Cooper deorganization: right problem, wrong solution

The proposal to deorganize the Washington County town of Cooper, recently submitted to the Legislature by a 21 to 32 town vote, addresses a pressing issue in Maine – the burden of property taxes on individual landowners. By giving up their local government and becoming a part of the unorganized territories, Cooper taxpayers would cut their mill rate in half. Owners of properties on pristine Cathance Lake might save a thousand dollars or more per year; other landowners would save hundreds. The problem is a real one – but the proposed solution is delusory.

For those who own lakefront in particular, deorganization is Russian roulette. Sooner or later actual valuation is going to skyrocket, especially if the proposed development at the southern end of the lake proceeds as planned. The fantastic land values one sees at Moosehead Lake and other choice regions of Maine are not far in the future. Local control offers the best protection against excessive revaluation: those who live in the town obviously have an interest in keeping valuations low; bureaucrats in Augusta do not.

For those with schoolchildren, deorganization will inevitably bring confrontation with the state educational bureaucracy. State administrators have priorities that do not necessarily run parallel to the wishes of a few parents in one small town. Ask anyone who has lived in an unorganized township and has had to take on that Goliath. And the predictions made by state officials in the deorganization forums in Cooper about the behavior of their department in the future are just that – predictions, not promises.

The most cogent argument for deorganizing Cooper is that it is difficult to find new personnel to take over from those few dedicated individuals who have served the community so well for so long in the offices of selectman and clerk, among others. I personally am busy enough running my own business without attempting to run a town as well. But I cannot help thinking that if even half the energy that is being spent on deorganizing the town were spent on solving its personnel problem, willing individuals could be recruited.

If deorganization is the wrong solution, what is the right one? Those feeling the greatest pressure in Cooper are older people on fixed incomes. Some towns in Maine and other states have programs that allow people over 65 to defer payment of taxes to their estates. Their heirs must either settle up out of pocket or allow the property to be sold to cover the back taxes. Given constantly increasing values, the program works well. Obviously, towns like Cooper could not take advantage of such a program unless the state could make up the difference by contributing to the town coffers until the property owner died. Such a state-wide program, properly and creatively implemented, would take a lot of pressure off these older citizens.

Another solution crying out for adoption is a higher tax on second homes, of which there are no few in Cooper.

A third solution, limited to Cooper itself, lies in the state’s shouldering its responsibility for maintenance of the major road through the town, Route 191. About 10 percent of Cooper’s budget goes to plowing and servicing this road, which has become a major truck route from the Canadian border to coastal Route 1. In fact, it carries more traffic than parts of Route 1 itself. Some 1200 vehicles per day use it, a figure that meets the criterion for arterial status; that is, by one measure the state could and should take over plowing the road, a duty it has thus far shirked.

So much for the financial side of deorganizing. The nonmonetary loss to Cooper would be beyond estimation. I lived in an unorganized township for 15 years before moving to Cooper, and I can vouch for the fact that the structures of town government that are at stake are key to the sense of community in any small town. Certainly some of my best memories from life in my former township were those days that I spent haying or splitting wood or shingling with neighbors – there was indeed mutual assistance and fellowship there.

But that kind of self-chosen community is a community of people like oneself; it does not have the diversity and truly democratic nature that is in evidence in the typical Cooper town meeting. Living in an unorganized (read that as fragmented

and incohesive) town is literally like living in Nowheresville.

There are other nonmonetary considerations as well. Opponents of deorganization cry that the town would be selling its precious democratic birthright for a few hundred dollars a year. Cooper residents are as fiercely patriotic as Americans anywhere, both on the left and the right; so it is ironic that the move to abandon local democratic institutions in Cooper comes at a time when our nation is fighting a costly war with the ostensible purpose of bringing democracy to a foreign nation. If less were being spent at the federal level for that purpose, there might well be relief for the states that would translate into help for education, which causes about 60 percent of the tax load that is

crushing Cooper residents.

Not only is Cooper’s deorganization the wrong solution for the right problem, it is, as they say about suicide, a permanent solution to a problem that may well be temporary. If Cooper abandons its town government, it will not only lose the underpinnings of its community during the lifetimes of those who live there now; it will rob future generations of that community as well. Once the local government is gone, human inertia alone will ensure that the return to democratic institutions in the town will be virtually impossible.

It is one thing to decide for oneself that one has no use for democratic government; it is another to make that decision for one’s children and grandchildren, and the children

and grandchildren of others. To do so means selling a birthright that is not even one’s own to sell.

Stuart Shotwell, of Cooper, is a self-employed translator, writer and editor.