Planning Decisions, Inc.

THE BOTTOM LINE FROM CHUCK LAWTON

We Need to Build the Government for Where We Live

Published Saturday November 10, 2007

Give me where I may stand,
and I will move the world.
~ Archimedes

The principal reason we spend so much time talking about but do so little to change our tax burden is that we are forever passing the buck between tax reform and tax relief, arguing now for changing how we get the money for government and then for decreasing the amount of money government spends. By forever debating which task we should undertake first, we succeed in avoiding both altogether.

We engage in a similarly unproductive but curiously satisfying debate in our ceaseless exchange of barbs about “local control” and “state mandates.” Like showboating clerks at Pike’s Market in Seattle, we toss these red herrings back and forth with great aplomb and little consequence. We need every bit of local government we’ve got because otherwise, we’d lose our “local control.” The only reason property taxes are so high is because Augusta passes all these “state mandates” but never gives us the money to fund them.

Forget the billions for education and the five percent of sales and income taxes that come off the top for municipalities. Pesky little facts we can’t let interfere with received wisdom.

Like the tax reform-tax relief debate, the local control-state mandates mantra is a canard, a handy way of avoiding the troublesome reality that neither 496 municipalities nor one state is the best way to make public decisions and provide public services for the way we live.

Maine’s municipalities are an artifact of the 18th century, when most people were farmers or worked in small mills serving local markets, when the nearest towns were a day’s horse or wagon ride away, when March town meetings were both a convenient social outlet following a long winter and an efficient way to dispose of public business before spring planting responsibilities.

Today, working in the town where you live is the exception. Business location is determined by both the adequacy of a labor market enlarged to the range of a day’s automobile commute and the ease of road, air and telecommunication linkages to the rest of the globe. Land use, transportation and utility planning is driven by regional watersheds, regional transportation networks and regional resources. Social networks are electronic and global, independent of time, distance and geography. Shopping is impulsive. Recreation is experiential.

In a word, our governmental structure is misaligned with the way we live. Municipalities are too small, and the state is too big. Municipal boundaries don’t encompass the problems, don’t put our focus on the issues that need to be addressed—downtown revitalization and open space preservation, together. Economic development and neighborhood development, together. Transportation corridors incorporating roads, rails and trails, together. Regional business parks and intergovernmental revenue sharing, together.

Ironically, we don’t need to create new forms of government more efficiently aligned with the way we live; we already have them. They’re our regional planning agencies. From the York County Regional Planning Commission to the Northern Maine Planning Commission, from Androscoggin Valley to Kennebec Valley to the Mid-Coast, we have agencies whose boundaries much more closely match the boundaries of our lives. And we don’t have to create anything new, force new mandates down the throats of locals. These agencies already exist; they have years of experience; they are creatures of and governed by the municipalities that created them. They are now responsible for managing many federal grant programs. We should put state programs on their plates as well. To have 496 communities compete for community development funds is easy to understand but hardly the best way to achieve strategic development goals. It’s like awarding education funds to the winners of local spelling bees—a good reward for individual achievement, but hardly the best means for achieving systematic reform.

In a world where how we live—where we work, shop and play—extends far beyond the town boundaries established 200 or even 300 years ago, we need to find ways to match our local government more closely to our 21st century lifestyles. One first step to that end would be handing responsibility for designing and implementing more state programs over to our existing regional agencies.

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