Do you favor amending the Constitution of Maine to allow the Legislature to provide for the assessment of land used for commercial fishing activities based on the current use of the property?

For longer than a century “summer people” have regarded coastal Maine as more a place to look at than work in, and Maine itself has done plenty to encourage the well-heeled to settle in for the season and enjoy the view. Some liked it so much they built second homes here or made Maine their new home, changing the life of along the coast, especially for fishermen, who increasing find their way to the water barred by the high cost of coastal property taxes.

Voters will notice that Question 4, in keeping with proposed constitutional changes, is vague. If passed, the details of this important proposal will be worked out in the Legislature, through public hearings and work sessions. All that voters will be answering Tuesday is whether the undisputed problem of fishermen being less and less able to afford property along the coast is worth doing something about through the tax code.

It is, for several reasons. The most practical of those is that fishing, directly and indirectly, employs some 26,000 people in Maine that last year added approximately $700 million to the state’s economy. But increasingly, rising property valuations, which produce higher property taxes, on the coast, is squeezing this traditional industry. Fishermen need access to the coast for obvious reasons, but simply providing more public docks is an inadequate response for a less obvious reason. Not only do they need to get themselves to their boats, fishermen need to move gear – often tons of it in towing wire, scallop draggers, traps and winches – between shore and boat. Their ability to do this, and the time it takes them to do it, can make all the difference in whether their business will succeed.

Question 4 aims to define working waterfront and tax those places as they are actually being used, and not, as currently re-quired, to reflect the price of a nearby property that was just sold as the grounds for a brand new mini estate. This lowered tax would provide both incentive and ability for fishermen to hold onto their land and keep it part of the fishing industry.

Opponents of this idea have raised some legitimate points that should help shape the bill in the Legislature. For instance, if voters approve this question, lawmakers should make it a priority to fund it so that the tax burden is not simply shifted to others in the community but spread over the larger pool of statewide and out-of-state taxpayers. Tough definitions of what constitutes working waterfront are essential. And, as with similar tax-reducing programs for tree growth and farmlands, there should be an exit penalty to prevent a landowner from taking advantage of the tax break for several years and then selling out unscathed for development.

With those restrictions in mind, however, voters should support Question 4 as a practical response to the changing real-estate demands on the coast. And there are also some less concrete reasons for supporting this constitutional change, reasons that are hard to measure but nevertheless are of immense worth to Maine.

There is value, not just in dollars but in the character of a community, in producing an actual product for a day’s work. Measure it in cords of wood, hundredweight of potatoes or pounds of fish, the physical product, as much as any geographical feature, identifies a place, informs its inhabitants about where they live, connects them to their hometowns in a way that the dot-com or service industry world never can.

This is a trait worth preserving in Maine, and worth asking the Legislature to act on for the sake of fishermen – and for the communities they live in.