Over the past couple of years I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to audiences all over New England about the past, present and future of the Maine Coast. I relate how our peculiar history as a colony of a colony engendered a healthy suspicion of outsiders, and how, in the heady years after the American Revolution, New England’s strong town governments served as a bulwark against aristocratic ambition.
The other day, after a talk in a midcoast town, a guy came up to me, said how he loved the talk, and then affably suggested that “in fairness” we ought to change two things about local government.
Now you should know that he’s a retired surgeon with a second home on the ocean and a primary residence in another state. His program for retooling local government? First, that absentee property owners should be allowed to vote in every place they own property, even if they’re there only one week of the year. Second, that anyone who doesn’t own property shouldn’t be allowed to vote at all.
If the affable doctor had his way he’d have disenfranchised half my family, many of my friends, and, until just a few years ago, me, replacing us with cottagers, condo investors and plutocrats. I’d pay money to watch him propose that at town meeting.
There’s a lot of talk these days of the need to loosen Maine’s “home rule” system of strong local governments. It’s absolutely true that if we’re ever to get public spending in check or prevent the entire coast from looking like Route 1 in Saugus, we need the ability to govern on a regional basis. But as we do so, it’s important to remember why Mainers have been so committed to local control.
Leave New England and, apart from New York and New Jersey, and the country is not divided up into towns as we understand them here. Instead, a town is a compact incorporated area, usually surrounded by vast unincorporated areas that don’t belong to any town at all. Most power is held by strong county governments, which control most aspects of life for those living outside large towns. Only cities have the same level of power that every organized hamlet or village has in Maine.
New Englanders inherited this system (and passed it on to their immediate western neighbors) from the original Puritan settlers. Suspicious of Pope and King alike, they vested civil and ecclesiastical power in local congregations. They didn’t invent town meetings, selectmen, or even saltbox architecture — they brought them southeastern England, where most of the Puritans came from.
After the American Revolution, strong local government took on new importance. Many Americans shared Thomas Jefferson’s fears that the new republic would be destroyed from within, that a homegrown aristocracy would spring up to replace the one the revolution had just overthrown. Jefferson argued that the best way to avoid tyranny was to devolve as much power as possible to local communities, and that the most resilient democracy would be a network of small towns wherein people were self-employed producers — farmers, fishermen and tradesmen — and inherited privilege, by wealth or birth, was not to be tolerated.
These values of the early American republic are still a part of Maine’s homegrown culture. The rich are not supposed to flaunt their wealth, not because it’s tacky, but because such signals of superiority are a threat to democracy. Respect has to be earned over time, not bought or inherited. And as long as each town is a republic unto itself, a direct democracy of citizen legislators, the ambitions of would-be lords can be thwarted, retired surgeons and all.
It’s a system that’s served us well, keeping a check on graft and corruption, and giving ordinary citizens considerable influence over what happens in their communities. It’s kept government boondoggles to a minimum and forced those proposing high-impact projects to make their case to ordinary townspeople, not just county or state-level politicos.
That said, it’s a system that desperately needs to be retrofitted.
The problem is, we no longer live at the municipal level. Many of us sleep in one town, work in another, send the kids to school in a third, and shop in a fourth. We live regionally, which means that we need to be able to plan and govern on a regional scale. One example: when Wal-Mart builds a supercenter, they’re thinking about a market of 50,000 people. Its effects will be felt over an entire county, and yet only the people of the town it happens to locate in have any say over where and how it is built. That’s the antithesis of local control.
We should keep home rule, but we need to redefine what “home” means. Clusters of towns like Damariscotta, Newcastle, Bristol and Nobleboro are in it together; they ought to be planning together, sharing services, revenue and administrators. Efforts like Gateway 1 in the midcoast — the Department of Transportation’s effort to foster voluntary cooperation between towns and state agencies — are spot on, a first step towards addressing decisions at the larger scale we now live at. Towns need to cooperate and coordinate their actions, ceding some of their powers to regional confederations. There should be the equivalent of School Administrative Districts for land use planning and the provision of municipal services. Yes, they will save costs and help keep a lid on taxes, but even more importantly it will let us better shape the destinies of our communities.
Colin Woodard is the author of The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier. He lives in Portland and has a website at colinwoodard.com.