Lastly, just this week I heard that the Brookings Institution was doing a study in Maine, and the report Charting Maine's Future: An Action Plan for Promoting Sustainable Prosperity and Quality Places was released on October 5, 2006.
Here is an interesting article about GrowSmartMaine and its founder.
The Portland Phoenix Unvarnished In search of authentic Maine By Sara Donnelly September 27, 2006
Mainers believe everything south of where they are is not the real Maine. Maine is at a unique crossroads. The state needs to grow, but it doesn't want to change. Maine must jump into the global economy to survive, but can't wreck the insular culture that helps make it unique. Growth - more jobs, more housing, more money - is necessary and inevitable, but unplanned growth produces a disorganized state plagued with unwieldy sprawl. And nobody wants that, least of all Alan Caron.
In 2002, Caron, a former business consultant, founded GrowSmart Maine, a nonprofit organization in Yarmouth dedicated to fighting injurious sprawl. In 2005, Caron flew to Washington DC and, armed with little more than a few posterboards and a speech, convinced the prestigious Brookings Institution to spend one year studying the state's economy and culture and, goddamn it, to figure out how to preserve everything great about us.
Brookings, one of the world's most respected think tanks, also considered proposals for similar projects from several other states. But Maine's dilemma caught their attention. Caron spent months juggling his work for GrowSmart, organizing the Brookings researchers' trips to Maine, and raising nearly $1 million (for their salary and for study implementation costs) from foundations, businesses, and individuals (including former governor Angus King). Brookings compiled a team of nine economists and researchers from Maine and around the country to take the measure of the state. Along the way, Caron's ode to his home also managed to ruffle some powerful feathers on both sides of the aisle in Augusta.
This sweeping, dense study on some of the most pressing policy questions Maine currently faces is catchily titled "Charting Maine's Future: An Action Plan for Promoting Sustainable Prosperity and Quality Places" and will be released on October 5 and available at GrowSmartMaine.org. The report includes Brookings's policy recommendations, which will be the subject of state-wide grassroots groups Caron intends to convene and work with over the next five years. Caron hopes that his report will influence policy-makers throughout Maine during this campaign season and beyond.
"This is our best shot at an unvarnished picture of Maine," Caron said of the study last spring. "We've got a lot of data swirling around [from other studies] and sometimes it conflicts and sometimes it can be self-serving. The Brookings study will be our blueprint for action."
The project's stated purpose, according to the GrowSmart Maine Web site, is to take a look at "the relationship between unplanned growth and sprawl, the growing cost of government, and our ability to create and attract tomorrow's jobs." But the report will look beyond the bottom line. Among the number of enormous questions it will address is one that triggers strong feelings from Kittery to Fort Kent: how does the state compete in a global economy without compromising a character built on reclusiveness?
Sometime last winter, it occurred to Caron that the "Brookings guys" would need to get out and talk to people to figure out how to answer this last one. Brookings needed to hear from Mainers about what they want to protect and what threatens them. Caron decided to take one of the most prestigious think tanks in the world on an old-fashioned Maine road trip.
And so, on April 25, cooler stuffed with Moxie and stereo keyed to Ray LaMontagne, Caron, GrowSmart program director Lisa Fahay (or, as Caron calls her, "Lisa, old buddy"); his legislative liaison Maggie Drummond ("Maggie, old buddy"); the Brookings Institution's Mark Muro, policy director for the Metropolitan Policy Program; and this reporter piled into a rented van smelling vaguely of someone else's dog and departed from Presque Isle to snake south through nine stops - in Caribou, Eastport, Dover-Foxcroft, Farmington, Waterville, Camden, Scarborough, Brunswick, and Alfred. These were three days set aside to find unvarnished Maine.
Bitter reality Somewhere between Eastport and Dover-Foxcroft, Mark Muro had his first taste of classic New England. Bored with a wifi laptop rendered useless by a dead signal, he bent to pressure from Lisa Fahay and tried a Moxie.
"As of this legislative session, that is now the official drink of Maine," said Maggie Drummond from the front seat.
Muro stared at the dark soda in his glass.
"What's it taste like?"
"It tastes like root beer before it was sweetened," Caron answered.
Muro grimaced.
He sipped from the cup and nodded politely. A few minutes later, while Caron sat immersed in a biography of Lincoln, Muro dumped his remaining Moxie out of the van's back window.
"We've got some pickled eggs up here for you later," shouted Fahay from the driver's seat.
The classic Maine, which Muro had found himself in a van full of, is what Brookings refers to as our "brand." For decades, Maine's brand was defined by its rural lifestyle - Mainers were fishermen, farmers, factory workers, homemakers, and hunters living in small communities on the edge of a sweeping, untamed wilderness. But since the collapse of Maine manufacturing became evident in the 1980s, Maine has been in the throes of what University of Southern Maine professor Richard Barringer refers to as a "time of historic change" in which the state must decide how to both grow economically in a global market and still retain its unique character, which comes from generations of independent-mindedness and contented detachment from the rest of the world. It's a question that colors every part of Maine policy and it's the biggest one facing the young generation of Mainers who will inherit this morphing state.
Caron himself is part of that classic Maine. A lifelong Mainer from a working-class Irish family in Waterville, he's as wary of the Brookings outsiders as he is eager to hear their take on Maine. At various points in the road trip, Caron rolls his eyes when the researchers lament the lack of cell phone coverage in rural Maine and silently bristles when they vocalize a characterization of Maine that he finds offensive. But, as much as he remains defensively local, Caron believes Maine needs their outside expertise to move forward.
According to the Brookings researchers' preliminary findings - and their experience studying other rural states like Missouri and Pennsylvania - the Maine of the future needs to be one that welcomes an injection of some outside know-how. We will have to get a handle on Maine's 504 municipal government agencies, whose policies, left unchecked and uncoordinated, perpetuate self-destructive sprawl and costly inefficiencies. We will have to encourage industries that can build an economy that's a major player in the global market rather than a spectator.
Caron organized the road trip to figure out what Mainers think that economy should look like. Problem is, our independent streak makes it tough to come to a consensus.
The researchers heard from Mainers who are conservationists, others who want the forest cleared for industry; some who want to bring back manufacturing jobs, others who think the future's in R&D; some who say higher education is important, some who want more trade schools; some who run from the rat race, others who commute weekly to jobs in New York City. Uniting them was an anxious concern for the future of the Maine they love.
"In some ways, it's quite distinctive, the strongly felt connection to place," said Bruce Katz, vice president and director of Brookings's Metropolitan Policy Program, which since 1996 has proposed innovative policies for dynamic cities and urban areas. Katz joined us on the road trip's second day. "There's a level of engagement to these meetings that's actually quite striking."
Forest through the trees
Voices from those who will lead this state - the 35-and-younger set - were disappointingly few at the road trip meetings. Most participants were middle-aged or older. And, judging by how much everyone disagreed on what Maine needs to prioritize, it looks like Caron could have a rough road ahead to make his "blueprint for Maine" a reality.
Residents of Caribou, a rural farming town that suffered in 1994 when the Loring Air Force Base closed, called for more help for potato farmers. A Farmington man said the state needs to protect its forests and "unfractured landscape" for tourists. An artist in Eastport, which has struggled to find direction amidst heated debate about a proposed liquefied natural gas depot, said Mainers don't want to be billionaires, they just want "enough" - enough money to feed themselves and their families, enough to buy a house to live in, "just enough." A young lawyer in Camden thinks the state should pay for perks for young professionals like himself by building a light rail for commuters from Rockland to Augusta. A middle-aged woman at the town meeting on the Colby College campus in Waterville was concerned about her brother:
"My brother works in the woods and lives on a farm and there is such incredible pressure on him. What he gets paid for his wood has not gone up in the last 12 years. So what can the state do to support these traditional natural economies? Not that everybody is going to go back and become a forester or farmer, but we need to retain some of those to maintain our natural character."
In response, a Colby student quipped, "Always keep in mind that it's okay if people move and if they don't have the same jobs their parents did."
"Now we find ourselves in this extreme time of transition and no one knows what the outcome will be and everyone wants to protect what their interests are," says USM's Barringer, who was an unpaid consultant to the Brookings researchers during the early months of the study. "And that means that when you travel around the state enough and ask people what they'd like to see preserved and protected, they tend to say those things that are in their interest and that they love."
Joseph Conforti, a professor of American and New England studies at the University of Maine who has written books about Maine culture, contends that Mainers' sense of place is influenced by where they live.
"I think people still have attachments to their subregions of the state and tend to see their subregion as the more authentic part of Maine," says Conforti, who is not involved with Caron's study.
"Maine is in many respects an un-New England state in the sense that it doesn't share the compactness of other states and the density of population. Mainers believe everything south of where they are is not the real Maine."
"We are really a hundred different Maines," said Caron on the road trip, somewhere between Eastport, population 1640, and Farmington, population 7410. "This isn't going to change tomorrow, but we've got to find a way to see ourselves as one Maine as fast as we can."
Made in Maine
On the road trip's second day, the van took a detour to Augusta. Caron and Muro had been called to a meeting at the State House with representatives from the Department of Economic Development, who Caron said were concerned about whether the Brookings study would reflect negatively on the current Democratic administration. Months before, Caron met with members of the state's Republican leadership who were worried about negatives that could affect their camp. In both cases, Caron says, his answer was the same.
"I didn't tell them a thing," he insisted. "All I said was, ‘We are going to paint an unvarnished picture of Maine.'"
Caron's vision stretches far beyond his study, which a number of Mainers in the meetings worried would quickly disappear from the political debate like other, smaller studies. Caron intends to keep his alive by foisting it on politicians a month before the November elections and later by gathering interested civic leaders and citizens in a multiyear campaign to implement Brookings's specific recommendations.
During the road trip, Katz and Muro agreed the way to protect Maine's culture is in part to sell, sell, sell it to the sound-bite world Mainers have long distrusted. Maine's cultural brand, as they define it, can be used to market its place and products. Outsiders buy LL Bean because it's "Made in Maine" and therefore has a reputation for reliability. Plenty of tourists like Maine-crafted furniture and serene paintings of our rocky coast. And for people looking for a new life rather than a pretty thing, Maine's people and environment make us competitive. In a world where bullshit seems to surround us, Maine's close-knit neighborhoods and sense of civic engagement are rare.
This commitment to place propelled Caron to beg for the better part of a million dollars on a study that could, in the end, be ignored. It brought hundreds of Mainers to the Brookings town meetings in the middle of the workweek even though, in the end, they could be ignored. And the strength of it will decide whether Brookings's suggestions are destined for success or doomed to fail.
Brenda Cummings, an assistant city assessor in Bath whose family first arrived in Maine during the 17th century, sat in the front row of the conference room in Brunswick's Curtis Memorial Library on the final day of the road trip, Thursday, April 27. The room was packed with more than 100 people for the noon meeting, including former governor Angus King, area town planners and town managers, business owners, and environmental advocates.
"Our way of life is not just a nice thing but it is an economic benefit and we lose that at our peril," Cummings said. "People don't want to come here just to look at the scenery, they come here to see Mainers doing their thing and they need to see Mainers doing their thing."
The audience applauded.
After the meeting, as people stopped to second her comments, Cummings, a bookish woman in a sky blue blouse, struggled to define what Mainers "doing their thing" means.
"There's a way in which we are under pressure to become an economy like the rest of the United States," she said. "Change is inevitable and there'll be a balance somewhere. It's never going to be the Maine it used to be but hopefully we can find a way where we can live together where there's enough of a balance that our culture can exist."
About 70 miles away, a man from the small town of Vienna thinks that balance, that new authentic Maine, will be tough to find, even with the help of the report.
"This is a clash of cultures," said economist Roy Van Til, at the Farmington meeting. "We are trying to cope with this change and it's not a matter of independence, it's a clash of ways of living life."
