FROM THE CROWE'S NEST

End The Sell Off

Fishermen in Florida appear to have been dealing with a more complex and costly version of what others have been confronted with all the way to Eastport, Maine. Reduced fish stocks, increased regulation, rising costs, competition for the resource and competition for access to that resource through skyrocketing real estate valuations.

Everyone seems to be flabbergasted by the valuation of coastal real estate and the taxes on it in Maine, well, not everyone. Not the speculators, not the dealers who take a percentage, and not the state tax collectors and politicians who happily wade through the resulting revenues.

This states’ response to the real estate tax burden crisis, and it is a crisis, is laughable. A fraction of a percent in reduction, for a fraction of a percent of the taxpayers in a limited number of cases, is not the definition of equitable tax policy. If this were the policy with vested interests and corporations that get incentives and tax breaks, the citizens might not have a tax crisis.

The state of Maine is just not doing enough to make things right for individual real estate taxpayers. And the reason is simple — the state is making too much money from the system.

Coastal Florida went from wild lands populated by native Americans and a few scattered villages in the 1920’s, directly to a manufactured reality for tourists and snow birds. That is it’s modern history. Now, with a run down trailer selling for $250,000 in recently remote areas, the chance for a reasonably normal community has past.

Maine has been a coast of economically related communities connected to the sea for a few hundred years. The dislocation encouraged by tax policy and development here is more wrenching, the social costs greater and the loss more tragic.  Families forced by taxes from generational homes and communities is wrong.

“The Way Life Should Be” — an ad agency tool for the selling off of the state’s true asset, it’s quality of life and people, illuminates a misbegotten policy. Offered for exploitation to the tourism and the real estate industries by the state government for revenue enhancement, the end result of this policy can now be seen in Florida.

If the people of Maine like what they have, its time to let the policy makers know. It’s time to demand an end to the sell off.