Media Mission
National mainstream pundits are so concerned that the USA is dangerously close to losing its constitutional foundation and becoming an authoritarian state, that raising the level of public awareness in the minds of everyday people is a mainstream media mission.
This issue calls for more lighting, locally, as well.
Maine became a constitutional Home Rule State in 1969 but we never had a chance to see how Home Rule works socially, psychologically, and economically, because in 1976 the Legislature deemed that “centrally managing the economy is an essential government function”, without asking anyone else. and ever since statutory laws have been enacted to overwrite Home Rule. The most recent giant step in that cause is HP 1489, the act passed in 2022 to address the housing shortage that transfers authority over housing density and community character from the local government to the state.
Home Rule is anchored in a process that initiates from the roots (the people) evolving upward and outward.
But It is true in most societies that there is a ruling elite that does not respect the will of the people and plots to override the public intention by whatever means they can.
A centrally managed economy is corporatism.
Corporatism is controlled by an elite from the top down as a hierarchical system that encourages a culture where vying for a superior position on the totem pole trumps and then tramples collaboration, innovation, productivity, and everyday cooperative human relationships.
The cultural attitude that proliferates in corporate culture is a significant reason why the remote worker’s movement persists, but its voice is not heard by state and local leadership.
Perhaps if a small community listened to what working people want, and developed a responsive community, such a community would become an attraction to the coveted younger generations. Workers want to be in a psychological environment that allows them to engage in the work process. The working class in its purest form is the class that likes to work and is enriched by working, not only economically but spiritually, and because work promotes well-being.
However, the ownership class is granted decision-making authority in just about everything and lacks insight into the real needs and directives of the working classes.
Corporatism is a form of authoritarianism that creeps slowly into society through innocuous rhetoric portraying the transference of power and wealth from the public to private corporations as a benefit for the working class.
When corporatism takes the form of a public-private relationship it is an oligarchy. That is what we have in Maine as codified into state law.
Taxation is used to subsidize the corporate ownership of the means of production in a process promoted as “job creation”. Corporate ownership is subsidized for the good cause of giving the working classes “quality jobs”, which are measured by the Maine Legislature solely by a rate of pay that is “higher than average” and as jobs negotiated by the Maine Legislature in exchange for public subsidization of the corporate ownership of the means of production. Since the state negotiates with public subsidies for jobs that pay higher than average, the jobs that the state targets will always be in the 120% of the median income category, which is the target income for subsidized “affordable home ownership”.
What does it say when the target for subsidized “affordable” home ownership is above-average income? It says that even working a “quality job” does not grant access to ownership without public subsidies arranged by the state.
The state has been centrally managing the economy since the seventies so why hasn’t it figured out how to manage wealth distribution equitably so that workers can afford homes without subsidies? Are we not told that everything the state does in managing the economy is for the sake of the workers?
The centralized economy run by public-private relationships has wrought a lack of available housing for the citizenry, but the state never assesses the effects of its own policies as a cause of social problems. The state assigns a cause elsewhere such as “the housing shortage is caused by “underproduction of housing” rather than by the state’ and local government’s choice not to regulate short-term rentals but to collect a high sales tax on short-term rentals instead. When the transference of residential living units to the short-term rental industry causes a housing shortage for residents, the state comes to the rescue by entrenching its policies and power alliances ever deeper to create a new set of problems for the state to exploit while advancing toward its inevitable goal, the totalitarian state that controls all and subjugates the local government and the individual.
The housing shortage wasn’t created by the underproduction of housing, it was created by policies that continually transfer wealth from the whole of the economy to the top of the economy compounded by a failure to regulate the short-term rental industry.
However, in recent policies, the Maine Legislature forgot to include the now-standardized statement that “The (entity- in this case-the entire state of Maine) is a municipal corporation serving as an instrument of the state”, a statement commonly used to wriggle around Article IV Part Third, section 14 of the Maine Constitution, even though the exception is for municipal purposes while an instrument of the state serves state purposes.
Section 14. Corporations, formed under general laws. Corporations shall be formed under general laws, and shall not be created by special Acts of the Legislature, except for municipal purposes, and in cases where the objects of the corporation cannot otherwise be attained; and, however formed, they shall forever be subject to the general laws of the State. (emphasis by author)
By declaring the entire state of Maine to be one municipal corporation, the Legislature could have gotten around the Home Rule Amendment permanently or at least, until the constitutionality of such a move is successfully challenged in the Maine Supreme Court. Why didn’t they think of this?
You may have noticed that everything in the state’s economic design is calculated as a ratio, as is the GINI rating. Why haven’t the wizards of central management thought of calculating all of those ratios to target a widespread distribution of wealth? Where is the app? They don’t design it if they don’t want it. The corporation, be it the state or be it private, does not serve the greater good, it serves its self-interest.
In 2022 state management of the economy had advanced to the point where only those workers with “quality jobs” can afford home ownership as is the statutory qualification for subsidized home ownership at 120% of the median income, ie “higher than average” medium income, negotiated for you by your state if you are employed in the state’s “targeted sector”. Then you can be one of the special class of working people who get to own something.
1. Affordable housing. "Affordable housing" means a decent, safe and sanitary dwelling unit for which the cost of occupancy is no more than 30% of a family's household income for a family with an income up to 80% of the area median income for rental housing and an income up to 120% of the area median income for owned housing as established by the United States (emphasis by author)
Now that the wealth divide has escalated to the ownership class-working class divide, the same principles are used in “solving the homeless problem” as are used in “job creation”. To have a job, first, the working classes must subsidize the ownership classes so that the working classes can work for the man and to have an affordable place to live, first, the working classes must subsidize corporate landlords.
There is a pattern of confusion in the rhetoric implemented to explain the legislation; so persistent as to appear intentional. It is the act of confusing the corporate identity with that of the people:
Housing and living assistance
Stover said several new laws involve assistance to families in need of housing or other support for living expenses. She said the legislature set aside $70 million for the construction and creation of housing units to reduce homelessness. Projects will be put out to bid around the state. Boothbay Register New state laws could have local impact
The second sentence is a nonsequitur to the first. Corporate ownership of single-family homes is being subsidized, not the families. Families are just paying what would be a fair rent in a system with an equitable distribution of wealth.
Similar identity confusion was seen when the Boothbay Regional Development Corporation closed the purchase of the land for its housing development. The story features the family from whom the land was purchased. There is no one to accept the accolades from the corporation, not Erin Cooperrider, Paul Coloumbe, or Steve Malcom. Why not?
The Disappeared Voices
In a Democracy, the people are supposed to have a voice in their government. Locally, we are told to come to meetings and participate, but behind the scenes, information is being made inaccessible and voices are silenced. The explanations we are given for policy are general impressions, short on real information.
The Register reports that “Projects will be put out to bid around the state”, raising a lot of unanswered questions about how that works.
The Maine Monitor identifies the Rural Affordable Rental Housing Program and the Low Incom Tax Credit are used to subsidize developers to build affordable housing.
Included in the supplemental budget passed Thursday is $70 million in one-time funding for housing subsidy programs statewide through the Rural Affordable Rental Housing Program and the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program. Both are administered by MaineHousing. Maine Monitor
Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program
The federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) provides subsidy in the form of a federal tax credit to developers of affordable rental housing. Developers using funding must reserve a portion of the rental units for lower income renters. (emphasis by author)
MaineHousing allocates the LIHTC to developers who sell (syndicate) the tax credit to corporate investors. The money this raises is used as equity in the rental housing project. The LIHTC can be linked with other financing through MaineHousing’s Rental Loan Program (RLP). Maine Housing
The tax credits provide approximately $20 million annually in subsidy.
What is the required portion of rental units for low-income renters?
While the official minimum criteria allow for a low of 20 percent of units to be affordable, it is common for projects to promise 100 percent affordable units to ensure their application is competitive and they can receive the maximum amount of tax credits .[45] Between 1986 and 2018, approximately 70 percent of projects offered 100 percent affordable units.[46] Additionally, some QAPs seek to incentivize broader social goals such as a project’s environmental impact, proximity to public transit, and occupancy preferences (for the elderly, families, special needs, etc.).[47] Source The Tax Foundation
I have never seen the percentage of units that are low-income identified for affordable housing projects. The Tax Foundation concludes that “While the goal of the credit is to provide high-quality, affordable rental housing to low-income households, the evidence suggests the credit is not effective in achieving this goal. Despite its apparent ineffectiveness, the credit has maintained participation from local developers and continued extensions from a bipartisan coalition of Congressional lawmakers.”
The sales of the tax credits to corporations open the door to private equity investors in deals that package many single-family homes as one investment opportunity. Private equity owners of single-family homes are reported to be the most ruthless of landlords, which makes sense because they are investing only for profit.
It is a reasonable assumption that some of the 70 million dollars will finance the plans laid out in the 2022 bill titled An Act To Implement the Recommendations of the Commission To Increase Housing Opportunities in Maine by Studying Zoning and Land Use Restrictions.
It is not as easy, today, as it once was, to find the above bill in a Maine Bill Search.
Today an advanced bill search including the exact title, exact subject matter, the 130th legislative session, and LD number 2003, all taken directly from the bill, produced no results on a Maine Bill Search.
A comparison search for a bill that I know comes up in search results required only the title for Maine Bill Search to link to the bill.
If you have the exact title, you can find the act using a search engine. However, the public testimony is located on Maine Bill Search so without being able to access the bill through Maine Bill Search, one cannot access the testimonials menu. The last time I was able to bring up LD 2003-HP 1489, the testimony link connected to the main search function rather than the testimonials.
If you right-click “Testimony” on the Boothbay School Charter, and click on “Inspect” it displays the code that leads to the main search page.
Home Rule Authority removed from our School Charter
There is a disturbing article about the school charter in today’s Boothbay Register in which the charter is presented as if required to be “aligned with state law”: But where does this requirement come from?
According to Stover, the former charter met local needs for daily operation of the schools but did not completely meet state law. She said there had been many changes to the charter since the high school opened in the 1950s, some of which conflicted with current law. She said the new version cleaned that up. (emphasis by author)
……..“... Those laws are updated regularly, and if we're following them and we're saying we're following them, then we don't need to constantly update a charter …,” Kahler said.(emphasis by author)
Where is the need to comply with state law coming from? The Maine Constitution says that the state has “the right to grant any further powers to alter, limit or restrain any of the powers vested in any such literary institution”, only if it is making an endowment to the school.
Maine Constitution Article VIII.
Part First.Section 1.
Legislature shall require towns to support public schools; duty of Legislature. A general diffusion of the advantages of education being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people; to promote this important object, the Legislature are authorized, and it shall be their duty to require, the several towns to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for the support and maintenance of public schools; and it shall further be their duty to encourage and suitably endow, from time to time, as the circumstances of the people may authorize, all academies, colleges and seminaries of learning within the State; provided, that no donation, grant or endowment shall at any time be made by the Legislature to any literary institution now established, or which may hereafter be established, unless, at the time of making such endowment, the Legislature of the State shall have the right to grant any further powers to alter, limit or restrain any of the powers vested in any such literary institution, as shall be judged necessary to promote the best interests thereof.
And yet other than the “simple” statement that the charter will be “aligned with state law” the repealed and replaced school charter is mainly details about how the municipality will fund the school. The boards have changed the terms to the State governs our local school system but the municipality funds it. However, speculatively, it sounds as if the lure of a state bond motivated the boards to do what they had to do to get it.
The way Representative Stover and Superintendent Kahler talk about the charter and why it needed to be repealed and replaced in the vaguest of terms is the same way it was explained during the Legislative hearing. The explanation comes across as arrogance justifying laziness as the current boards mocked past boards for writing a charter that is too long for the current boards to read. Mr. Kahler tells us they have “simplified” the charter- down to one sentence “aligned with state law”. He even says that since we put those words in there we will never have to amend the charter again no matter how state law is changed because those words ensure that it will always be aligned with state law.
When I testified that the words “align with state law” could be interpreted as relinquishing our Home Rule authority over our local school system, little did I know how on target I was. It is clear from today’s article that those words were intended to do away with Home Rule. However, the boards are not identified in the Maine Constitution as having the authority to amend the charter. The Maine Constitution grants authority to “the inhabitants of the municipality”, via the Home Rule amendment, a point made in my testimonial.
The timing of repealing and replacing the school charter just when there is a plan underway to demolish and replace the mid-century school building is too coincidental to be a coincidence. One can easily imagine a behind-the-scenes dialogue in which someone has told the boards that they can fund the school with a state bond if the charter is aligned with state law. While the Maine Constitution says that if a school receives a state bond, then the state has “the right to grant any further powers to alter, limit or restrain any of the powers vested in any such literary institution, as shall be judged necessary to promote the best interests thereof”, The Home Rule Amendment still grants the right to amend the charter to “the inhabitants of the municipality”, creating a potential conflict with the Maine Constitution Article VIII.Part First.Section 1.
However, the planners couldn’t get around the municipal referendum on the bond to finance demolishing and replacing the midcentury school. The inhabitants of the municipalities voted the plan down with a very wide margin. Now we are stuck with the repealed and replaced school charter. If the boards thought reading seventeen pages of the old charter was a lot of work, now they have to know what is in state law, and not just the educational section because state law is a web of interrelationships that often require reading several laws from several different sections to fully understand the whole picture.
Problems emerged when the BoothbayTown Manager Dan Bryer said either town could veto the Nov. 7 referendum, according to the school charter, but he was referring to the repealed school charter, which I pointed out and asked where it is stated in state law how a difference in results is to be resolved. The correction statement deferred to AOS98 as the authority but the replacement charter does not say our school system is aligned with AOS09, it is aligned with state law. This issue needs to be resolved, perhaps with another amendment to the new “simple” school charter, before the next school referendum. While they are at it, perhaps read the previous school charters to see if any other parts need to be included. Not too long ago, all the previous charters were available on the AOS98 website, but I am not finding that today.
My testimony is no longer accessible to the public on the Maine Bill Search page, but it is available here.
The Rural Affordable Housing Program
The good thing about the Rural Affordable Housing Program is that it is limited to projects between 15 and 18 units rather than massive developments like the one on the Boothbay Peninsula. The affordable housing requirements must be maintained for 45 years which used to be thirty years.
The developers in rural Boothbay were likely planning on the voters to approve the 89 million dollar school to populate the development located in a community with an 80% median income that is far higher than the state-wide homeless and low-income people can afford, who are the targeted demographic in promotions for public investment in subsidized housing.
She said the legislature set aside $70 million for the construction and creation of housing units to reduce homelessness. Boothbay Register New state laws could have local impact
The Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor voters rejected the school by a margin of approximately 2-1. The voting line in Boothbay went out the door and onto the lawn.
The Boothbay Regional Development Corporation is developing a 137-unit affordable housing project on a 30-acre parcel on Butler Road in Boothbay. source
It’s hard to take the motivational claims about HP 1489 seriously when one of the authors of the act, Erin Cooperrider, is the first out the gate to head up large-scale affordable housing development in Lincoln County’s wealthiest community, where the rents that can be charged for affordable housing are the highest. If the Legislature, and private authors of the act, were serious about solving the state-wide housing problem, why didn’t they apply a state-wide median income, instead of a municipal median income, so that they could target the demographics where the direst need exists first?
Shawn Yardley, chair of the Statewide Homeless Council says this:
“You’ve got to build more housing. So you’ve got to have subsidized housing because not everybody can afford the cost of living and what it costs to build something now,” Yardley said. source (emphasis by author)
Yardley doesn’t say who should be subsidized, the people or the corporations.
Why not subsidize the people so they can afford to build something? Why not subsidize someone building a single affordable home? At least genuine single home builders should be given a chance, especially in rural Maine which historically was developed one individual home at a time. 15 to 18 people building individual affordable homes is 15 to 18 affordable homes. Furthermore, building single homes does not require the acquisition of a large parcel of land. If the point is to build more houses because there is a housing shortage why wouldn’t we want to utilize different sized plots of land?
The difference between subsidizing corporations and subsidizing individual builders is in the ownership of the homes and whether in the future rural living for Maine year-round residents will include an individual person-to-land relationship, where one can grow one’s own garden.
In projects like the one being developed in Boothbay, the non-profit corporation retains ownership of all the land, and along with its equity investors, also owns most of the housing units. I hear on Nextdoor that developers in Bath are trying to convert a golf course into “cluster housing” which are developments where the land is communal, not a private space. As Maine is aggressively driven down the path of corporatism, rural living for the non-ownership class, is increasingly resembling housing barracks providing the minimum level of needs and cut off from the experience of nature. We can do better.
I anticipate that the reason why individual builders cannot have equal access to subsidies will be said to be because of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. However, the report by the Tax Foundation concludes:
As the supply of affordable rental housing for lower-income households continues to decline, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit will remain at the forefront of the housing policy debate.[68]
Can we get innovative about expanding the same subsidies to individual builders as are available to corporate developers? Being small and needing to compete would likely mean that 100% of the units built by individual and small builders would be for low-income or affordable housing, and being more closely connected to the community, they are less likely to sell the tax credits to private equity corporations.
That last statement is me being optimistic. Individual investors have equal opportunity to be ruthless but perhaps the ratio of sincere to ruthless would be a better one. We have to keep on trying and that begins with acknowledging the errors of past policies and trying new approaches.
Hey Mackenzie- I like this sentence you wrote, "people are supposed to have a voice in their government." Isn't that the truth? Thanks for sharing your thoughts.