Special Report Torn in a small town Letting go of local control poses quandary for residents

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Editor’s Note: This is the first story in a two-day series exploring the future of small towns in Maine. The second story will appear Monday.

DREW PLANTATION – James Potter’s roots here run deep.

“We have a kinship, I guess you could say,” said Potter of his connection to this tiny Penobscot County outpost where he was born 71 years ago – the same year the town officially organized.

For 40 of the years since, he at times has served as town selectman and caretaker of its now 25-year-old firetruck, which rarely moves from its parking place inside the Quonset hut that also serves as town hall.

For 25 of those years, he has maintained the town’s cemetery on a high clearing off Route 171. Beneath one of the older tombstones lies another James Potter, a distant relative and Civil War veteran who was buried on the tranquil spot more than a century ago.

But Potter’s relationship with the town – and the town itself – might be coming to an end.

Drew Plantation, located about two hours northeast of Bangor, has a population of only 42 people. It is one of several rural towns exploring whether to disband and join Maine’s Unorganized Territory, a vast expanse of forestland in northern and eastern Maine that is run by state and county officials.

For most of these communities, it’s a numbers problem in two respects: There aren’t enough people willing to fill town positions, and property tax rates rival those of larger cities, but offer far fewer services to their residents.

In practical terms – and most disturbingly to historians – deorganization also brings an end to local elections and annual town meetings that have been the backbone of small-town New England democracies since the 17th century.

The tradition of local control has thrived particularly in Maine, which has among the highest number of local governments – and local government employees – per capita anywhere in the country.

Although Potter seems resigned to his town’s eventual demise, the tradition of local control still stirs in the back of his mind.

“I cherish my rights and freedom, and I don’t want someone from afar dictating to me,” reads Potter’s handwritten testimony delivered last week to a legislative committee considering the town’s fate. Although it might not sound like it, Potter, who personally opposes deorganization, reluctantly testified in favor of disbanding the town given its current state of affairs.

On Wednesday, that committee backed a plan to allow the town’s residents to take a final vote on the matter.

The full Legislature now must approve the request for a local vote. If it does – and two-thirds of townspeople vote to disband – Drew Plantation would become the 10th town to do so since 1983.

Other towns, including Whitneyville and Cooper in Washington County, are at various stages in the process. Last week, residents of Hammond, just outside of Houlton, voted to stop the process and remain a town. State officials also recently fielded an inquiry about deorganization from the Aroostook County town of Perham.

The growing trend has worried state officials concerned about being inundated with requests from towns seeking to join the Unorganized Territory, where property tax rates can be roughly half that of organized towns.

There are also concerns about the potential effects on surrounding towns, which often have financial partnerships with the towns seeking to disband.

Lawmakers consequently have toughened the requirements in recent years.

For instance, starting the procedure once required signatures from just 10 percent of the town’s registered voters. Now that number is 50 percent.

In Drew Plantation, where 14 people voted in the 2002 governor’s race, that translated into a mere seven signatures.

In Cooper, a lakeside town in the wilds of interior Washington County, those wanting to explore deorganization needed 39 signatures. They collected 42, several of which came from the lunch counter at Cathance Lake Variety, the town’s one and only store. Owned by Town Clerk Kathleen Hull, the store doubles as the town office. Calls to the town’s telephone number are answered with Hull’s cheery “Cathance Lake.”

A fixture at the store’s counter is Denny Lyon, who owns property in Cooper and the neighboring Unorganized Territory known as No. 14 Township.

Lyon, who is semiretired, counted Cooper’s high taxes as foremost among his reasons for favoring deorganization. But money isn’t the only reason to consider handing the keys to the state, he said.

“It’s the state and the federal governments that really tell you what to do, and the town has to do it,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a small town no more.”

Roots of democracy

Indeed, with increased state and federal mandates, small towns have lost some of their autonomy, said Jane Mansbridge, a Harvard University professor and expert on local governments.

While the pursuit of lower taxes is understandable, she said, it could come at too high a price.

“I can see how the temptation would be considerable,” Mansbridge said. “However, the ability to belong to a political entity where you actually make decisions for yourself and your neighbors is a gift that brings with it a number of benefits.

“You don’t see them when you have them, and you don’t immediately miss them once you lose them,” she continued. “But one day you look around and say, ‘Things aren’t the same here anymore.'”

After nearly a decade in town government, the Cooper clerk has grown somewhat tired of what she considers an idyllic view of small-town democracy.

Besides being town clerk and registrar of voters, Hull also recently served as tax collector and treasurer. Pulling double duty – or in Hull’s case, quadruple duty – is common in small towns, which, despite having few residents, still must plow roads, send children to school, dispose of trash, run local elections, administer general assistance and provide a host of other services.

Hull, who favors deorganization, said she intends to resign her posts at next month’s town meeting if someone else wants them. It is a town’s residents, she said, not its mandatory annual meeting, that keep a community alive.

“We’ll get together because we want to, not because we have to,” said Hull, whose quest was kept alive last week when a legislative committee voted to reconsider Cooper’s petition to disband.

The town has tried to dissolve itself twice before. In 1997, the attempt failed after residents balked at sending their children to Edmunds Consolidated School, one of six state-run schools in the Unorganized Territory. In 2005, lawmakers asked state and local officials to take one year to try to resolve the town’s problems before considering the request.

Outside of town, perhaps no one is watching Cooper’s progress more closely than Les Gardner.

Gardner, a selectman in the Washington County town of Whitneyville, population 252, has enough signatures to start the process of deorganizing.

The next major step would come when townspeople meet with state officials next month to discuss the details of disbanding. The residents then vote, and if a majority agrees to proceed, a committee is formed to study how deorganization will affect surrounding communities and school districts.

A bill then is introduced in the Legislature, which must approve any town’s attempt to disband. If approval is granted, townspeople take a final vote, with two-thirds needed to deorganize.

The Legislature, particularly in recent years, has been reluctant to allow towns to disband solely for the prospect of property tax relief.

The tax rate is generally lower in the Unorganized Territory, state officials explain, because school costs – the major factor in a small town’s budget – are spread among taxpayers throughout the territory’s 419 mostly uninhabited townships.

There are other reasons for the state’s reluctance. Namely, state agencies that oversee the Unorganized Territory simply are not designed to provide services to large populations.

“Most of our residents are trees,” said Doreen Sheive, the fiscal administrator for the Unorganized Territory, which has 7,800 permanent residents in its 9.3 million acres.

Seemingly a less likely candidate for deorganization, Gardner’s hometown of Whitneyville was incorporated in 1845. It has a town office, a church, a community center, and a library in the town’s former schoolhouse.

And – unlike Drew Plantation or Cooper – there’s a sign announcing you’ve actually entered the town.

Gardner is well aware that, considering the current mind-set in Augusta, his effort might be in vain. But, he said, if nothing else, his community could let state lawmakers know they must better address the high property taxes that are fueling deorganization efforts.

“If we can’t go ahead, then maybe we’re sending a message,” he said. “I think we really have to.”

Mission: Regionalization

Lawmakers in Augusta have their own message to small towns: Work together.

Politically, however, there’s no hotter potato than proposals to consolidate school districts and government services – or even merge entire towns – in an effort to reduce local costs.

“There are rivalries, and there’s a certain sense of pride people take from living in their community,” said Rep. Christopher Barstow, a Gorham Democrat who chairs the Legislature’s State and Local Government Committee. “It would be like telling people in Veazie to join Orono. You wouldn’t get very far.”

Indeed, one has to go back 84 years to find such a merger, when the Piscataquis County towns of Dover and Foxcroft – with the addition of a hyphen between their names – officially became one town.

Whitneyville was part of Machias at one time in its history. While annexation is one of the options a town must explore before it deorganizes, Gardner was unsure about the possibility of such a reunion.

“When there’s a little guy, there’s always an expectation from the big guy that the big guy always runs things,” Gardner said, characterizing his town’s relationship with much larger Machias, a town of about 2,300 people. “You’ll always have that.”

In her work with towns seeking to deorganize, Sheive has heard more pointed resistance.

“I’ve actually had people tell me that people in the next town have cooties,” she said.

If full-blown mergers are a tough sell in many Maine towns, so is deorganization.

In Hammond, a southern Aroostook County town of about 100 people, residents gathered late last month at the former one-room schoolhouse to talk about disbanding.

No matter the town – and Hammond is no exception – passions run high over the issue, which generally pits longtime residents against relative newcomers.

Although he came from Philadelphia, Glenn Hines, a sculptor and first selectman, is no newcomer to Hammond, where he and his wife have lived for 32 years.

Despite his long tenure, Hines sought to reassure the 15 or so townspeople at the meeting that there was nothing sinister about his effort to deorganize the town.

“We’re not trying to hoodwink anybody here,” he said, reciting for residents the potential benefits of disbanding – particularly the ability to cut the town’s high school costs.

“That’s a pretty poor way to cut taxes,” Third Selectman David Saunders, a lifelong resident, shot back. “I think the board could look at other ways rather than turn the town over to the wolves.”

Saunders’ position eventually carried the day in Hammond, where residents met again last week and voted 15-9 to stop the process.

While Hammond will remain a town – at least for now – back in Drew Plantation, Potter remains torn. He considered his town’s future recently while on his way to check for fallen branches in the cemetery, where the town’s history is written on weathered gravestones.

“Why do I want to take the town away from the younger kids who can’t vote?” Potter asked, questioning his already wavering support for disbanding it. “Maybe they want to keep it. If I take it away from them, they’ve lost that chance.”

Monday: One town dies, another hangs on.