Preserving The American Political Philosophy

In a story published in the Boothbay Register,  in May of 2014      The return of the TIF ,   the TIF district which was passed did not  include the controversial village improvement plan, traffic roundabout or borrowing money to pay for a municipal bond. In 2016, the town entered into a financial partnership with the Maine Department of Transportation to finance a roundabout. According to the DOT Cooperative Agreement,  the Developer. Paul Coulombe ("PGC5 LLC") hired the design firm to design the roundabout which required approval by  DOT.  I have never found confirmation of the identity of the design firm hired by the Developer. In March of 2016, a proposal including a re-routed Corey Lane, a new entrance to Back River Road and roundabout near the Boothbay Common was published in the Boothbay Register as a plan approved by the Maine Department of Transportation. The Boothbay Register website displays a video approved by DOT...

Today my voice in the Boothbay Register discussion Addressing a national crisis locally: Can the Boothbay region solve its housing issues? was again removed, most likely by the user Islandmanz.  Some months ago, I was confronted in Hannaford by a person employed by the Department of Economic and Community Development . I was told that I had to stop writing about the JECD (Joint Economic Development Council of Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor). There was no collusion between the JECD and Industry Partnerships, I was told by one who obviously had been reading my blog.  The DECD is the statutory planning board of the Financial Authority of Maine , which concentrates and redistributes capital funds in Maine. What, then, is the DECD's chain of command, if not the regional boards? §13059.State agencies to cooperate    All state agencies and any other organizations designated by the department to implement community and economic development programs and policies sh...

While the super-funded Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens Inc is busy using it's vast re-distributed wealth to bully the Town of Boothbay, Maine.into allowing the Gardens to build a parking l ot in the water shed, few are paying attention to the fact that the tax-exempt Gardens is also expanding its commercial operations via a restaurant and an expanded gift store. Meanwhile, thanks to the distributive policies of the Maine DOT , Maine state taxpayers were required to pay one third of the cost of rerouting the traffic patterns entering and exiting Boothbay Harbor by creating an obstacle in the formerly unobstructed roadway so that the traffic pattern goes directly from Coastal Gardens Incorporated to Paul Couloumbs Country Club and planned shopping mall. The co-chair of the JECD public-private development group, W endy Wolf, when running for State Selectmen weighed in on the round about issue by glibly saying she supported t he round about because "it wasn't a ...

Weston Neil Andersen, founder of Andersen Design at age 91, photograph by Susan Mackenzie Andersen The narrator of the video, produced by GHD inc  is selling the need for the round about. He tells us that the traffic going to the Boothbay Botanical Gardens will double in the next twenty years with nothing to back that up but his confident tone of voice. Selectmen promoting tiff financing speak as if there can be no doubt that projected property taxes will yield sufficient return on the investment to cover Boothbay's cost of the round about. Tiffs are seldom spoken about in terms of risk, but there is no such thing as a no risk investment. The future does not follow a certain path. My family has been selling in this region since 1958 but we did not anticipate the sudden down turn in summer tourist spending that happened regionally in 2002 and has continued to decline ever since. The next year, The Boothbay Opera House reopened as an entertainment venue, followed by the B...