What Is a Public-Private Relationship, by Another Name?
Is it time to reclaim the separation of the economy and the state?
In the recent past, I have made a comment, here and there, comparing a particular faction’s views about the function of government to that of a development corporation, but it was just a metaphor, or so I thought until I recently requested a copy of a historical government record that I had previously reviewed from the Maine Legislative Library in 2014.
I first learned of the report, LEGISLATIVE RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE ·GOVERNOR'S TASK FORCE ON ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT October 1, 1976, in 2014, in an email correspondence with Marshall J Tinkle, the author of The Maine Constitution, a Reference Manual, which is the reference work on the Maine Constitution recommended by the Maine Legislative Library.
In 2014, when I requested the document, I received a much simpler version than what I received when I requested the same document of the same title and identical cover in 2021.
The library made an exemplary effort to come up with the simpler version but could not produce it. I remembered clearly that the report I received in 2014 had only two main objects, to charter the Maine Capital Corporation and to eliminate the public referendum on municipal bonds. The report I recall did not contain graphs and many developed plans for reorganizing the Maine government. Its cover looked exactly like the cover of two similar but different versions of the 1976 report that I received in 2021:
As I compose this piece, I am sometimes listening to the pundits in the background talking about voter disenfranchisement. Orchestrated attempts to do away with a constitutionally provided municipal referendum on public bonds, is in the same category. The reports reveal that the Governor and his task force are obsessed with disposing of the requirement for the public to weigh in on how their tax dollars are spent, but not once in the report, is it ever mentioned that the referendum is a constitutional mandate. This gives cause to wonder if, when the government becomes a public-private relationship, are the private participants required to take an oath to uphold the Constitution just as the publicly elected representatives are required to do?
Governor Longley took that oath - not very seriously. Did his special board take it, and then ignore it? Would the Constitution of Maine have come into play if instead of forming a private board, the Governor had worked with elected representatives? Does forming such a private board to work out a comprehensive government agenda transgress lobbying laws? Did anyone in the Maine Legislature at that time, bring up to the Governor the issue of the constitutionality, pursuant to the Maine Constitution, or was he surrounded only by yes men?
My recent inquiry produced a new document written in 1975. This document identified a much larger board. None of them are identified as elected representatives:
The version of the report that I read in 2014 did not include detailed and comprehensive plans for instituting the centrally managed economy that is in the versions that I was given in 2021. It was startling to discover that when I equated the government’s role in economic development with that of a development corporation, it was so spot-on, being stated with no mincing of words in the Recommendations on the Governors Economic Development Task Force of 1976:
2. A municipality should be defined by statute as legally equivalent to a local development corporation for the purposes of allowing the MGA (the Maine Guarantee Authority- added by author) to guarantee municipal revenue bonds. Current law requires a local development corporation to hold title in order for an industrial loan to be eligible for a guarantee. This is incompatible with the requirement that the municipality hold the title to be able to issue an industrial revenue bond. This change would eliminate the need for a municipality to take an extra legal step in the process of obtaining new industry. (The 1976 Report, Legislative Recommendations on the Governors Economic Development Task Force of 1976 pg22)
The ”extra-legal step” is a reference to the municipal referendum mandated by the Home Rule Amendment. I infer this because the simplicity of the original report highlighted the importance of eliminating the municipal referendum, and by the attention given to that goal throughout the other versions of the report. In contemporary equivalence, the Governor’s Task Force is that element of Maine politics in 1976 that rejected the results of the vote in 1969. which was the vote to add the Home Rule Amendment to the Maine Constitution. What is prohibited by the Constitution can be achieved through the statutes, they said. and planned, and did.
Article VIII
Part Second.
Municipal Home Rule
Section 1. Power of municipalities to amend their charters. The inhabitants of any municipality shall have the power to alter and amend their charters on all matters, not prohibited by Constitution or general law, which are local and municipal in character. The Legislature shall prescribe the procedure by which the municipality may so act.
Section 2. Construction of buildings for industrial use. For the purposes of fostering, encouraging and assisting the physical location, settlement and resettlement of industrial and manufacturing enterprises within the physical boundaries of any municipality, the registered voters of that municipality may, by majority vote, authorize the issuance of notes or bonds in the name of the municipality for the purpose of purchasing land and interests therein or constructing buildings for industrial use, to be leased or sold by the municipality to any responsible industrial firm or corporation
In addition to the fact that the municipal referendum is the people’s voice weighing in on how their taxpayer dollars are spent, the municipal referendum is also local authority over a local expenditure (local and municipal in character). The Maine Guarantee Authority was a central State government authority. When the inhabitants of a municipality issue a municipal bond, the decisions, benefits, and responsibility for spending and repaying the bond both fall on the same group of people which is local and municipal in character.
In a complementary mission, the Governor’s task force upholds in clearly stated language, that there should be no difference between a municipality and a development corporation.
However, a development corporation is organized to serve an agenda of its own, while a State, in principle, serves the interests of all of the people, and in theory, pays its own expenses, until it merges into a public-private relationship. When the public-private relationship intersects with governing, the focus changes from serving the common good to serving special interests, and often from good sense to nonsense.
In an example, until Paul Coulombe became involved in the (Boothbay) roundabout he appeared to be financing his own ambitions on his own dime, but the roundabout was financed by the public, local, state, and probably federal taxpayers. However you spin it, it would be hard to make the case that the roundabout would ever have come into being if not for Paul Coulombe. There was no sensible reason to place a roundabout in the middle of the most traveled road in town. Who would ever suggest such a thing?
The inhabitants of Boothbay were convinced by their community leaders to approve a roundabout a tree planted in the middle of the main throughway and to surround it with road decor, while the traffic congestion where the main throughway meets the country club road will likely never get a traffic light because it might cause a traffic jam in the mini-roundabout, needed for traffic to negotiate around the tree, which just by happenstance is located where it makes an important-looking entrance to Mr. Coulombe’s country club.
While our community leaders were spinning the dangers of a four-way stop off to the side of the main throughway, the intersection of the main throughway and road leading to the dump (country club road) was not part of the conversation, though clearly more of a traffic issue.
Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame starts out with a treatise on architecture serving as the public press before the printed media was invented. That hasn’t changed. Architecture and infrastructure convey a clear and strong message that doesn’t go away. The new infrastructure delivers an unrelenting message about town leadership functioning, not in the service of the common good, but kowtowing to big money. The road decor joins in and says “We are a wealthy town with money to spend frivolously”. It feels alien, not like a hometown, suitable for driveway entry to a development corporation. Uniform rows of foliage wrap around the town office and continue as tulips arranged in military formation where once there was an old New England home, now gone, its memory faded away into the manicured landscape of the country club.
Answer to the question in the title: Oligarchy.