, which goes to the first issue discussed herein. “4. Encourage the development of a range of types and prices of housing to meet the needs of a diverse population.” relates to the second issue of the expanding school budget.
No details of the environmental violations are given in the article, but it sounds like a healthy (or unhealthy) dose of violations and so there must be something there, especially when considering that a similar letter was sent to Town officials by the State Attorney General’s office. The article then reports that ”town officials contend they followed both local and state rules in approving the development’”, which is nothing but an unsupported assertion.
Next, it is oddly stated, as if in explanation, that the only other location was in a wetland as if to say the bottom line is we have to let these folks build on the property and its either the location that violates town ordinances and state law, or a wetland, which also violates town ordinances and state law, but the bottom line is we have to let them build.
I wonder who these folks are, a little research reveals they are from Massachusetts and the brother of one partner is Brian Cresta who is politically active in Massachusetts and was part of the team representing the applicants in the hearing.
I feel sympathetic to anyone buying property believing that they can build on it, but the environment is the larger issue and so is the party that sold the property to the applicants under the belief that they could build on it.
After receiving the challenges from the DEP and the Attorney General’s office, the Town held a second review with no one from the DEP or the Attorney General’s office present.
Attorney Sally Daggett spoke on the planning board’s behalf. Brian Cresta and the applicants’ lawyer, Sean Turley, also delivered arguments.
As reported in the Boothbay Register, the argument centered on two technicalities, whether the DEP had standing and whether the DEP’s appeal missed the deadline by six minutes. As reported by the Register there were no significant arguments related to the core environmental issues of the property.
Daggart said,” The DEP has an overarching authority under state law for enforcing and administering shoreland zoning. So sure, they have standing here”.
Appeals board member Martin Page asked why Clark wasn’t at the hearing to answer questions. “It makes it difficult to make a decision when the DEP isn’t here,” he observed. I say it makes any testimony about what Clark said into mere hearsay.
After the March 15 meeting, The Boothbay Register took an unusual pro-active move and interviewed Clark by phone, and on that same day, Town officials reported that Clark was being invited to a planning board meeting on April 20.
The more I learn about how local politics works, the more dystopian this town seems. One thing is clear, most developers don’t concern themselves with environmental issues, which are clearly emphasized in the land use section of the Town Plan. The Botanical Garden’s easily lawyer-bullied the Town into allowing its asphalt mega parking lot in the watershed. It might not be as easy to do so when the State is involved.
It was the State that sounded the warning, seven years ago1, about the dangers of further development to our two primary water supplies, Knickerbocker Lake and Adams Pond. Both bodies of water are contained on the Peninsula, but Cross River is a tributary of the Sheepscot River, affecting a larger community. On Cross River, what goes on in Boothbay doesn’t stay in Boothbay.
Another story in the local news is CSD talks $11.4M draft budget, expanding adult ed about the yearly educational budget at the high school, which is contextually inseparable from the 2.5 million dollars raised by a small wealthy people’s caucus led by Paul Coulombe to pay architects to design a fifty-million dollar school to be located on the Boothbay Peninsula where the highschool serves 177 students.
Although there has never been a public vote, the fifty-million dollar school project is prominently featured on the website where it says:
How is this project funded?
Funding of this project will need to be determined. Stay tuned for a capital campaign!
Donations may be mailed to:
Boothbay-Boothbay Harbor CSD
In addition, there is a 501(3)(C) organization called Education Boothbay with a donation link leading to Boothbay Region Education Foundation that funds new tech equipment and training.
A look at its 990 form does not account for the two and a half million dollars raised by a group of private citizens spearheaded by Mr. Coulombe to pay the architects to design the fifty-million dollar school, and nothing explains the figures quoted in the first paragraph of the article:
The Boothbay-Boothbay Harbor Community School District committee continued 2022-2023 budget talks March 17. The $11,366,816 draft budget shows a 4.3% increase in spending, but after $8,782,448 in revenues, taxpayers will see a 0.4% decrease overall, a 4.2% decrease for Boothbay and a 6.6% increase for Boothbay Harbor. CSD talks $11.4M draft budget, expanding adult ed
To my understanding, revenue refers to money earned by a business through producing a product or service, while redistributed money is called funding.
Traditionally, a town produces revenue that funds a public school but this conversation is about the Community School District committee budget and uses the term revenue. These days public and private and for-profits and non-profits merge into each other and anything goes and it is called innovation. Pursuant to the language being used, it is not clear where is the money coming from.
The draft budget is higher than the revenues but the accountant for the school system, Marc Roy, says we can afford to use $825,000 in unassigned funds because revenues have been underestimated for two years, and is expected to be the case this year. One might think that increased revenues could be the result of an increase in real estate values, but then, for clarity’s sake, the money distributed to the school system should be called funding. However, with the Industrial Partnership’s Act repurposing public education as industrial job training, one can’t help but wonder if there is an incremental plan underway to transform all public schools into businesses on the order of the Advanced Manufacturing Center at the University of Maine, which operates as a business employing student labor.
The accountant argued for increasing the budget while Chair Stephanie Hawke was concerned about the sustainability of such an increase, adding that 50 people a day come in the shop who are in trouble. Ruth Macy suggested no more than 3%, traditionally applied as an average rate of yearly inflation.
In terms of sustainable financing, all stakeholders matter. Consistent with that way of thinking, the school budget should not be raised higher than the lower end of property taxpayers can afford, resonating with the core value expressed in the Land Use Plan, “4. Encourage the development of a range of types and prices of housing to meet the needs of a diverse population.”, in which a diverse population clearly includes a financially diverse population.
As public outrage over a two-dollar fee charged by a private working class entrepreneur continues with demands for public access to all of the entrepreneur’s accounting records, there is no public demand for open books about a two-and-a-half million dollar donation by unknown benefactors (excepting Mr.Coulombe) who may have a special private interest in a public educational system repurposed as industrial workforce training, as a public-private partnership of the State’s targeted industries.
There is a Right-To-Know request form on the AOS98 website. The costs that one might incur in asking, include “A fee of fifteen dollars ($15.00) per hour after the first hour of staff time per request will be charged to cover the actual cost of searching for, retrieving, and compiling the requested public record”.
One might not expect a request for the accounting of the two and a half million dollars to take a long time to retrieve, on the other hand, this is Boothbay. I have had my own hostile encounters with the Town Office brought about by requesting a simple Doing-Business-As form. I thought I was just going to walk in the door, request a form, receive the form, and be out the door in five minutes. No big deal.
That is not what happened. Instead of the one-sentence form that I eventually received a few days later, I was handed a multi-page form with many legal warnings at the top of the page and requests for private and personal information and told to fill out three copies and bring them to the next selectman's meeting.
I pointed out the legal warnings at the top of the form to the young clerk who kept telling me that she was there to educate me, She instructed me to pay no attention to those legal warnings, the Town only uses that form because it is the only one they have.
I pointed out that our property was grandfathered as a business in a home since 1952 and she said “Well maybe you want to do something that isn’t covered”.
No, I don’t I thought, but maybe we can discuss that If I actually submit the (one sentence) doing-business-as form. I am not submitting a form, I am asking for a form that I may or may not use.
Did she not know what a Doing-Business-As form is, or did she really think I needed permission and approval by the Town selectmen to use a business name? The more obvious conclusion to draw was that she was trying to get me to sign legal documents that would negate our grandfathered business in a home status, which firmly establishes our stakehold in the Peninsula’s history.
In the course of the conversation, she said that any income-producing activity taking place in the privacy of one’s own home in Boothbay has to have the approval of the Town Selectmen. I found this concept incredulous and so I asked to see the ordinances and sure enough, it was in the town ordinances. At that time it said that any activity taking place in the home for pecuniary reasons had to be approved by the Town selectmen even if the activities have no effect on the neighbors. Thankfully, I do not find that in the 2020 version of the Boothbay ordinances.
A picture of the Industrial Park is displayed in the Town report above the ordinance code regulating businesses in or attached to the home, sending a clear message about where the Town wants to relocate businesses in a home. The Town wants to establish an industrial manufacturing zone and we are manufacturers but the Industrial Park is an absolutely soulless location for production as an art form, that Andersen Design has been practicing since 1952. The location is contradictory to the philosophy and alternative culture movement on which Andersen Design was established, dating back to the Arts and Crafts movements that emerged in response to the Industrial Revolution, that replaced the Cottage Industry culture, which was a business in the home culture.
According to that other Town Plan purchased the Joint Economic Development Council of Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor, the one everyone talks about, The Camoin Report (2017), history is an important feature for our community to capitalize upon. The Andersen Design philosophy is inherent in the business in a home environment using production as an art form. Our model has historical precedence over the corporate centrally managed model of the Industrial Park, which, I suspect is based on the central template for everywhere codified in the Industrial Partnerships Act, in turn, modeled on Silicone Valley.
Did I say that the Camoin Report also said we should emphasize what is unique about our region?
The people writing the rules have no knowledge of what running a small business entails, or care an inkling about how the working environment impacts the work process. After going to the Town Office to pick up a DBA form, I left feeling as if making a living on one’s own premises is criminal activity. When hearing the often-repeated political rhetoric about how the so-called leaders want to “attract and retain businesses”, I know politicians also want to eliminate businesses that do not fit the central management’s designs. However, that attitude contradicts the philosophy found in the Land Use Plan “4. Encourage the development of a range of types and prices of housing to meet the needs of a diverse population.”,
A centrally managed economy is like having one corporation with one vision, one agenda, one cultural set of values run an entire community, state, or country, to the exclusion of everything else. When that happens everything everywhere looks and feels the same.
Then a pandemic happens that keeps everyone at home for an extended period of time and when it ends, masses of people do not want to go back to corporate headquarters. They want to live their lives their way.
While public local outrage focuses on a two-dollar fee charged by a grassroots entrepreneur, millions and millions of dollars are added to our Town debt with every passing year receiving almost no public examination or comment- though that is changing through comments in the Boothbay Register. I hope people will come together under the rubric of the Green Party caucus and make our own vision for the future of this peninsula and the wider region in which it sits. This is what I would like to do with the Green Party caucus and this conversation is a start.
Grateful for my blessings
I was privileged to grow up in an unusual creative learning environment of a business in a home. I love the lifestyle and the work process and it is my mission to make sure that the assets we built survive to benefit a future generation of creative working-class entrepreneurs, and I love swimming in the ocean at Ocean Point. Why should we be pushed out or relocated to an inappropriate environment for our business? We did not prosper because of trickle-down economics from Boothbay Harbor. We were destination shopping. Customers traveled hundreds of miles off course to come to our shop. Andersen Design is sold and collected nationally and internationally. We are the living history of the Boothbay Peninsula, not just a rhetorical talking point used by politicians.
The State’s current challenge to the development on Cross River is a harbinger of what is to come if the fifty million dollar school makes it to the building ordinance stage. The Town leaders may be willing to look the other way on the dangers posed to the local water supplies, but will the State continue to look the other way, particularly when the Industrial Partnerships Act envisions industrial clusters surrounding the industrial training centers. The water-challenged Peninsula cannot sustain that level of development. From the State’s point of view, such a facility is optimally located where it is in a region that can accommodate industry clusters.
Instead, the Peninsula could cultivate an alternate culture by encouraging grassroots entrepreneurs. They are innovative by nature. Let them innovate!
I later learned that the warning was sounded in 1989 What’s the threat to our drinking water? Boothbay Region Clean Drinking Water InitiativeSun, 04/03/2022 - 8:45am