Torn in a small town As one community dies, another regroups

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Editor’s Note: This is the second story in a two-day series exploring the future of small towns in Maine. The first story appeared in the Feb. 18-19 edition and is available on the Web at www.bangornews.com.

CENTERVILLE TOWNSHIP – A few hundred yards before the pavement ends on the Mitten Mountain Road, Gloria Bagley’s house stands alone amid the silence of the snowy fields and forests that surround it.

Residents of this sparse settlement tucked away in the blueberry barrens of Washington County have become intimately acquainted with the quiet.

“Three cars a day, and one is the mailman,” said Merton Bagley Sr., Gloria’s distant relative who was born and raised here but now lives in nearby Columbia Falls.

Just two years ago Gloria Bagley’s kitchen table was the busiest spot in this sleepy place. There, the town’s residents – 26 at last count – would routinely come and go to register their dogs or pay their excise tax, and almost always, stop and talk.

Today, the town – once the smallest in New England – is no more. And the kitchen table, once covered with stacks of official town records, is a much tidier – but lonelier – place.

“It’s almost like a curtain was pulled,” she said of the atmosphere in town after voters there dissolved their local government in 2004 to join the state’s Unorganized Territory. “The people you used to see you just don’t see anymore.”

To some, disbanding a town seemingly defies the tradition of local control in New England, where spring town meetings date back hundreds of years. That tradition is particularly strong in Maine, which has among the highest number of local governments per capita anywhere in the country.

Since 1983, nine Maine towns have deorganized. The process, much to the dismay of state officials, has become more popular as rural towns faced with dwindling populations and increasing state mandates on how to operate seek relief from rising property taxes needed to maintain basic services for those who remain.

Today, three Maine towns – Cooper, Drew Plantation and Whitneyville – are at different stages in the deorganization process, which normally takes up to two years. On Feb. 9, voters in the Aroostook County town of Hammond voted to stop the process and remain a town.

In all of those towns – as was the case in Centerville – questions abound about the potential effects of disbanding: Who will decide how to spend our tax money? Where will our children go to school? Who will plow the roads? Where will we take our trash? Where will we vote?

In some respects, the answers depend on the town. But those decisions, in all cases, no longer will be made by the local board of selectmen or the town voters. That board will cease to exist, and there will be no more town meetings. All of the town’s property will be sold, and all future decisions will be made at the county and state levels.

“I tell towns [considering deorganization] it’s the last decision they’ll ever make,” said Doreen Sheive, the fiscal administrator for the Unorganized Territory, a vast expanse of land in northern and eastern Maine.

‘There was nobody left’

If Centerville, the latest town to disband, is any indication, there are benefits – and drawbacks – to turning over the keys to the town.

Next door to, but well out of sight of, Gloria Bagley’s house, Bayley Grant can look out his kitchen window and see the former town office, a modest gray modular building a quarter-mile down the hill.

The building, at one of the township’s few crossroads, stands on the spot of the old schoolhouse, which closed decades ago as the number of children dropped into the single digits.

Grant, a game warden, was out of town for training and couldn’t attend the final town meeting at which residents voted to disband and auctioned off the remaining furniture in the town hall.

But his absence didn’t really matter.

Disbanding, he said, was the only real choice for Centerville, where finding people to fill the needed town positions had become all but impossible.

“There was always something that needed to be done, but nobody wanted to do it,” said Grant, who during his 12 years in town served at times as property assessor and third selectman.

“If nothing else, it’s better,” he said, citing improved road maintenance and the addition of curbside trash pickup since the state assumed responsibility for the town.

But state officials, concerned about being inundated with requests from other towns seeking tax relief, generally have discouraged deorganization in recent years. Centerville, with its double-digit population and its relative isolation, was an exception.

“There was literally nobody left,” Sheive said. “You need two people to sign checks. They didn’t even have that.”

Centerville was an exception that was not made lightly – and would not be made for one Piscataquis County town.

The reluctant town

Compared to Centerville, Atkinson is a relative metropolis.

With a population of 350, Atkinson had an elementary school, albeit with just 16 pupils, as recently as 1993.

Today, although the swing set and monkey bars remain outside, the school building is privately owned and features a beware-of-dog sign on the door children once entered.

For Selectman David Kinney, it was the school’s closure that started his town’s path toward deorganization.

“That was the loss of our community,” he said over the sound of a radio playing softly in the background of a recent selectmen’s meeting, an informal gathering around a folding table in the town office.

There’s no denying that Atkinson, like many small towns, has been in decline. After the loss of its school, the town sold its two firetrucks. In a community that once had 15 to 20 dairy and potato farms, there are now three.

Even the town’s short-lived Atkinson Days parade, which in 1991 drew 2,500 people, has long since fallen by the wayside. Last year, the town recorded just two births and three deaths.

“Things have pretty much gone downhill, I guess,” said Michael Snow from behind the counter at his saw shop at Atkinson Corner, the closest thing to a town center.

This town’s journey toward deorganization was cut short in 2004, when the Legislature, citing the potential financial effect on the other towns in the school district to which Atkinson belonged, declined to allow residents there to take a final vote.

“I don’t know if there’s an 11th commandment or something saying, ‘Thou shall not deorganize,’ but that’s how it felt,” Kinney said of the reluctance in Augusta to grant the town’s request.

Opposition to Atkinson’s request wasn’t limited to Augusta. The issue often divides residents as well, and such was the case in Atkinson, where Linda Roebuck, the town’s former clerk, has lived for all but six of her 53 years.

“People still don’t talk to me that much,” said Roebuck, who opposed the effort to disband despite its potential to cut taxes in town by as much as half. “That’s what happens in a small town.”

While efforts to dissolve the town became personal, Roebuck said that as far as town affairs are concerned, it has been business as usual since the attempt failed.

“They still plow the roads, the kids still go to school, and people still complain about their taxes,” she said.

Back in Centerville, Gloria Bagley doesn’t necessarily miss those responsibilities or complaints. But she does maintain a real sense of nostalgia for her town, which lasted in its sheltered state for 162 years.

“This town did very well, I thought,” she said.