There are five candidates announced in the Boothbay Register for Boothbay and one new candidate for Boothbay Harbor.
Two candidates in Boothbay are incumbents. I will not vote for an incumbent because they are responsible for what has happened during the last dozen years or so including the placement of a tree in the middle of our main through way going in and out of town, around which was constructed a tiny roundabout, which I have already written reams about on my blog. The longer the obstruction exists, it only becomes worse. The crunched curve that one has to navigate if one wants to turn left on Corey Lane does not gradually become spacious and graceful over time. Each time I have to drive around it, I hate it, even after all this time. The uncomfortably small curve is just one detail in what could be a large book about everything that is wrong with the roundabout. The story begins with the false narrative with which the obstruction in our main throughway was sold to the public- that of a four-way stop, off to the side of the main throughway being very dangerous. According to legend, some drivers sped through the four-way stop, possibly because the driver saw little need to stop for no other vehicles.
The solution, according to our community leadership was to build a four million dollar roundabout in the middle of the formerly unobstructed main throughway and most heavily traveled road in town.
With all due respect for the fact that the parking lot in the watershed built by the Botanical Gardens was at first denied by the board. leadership caved when the super-funded non-profit sued the town to get its way and so it’s time to vote our past leadership out.
None of the other candidates have any experience on boards, which is a good thing considering that the board most often cited is the board of the Joint Economic Development Council of Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor, which took the high taxes we paid for our former property and then would not consider our proposal for a museum, which at that time was fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas. Museums are recommended by the Camoin Report, but the JECD was preoccupied with spending public money on an advertising campaign to coordinate downtown Boothbay Harbor with the yearly Christmas lights display at the Botanical Gardens when it told me “Sorry we can’t do anything to help individual businesses, we advise getting help from your own peer group”.
Now is a different time. Coronavirus has changed the world but central management is still working from an old paradigm that is still an ill fit for the region.
It is the way of politicians to talk in terms that leave much of their true intentions to the imagination. My interpretation of what local leaders mean when they talk of building houses on smaller plots as “affordable workforce housing” is based on the old corporate welfare model, which is being disrupted by the remote work evolution.
In the old model corporate welfare paid for the job training of a targeted sector of the economy. Job training for “approved careers” can also be had as a high school degree pursuant to Maine’s Industrial Partnerships Act of 2013, such will be a purpose of the fifty million dollars high school proposed by the faction that I call the JECD party.
However, Google recently announced new certificate courses in user experience design, project management, and data analytics with scholarships for which anyone can apply. It involves ten hours of study a week and lasts from two to six months and is the equivalent in job pay to a college degree. You can read about it on The Next Hint.
My thought is that Google’s program is an evolution of remote working. I have not done the research to know how much corporate welfare Google receives but the program is being offered by Google as a scholarship program, and not promoted as state corporate welfare for job training. In that there will no longer be such large numbers of employees (representing income tax dollars to the state) as a trade-off for corporate welfare, remote working disrupts that former paradigm.
There was a time when the Boothbay Peninsula served as a family get-together location during the summer months. No one knows why that changed but one theory is that the younger generations were working high-paid summer tech jobs in the city. If the tech jobs are going remote, including tech job training, could that result in a return to family summertime retreats?
Local politicians all cite the tourist industry while promoting year-round employment, but today that industry’s local tourist industry workforce is largely transient. Seasonal workers easily find places to stay, most likely because it is arranged by industry. I am not knowledgeable about the quarters provided. My guess is it is on the order of a place to lay one’s head at night. Now the real estate activists are proposing minimal housing requirements for projected year-round workforce housing- small plots of land, even townhouses stack up wall to wall, and the houses are broken up into smaller units to accommodate a projected radically expanded population.
We need a new generation of leaders who think differently. The latest candidate in Boothbay Harbor, Allysa Allen is younger and more inclusive in her thinking, including a larger community, even mentioning ceramics- a first! That is a start of a new conversation that needs to be opened up and expanded upon.
So be involved! Read up on the candidates and ask them questions.