Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [69]
It’s a warm day, for Maine in March, and residents file into the truck bay of the fire station prepared for the long haul, with snacks, thermoses, and in Hannah Warren’s case, knitting. Rows of folding chairs fill the fire station’s truck bay, and town officers sit quietly at tables up front.
Since before Maine was carved from the territory of Massachusetts, the town meeting has been the state’s most common form of local government. All across New England, towns meet in late winter or early spring to vote on operating budgets, laws, and other matters for the community’s operation over the following twelve months. Town meetings are social events, a welcome break from the long winter. They last all day, often broken up by a potluck lunch. Bill McKibben writes in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, “This may not be the most efficient way to conduct the town’s business—electing a mayor and letting him decide might use fewer person-hours in the course of a year. (Allowing a lobbyist to simply write the legislation he’s paid for is simplest of all.) But town meeting is a school for educating residents about public affairs: for making them citizens.” Town meetings, says Frank Bryan, a political scientist at the University of Vermont, are a place to “practice face-to-face democracy as citizen legislators.”
Peter Malia, the town attorney and a partner at the Hastings Law Office (yes, those Hastings), moderates today’s meeting. He speaks quickly and without inflection, mindful of the thick warrant he must wade through before he’ll eat his supper. After sprinting through the first four articles—which have to do with the salaries of selectmen, selling town property, prepaying taxes, and maintaining snowmobile trails—a motion is made to take Article 17 next, out of order. “We need two thirds to pass that,” Malia says dispassionately. A voice vote approves the switch, and Gene Bergoffen, the sponsor of the water ordinance, takes the mike.
“There have been a lot of personal attacks in this matter, which have substantially confused people and undermined their trust in both people and this process,” he says. In a room of winter-white people, Bergoffen looks tan and fit, with a close shave and a recent haircut. Bergoffen suggests the town delay voting on Article 17 until a day when “calm and impersonal focus,” “objectivity,” and “good science” can prevail.
Malia calls for a stand-up vote: by a margin of three bodies, the town of Fryeburg decides to debate the issue immediately.
The full text of Article 17 runs to eighteen pages, and it’s been publicly available for only three weeks. But even if most people at the town meeting haven’t actually read the thing, they know what it’s fundamentally about: passing the water ordinance will allow Poland Spring to continue buying unlimited amounts of low-cost water from the Wards Brook aquifer while excluding other entities from pumping there. Within a newly drawn “wellhead protection zone,” the ordinance will restrict what property owners can do on, or with, their land.
The ordinance seems to offer multiple layers of protection to the Wards Brook aquifer, from which the town drinks, but many townsfolk distrust it all the same. “Poland Spring thinks this is a huge aquifer,” the Reverend Ken Turley had told me earlier, over tea in his kitchen. Turley is the pastor of the Church of the New Jerusalem, whose ladies would serve lunch on town-meeting day. “The company will need another bottling plant, and it will outspend anyone in order to do it. But once Poland Spring is in, you can’t interfere with their profit. The town will end up buying water from