The lead editorial in the Sept. 22 edition of your paper was brought to my attention.

I suppose I am part of what you refer to as the “local-control crowd,” though less for my job title than because I believe in local control. Thus, you will find me biased when I question your implication that tax-dollar waste is not only rampant at the local level but somehow sinister enough to require “watchdog groups” to ferret out.

For the past 10 years I have been a town manager Down East. I have worked for dozens of selectmen, all of whom were so careful with a nickel that they can tell you how many hairs there are on Jefferson’s head. I think you have insulted the integrity and the sometimes courageous dedication of these leaders, who serve voluntarily and mostly without thanks.

For any governor, including the present one, to accuse local communities of tax-dollar waste is surely to throw stones. If the same courage existed in Augusta as does in the local communities with which I am familiar, then perhaps the state would share school costs responsibly, would stop devolving services to the local level (services that frequently the state mandates), and would make more of an effort to invite governmental cooperation instead of pouting about its absence.

Your paper aspires to be regional; perhaps that is why your otherwise good sense is murky when it comes to issues of regionalization. Regionalization is not going to be ordered from above. It will happen in time, when communities are confident that decisions about services and “outlay,” as you call it, are responsible to them and not to extra-local levels of government whose accountability remains suspect.

Democracy took the form of town meetings from the outset. It is curious that you attack local government in the name of “money-saving opportunit(ies)” when the problem of expenditure might be seen to have begun when most decision-making was taken out of the hands of local government. Edward J. Storey Jr. Town manager Searsport