The Island Institute’s trustees voted in March not to take sides in Peaks Island’s independence effort, but Institute president Philip Conkling spoke at the public hearing, emphasizing all island communities’ ability to solve daunting challenges. Below is a portion of Conkling’s testimony:
…We do not pretend to be experts on the complex financial and tax implications of how the present bill, if enacted, would affect the City of Portland or Peaks Island. You will have to judge this issue and how much weight to give it based on the testimony of others.
We know that some of the Institute’s Peaks Island members wish to remain a neighborhood of Portland for all the advantages that relationship offers. Others wish to be independent. The Island Institute intends to work with the community and residents of Peaks Island whatever the ultimate decision on their form of government….
One of the biggest fears expressed by island residents and mainland representatives contemplating independence from a mainland municipality is that these small communities may not have enough people to take on the enormous, often onerous, always thankless tasks of governing themselves. Sophisticated skills in municipal finance, legal compliance with complex regulations, and making hard decisions to allocate scarce dollars for pressing community priorities make any reasonable person swallow hard. Islands also face unique challenges — in evacuation plans for medical emergencies, solid waste management and transfer, the high costs of providing for education, among others. All we can say is that other island communities, whether they have been independent from their inception, or recently constituted, have demonstrated a remarkable ability to develop and keep developing novel solutions to their very real challenges.