The Rise of the Content Provider Amid the Hey Day of Hierarchial Order
The grassroots finds its voice and venue.
I began writing because I did not see my point of view represented in the Maine media. The first act of evolution is when the individual finds their voice, It may not feel monumental, just one day when, you, the individual, as opposed to the collective system, feel you have something to say and you put your pen to paper, your voice to a microphone, or camera to the world. Thoughts that were running around your head fall onto the canvas and speak to you, asking you what is it that you really want to say, and you ponder that thought, rearrange that thought, talk back to it, cut and paste it, shuffle it around and suddenly it’s a thought object, its a product, its a thing. It is your voice, you can speak clearly now!
My experience with organizations and agencies across Maine is that they do not respond when I write to them about anything, not when I am looking for support for my projects related to Andersen Design, and not for any legislative concerns. It doesn’t matter if it is government or a nonprofit organization, appearing on the surface to address matters of mutual concern. I do not have a voice or a rapport with local organizations.
Commonly when I attend a meeting I am cut off as soon as I open my mouth to speak for the first time with “I am sorry, it is inappropriate for you to say that now”, now is not the “Introduce yourself” part where it seems inappropriate to launch into a substantive narrative about why I am there, as opposed to a sentence about who I am and where I am located. I like gardening, swimming, and pets.
However, I am on Grow Smart Maine’s mailing list and today I decided to look into what they are doing.
The very first thing I see is a Testimony by Grow Smart Me in support of LD 2003. Seeing this instantly categorizes Grow Smart Maine for me.
I have not in the past had an ear with Grow Smart Maine, back when Alan Caron ran it, or with Maine Wire which I recently wrote to after identifying a shared interest in LD 2003’s encroachment on Home Rule, receiving the standard nonresponse, or from my new State Senator whom I wrote to about the serious problems with the funding sections of Title 13 B. Once again I received no response but I am hoping a response will be forthcoming.
Who am I? A mere member of “the people”, or the ones who are not invited to participate in the studies and the Ten Year Plans of the State. To be invited one must be a non-profit organization.
I am a state-designated peon and I am good with that because this is the age of the peon’s voice with start-up newsletter platforms on the rise. I have been spending several days adding my newsletter to many platforms and I am still not through the list. Most are in the pre-launch phase. Not all newsletters are written by peons. It’s an intersection where peons, experts, and the well-connected meet. In the content-provider context, anyone can have a voice. It is a genuine grassroots media and it will potentially change the world! The fact that there are so many pre-launches of content provider venues happening at this moment suggests that something is going on and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. and Mrs. Doyle?
And so rather than fruitlessly write to people and organizations that purport to serve a public interest, via the usual channel of closed doors, I will respond to those organizations in this newsletter. I know this newsletter is being read by some who do not want to be known as reading it. For example, I commented herein that when Paul Coloumbe used the phrase “statutes and laws”, he means “statutes and ordinances”. The next time Mr. Couloumbe commented in the Boothbay Register, he said “statutes and ordinances” and then declared that the design of the Boothbay Harbor Water Front Park was “not functional either!”, giving no reason whatsoever for that outburst. In this newsletter, I criticized Mr. Coulombe’s design abilities for their lack of functional awareness. The fact that he would blurt out such a statement with nothing to inform it, underscores my point. He doesn’t know what makes for a functional design- as in form follows function, which means that design begins with the function it serves, and afterward one can add embellishments or not. Mr. Coulombe’s designs start and end with embellishments that impress a lot of people to no end!
This is a list of GrowSmart Maine’s Legislative Testimonies on its website.
It’s a long list. I am not familiar with all the acts yet, but glaringly at the top of the list is GrowSmart Maine’s testimony in support of LD 2003.
The letter of support is written by Nancy Smith. I might expect to share a philosophy with Nancy Smith but it is clear that Ms. Smith does not recognize that Home Rule is an issue with LD 2003, whereas it is an obvious issue to me, as our Constitution is the basis of our rule of law.
A while back I engaged in a brief battle with the webmaster for the Maine Statutes because the Maine Constitution had been changed from its stand-alone web address and its parchment-colored background to a blue background in a sub-section of the Maine Statutes. Eventually, I won. The Maine Constitution has since been displayed as it always was, a stand-alone page on a parchment-colored background. The symbolic meaning of this battle speaks for itself.
The Legislature engages private organizations in supporting and even writing legislation but there is no effort within the Maine educational system to further awareness of our Maine Constitution and so it is not surprising that those participating in public-private collaborations do not frame their role within the parameters established by the Maine Constitution.
And who is in charge of the Maine educational curriculum?
That would be the Maine Legislature.
The Department of Education was established in 1989, §6209. System of learning results established looks comprehensive but it isn’t. Not only is there no mention of the Maine Constitution, but no mention of studies pertaining to the subject of law unless they are subsets of “social studies” or “career readiness”.
The Constitution is the foundation for all laws, and yet the body that is responsible for crafting our laws, and who must take an oath to uphold our Constitution in doing so, assigns itself authority over our educational system and does not think it is important to include a study of the Maine Constitution in our educational system, at any level that I have found. Studying the Maine Constitution should be the rudimentary basis of education for anyone wanting to pursue a career in law in Maine. It is a natural way to engage young minds in the field of law. It is not as complex as the web of statutory laws. It is the principles and philosophy on which those laws are based.
Ms. Smith’s vision occludes the importance of businesses in home and craft making in general. Her industry is included in Maine’s targeted sector but my industry is not:
“We share a vision for Maine as a place with lively downtowns from villages to cities, healthy open space, and productive farms, fisheries, and forest, bound together by strong communities,” Smith says. “In my work at GrowSmart Maine, I am part of bringing that vision to life.” source
I account for this omission to the probability that most non-profit organizations in Maine are linked to the State, especially if the State distributes grants to those organizations. Therefore the state’s targeted sector will be cultivated and favored and the untargeted sector dismissed.
Ms. Smith's statement describes Grow Smart Maine’s focus as shifting from top-down to roots-up. That sounds good but if it is true then I should be able to engage in the conversation:
In 2012, GrowSmart Maine published an update to the influential report “Charting Maine’s Future,” written in collaboration with the Brookings institution. One of the lessons learned since the original report is that the government is not always the most effective leader of change. Instead, initiatives with grassroots community support are most likely to be successful, the report says. GrowSmart Maine is now advancing that idea with its community engagement program, Making Headway in Your Community, a series of community events focusing on single easy, visible projects designed to draw support for those things that matter most to a particular community. source
I have not tried to interact with Grow Smart Maine since Ms. Smith became its executive director and so I ought to give her a chance before arriving at conclusions. I decided to take the initiative.
I forwarded the email that I sent to my Senator concerning the funding rules in Title 13 B to Ms. Smith. This makes sense because GrowSmart Maine publishes their congressional testimonies on legislative acts. Paid subscribers can read the text of the email I sent to my Senator and forwarded to Ms. Smith, Here
Ms. Smith’s letter of support for LD 2003 begins by describing GrowSmart Maine as a statewide nonpartisan nonprofit organization that helps communities navigate change in alignment with smart growth. Fundamental to this is equitable access to housing choices; particularly at risk in recent years with the extraordinary influx of people who appreciate our quality of place.
I can agree with most of the 10 Principles of Smart Growth, but I cannot see a correlation between those principles and LD 2003, which takes away local ordinance rights over determining community character, which is what creates quality of place. LD 2003 transfers the authority for defining community character from the municipality to the state. The mandated “priority zones” for housing of unlimited density is an open call to developers to build corporate-owned single-family home developments across the entire State of Maine. How do massive housing developments of corporate-owned single-family homes equate with equitable access to housing choices? The stories told across the nation about the type of housing that Maine is welcoming with open arms describe anything but “equitable housing choices”.
WHEN WALL STREET IS YOUR LANDLORD- The Atlantic
GrowSmart Maine’s testimony in support of LD 2003 is a testimony in support in name only. While it talks about the discussion process. it has little to say that is specific to LD 2003. It is a general discussion around the issues that LD 2003 purports to address but it does not get into the nuts and bolts of what LD 2003 does and so there is nothing in the testimony that actually supports this act.
How can the supporters and authors of LD 2003 be unaware of the issues and the pushback to corporate-owned single-family homes that are sweeping across Canada and the USA?
Georgia public officials have the guts to stand up for better wealth equality:
Officials in the Atlanta suburb of College Park, where 75% of its approximately 14,000 residents are renters, turned away one developer who requested permits for a build-to-rent subdivision of new single-family homes that would never be offered for sale.
“We were not interested in that,” Motley Broom said. “We’re interested in building pathways to wealth through homeownership for members of our community.”
……Still, the Georgia General Assembly considered a bill earlier this year that would have stopped cities from placing restrictions on build-to-rent subdivisions. The proposal failed, but Davis said she expects the legislature to take it up again in 2023. source
However, with the enactment of LD 2003 the State of Maine put out the welcome mat to corporate-owned single-family home developers across the entire state with Boothbay leading the welcoming committee with a massive development of 162 units. The problem is so prolific that even the federal Congress is holding hearings on it but LD 2003 is signing, sealing, and delivering Maine to corporate owner-developers of single-family homes.
My letter to Senator Reny addresses a specific nuts and bolts issue. See here, paid subscribers. I can identify these small provisions in statutes that receive little public attention as having a wide effect because of years spent independently studying the laws as an ordinary citizen. This newsletter provides a space where I can express my own perceptions about the system. Even Wikipedia would not allow a simple edit in Governor Longley’s biography to include that under Governor Longley, the centrally managed economy of Maine was established in 1976, documented by a legislative report that I learned about through Marshall J Tinkle who wrote the Maine Constitution a reference manual, recommended by The Maine Legislative library. The admin of Wikipedia upheld that statutes and other documents publicly available at the Maine legislative library are not reliable sources. I must verify my facts with an article published in an academic journal. However all but one of the references for Longley’s biography are from Maine mainstream newspapers.
It is only in this newsletter that I can write about what my research has revealed.
A systemic view brought about by years of investigation allows one to comprehend which bolts need tightening. The whole system would work better for the people if the constructive change that I wrote about to Senator Reny were made. Right now the statute protects the interest of the investors and works against the interest of the people, if only because the funding mechanisms allow the system to conceal its operations in a way that allows any deal to take place behind closed doors, which is fine in the private sector but inappropriate for public institutions.
Since the centralized economy was entrenched in 1976 the wealth divide has continually expanded. In my view, that is because, from the very beginning, the system was designed to use the public to subsidize private investors. If that is acknowledged and a will to re-establish wealth equality grows, the first step toward restoration is to review the current system with an eye toward correcting its loopholes and leaks designed for the benefit of private capitalists but sold as a public benefit under the rubrics of job creation, or education, or solving the housing shortage.
The system can be deconstructed as it was constructed, through incremental changes that the system can bear, but the political will to do so has to exist.
In the meantime, Home Rule needs to be strengthened against the State’s attempts to eliminate it through statutory laws. This can be achieved by establishing Town Charters. A local School Charter, and maybe even a Town Charter can require that the Maine Constitution be taught in secondary school and/or high school. I believe this is fundamental to an equitable system as it imbues the principles of government within the populous making it more difficult for laws that override our Constitution to gain a foothold.
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