Taxes. Basketball. Spring -- and Hopes Eternal

With Town Meeting swiftly approaching on the first Monday of March, there are three topics on all our minds: Taxes. Basketball. Spring.

Let’s be hopeful about all three – and read on for four suggested strategies you can use to better impact local budgets and taxes.

On Monday, February 9 the Town of Stonington held a public meeting to walk residents through the local budget items up for approval as warrant articles at this year’s Town Meeting. The week before, the Town held a public hearing to hear from the nonprofits whose “third party requests” make up approximately $80,000, or 2%, of this budget.

The local tax bill you receive is made up of these and also the Hancock County tax assessment, by which residents pay for county services including but not limited to sheriff, jail, courthouse, and transportation services; as well as the consolidated school district (CSD) budget.

This year’s estimated county tax bill for Stonington has been assessed at $240,000, or about 5% of your total bill.

The school district operates on a July 1 - June 30 fiscal year so are just beginning their budgeting process. School costs annually make up approximately 45% or more of your tax bill. Deer Isle-Stonington is known as a “low receiver” of state education funds due to our high coastal property valuations: the state does not cover 55% of our school costs as it does in other areas of the state. Our small towns are annually responsible for the bulk of an almost $8 million school budget on our own; if school funding formulas worked for towns like Stonington, we would be responsible for less than half that total.

#1 strategy for taxpayers seeking lower local costs: attend school and municipal budget meetings.

The Town’s proposed operating budget makes up the final half of your taxes. This year’s proposed budget is $2,299,781, which represents a $106,981, or 4.88%, increase over 2025.

However: the selectmen have offset that increase by appropriating funds from surplus to make the local share flat this year, causing no increase to your tax bill.

The only increases, therefore, that Stonington residents will see to property taxes are from school and county budgets.

The Select Board’s decision is based on their knowledge of the relationship between property taxes and year round housing for our work force to keep Stonington a vital, year-round community.

Thanks to our beautiful coastal properties we are a “high valuation” (and thus “low receiver” for school funds) community. As property taxation, school funding and local revenue sharing are structured in the state constitution the Town is prohibited from accessing much of that value without harming local workers: we cannot levy targeted local taxes, or differentiate the tax rate between seasonal and year round residents.

#2 strategy for taxpayers seeking lower local costs: advocate for changes to state tax policies through your local legislators.

Despite our isolated location and small population, Stonington, thanks to our standing as Maine’s #1 lobster port, functions as a service center for our fisheries and marine economies. With our commercial fish pier, public doc, three working waterfronts, access to Acadia National Park and public utilities, Stonington is more of a “tiny city” than an ordinary coastal village. Unlike many surrounding communities, the Town, thanks in large part to its former population density, manages a public water company and sanitary district. These are real assets that make Stonington the envy of many towns, as housing development costs within these public utility districts are lower than outside of them. Sadly, during the real estate rush of the pandemic, year round residents lost control of over 50% of this historic housing stock. Now the Town is working on a number of strategies to make it possible to invite and encourage year round residents to live downtown again. The Town succeeds in its required operations thanks to dedicated grant seeking, writing, and awards totalling in the millions of dollars of investments to infrastructure and other improvements.

#3 strategy for year-round residents to lower taxes is to be signed up to receive the state’s Homestead Exemption reduction. Recently, we became aware of citizens who mistakenly believed this exemption is only for elderly residents. The Homestead Exemption provides a reduction of up to $25,000 in the value of your home for property tax purposes for all permanent residents of Maine whose property is your primary residence. Because the exemption applies to any residential property assessed as real property, it also covers mobile homes even if they are on rented lots. To qualify, file an application on or before April 1 with the municipality with the Town. And let’s advocate with our state legislators for getting that exemption amount increased! And P.S.: if you have sufficient assets to pay your taxes without this exemption – please don’t apply for it. All property tax exemptions like this and including those for nonprofit properties erode the overall tax base and thereby increase costs for your neighbors.

Finally, the transfer station is the second largest cost center for the Town. The millions of pounds of waste we ship out daily cost taxpayers dearly. You can help to reduce these by following the updated recycling and waste reduction instructions available at the transfer station.

#4 strategy: the more we reduce material waste, the more we can also reduce the costs of removing it.

The Town is here to help and your questions, ideas and actions are important. Please connect with us via email at econdev@stoningtonmaine.org; by stopping by the Town office; or by calling 207-367-2351. 

Money Talks - but it Don't Sing and Dance and it Don't Walk

Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson in "Song Sung Blue"

"Money talks.

But it don't sing and dance and it don't walk

And long as I can have you here with me

I'd much rather be forever in blue jeans"

- Neil Diamond, "Forever in Blue Jeans"

These past couple of weeks, we've been trying to catch up on Oscar-nominated films in anticipation of the 98th awards ceremony on March 15.

This is an old habit, from when we ran a movie theater, and a sad one as we no longer have a local theater at which to enjoy these films, and the conversations before and after, with others. It's the conversations with friends and neighbors that make the movies more than entertainment to be consumed -- but rather culture that helps us grow and strengthens our bonds.

"Money talks

But it don't sing and dance and it don't walk..."

Our favorite of the movies we've screened so far is "Song Sung Blue" starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson, who is nominated for Best Actress. Not at all clear why Hugh Jackman was not also nominated for this one.

I was never much of a Neil Diamond fan growing up. His music lives in an uncomfortable nexus between the hard rock we loved in the 1970', the soft pop to which we danced, and the country that was our parents' fave.

Not to mention that "Sweet Caroline" is forever embedded in my cells as it was the #1 tune of our marching band. "Ba ba ba...good times never felt so gooooddddd..."

"Play wiht all you've got:" me marching in 
a high school football game in
Stonington, CT circa 1977-78.

Yeah. We hated marching band, but it was required to be in concert band.

"Song Sung Blue" is actually the true story of a Milwaukee-based Neil Diamond/Patsy Cline tribute band, Lightning and Thunder.

It's Milwaukee. It's working class. Mike (Lightning) and Claire (Thunder) Sardina have a blended family and tough lives where money is short but the songs sing and dance and thus so do they, triumphant trough one tragedy after another.

And it may actually be one of the most honest and moving movies you'll ever see about being in recovery.

We need this now. Check it out.

But instead, the other movies we're getting tend to focus on money and the lives of despicable characters. "After the Hunt," for which Julia Roberts won a Golden Globe but failed to get an Oscar nod, takes on the still-important #MeToo movement within the elite environs of Yale in a way you know that we as women will never see justice in our life times.

The NYTimes called "Marty Supreme," which showcases the excellent acting of the still young Timothee Chalamet, "one of the most exciting movies of the year" -- mostly, it seems, on the basis of it being a terrific love letter to NYC's now lost, once-seething with life Lower East Side.

I miss it, too.

But not enough to praise yet another story of a young man on the make, striving for money and running roughshod over the married women with whom he has affairs to obtain his own goals.

It's an all too familiar story, and one we need to stop lionizing. #MeToo anyone?

The world we're living in is farther from perfect than most of us would presently like.

Movies like "Song Sung Blue" show us the lives and fights of those too often invisible to decision makers. The lives of real people who matter. And it might even give you a new appreciation for the hidden treasure's in Diamond's ouevre.

"Money talks

But it don't sing and dance and it don't walk

And long as I can have you here with me

I'd much rather be forever in blue jeans"

- Neil Diamond, "Forever in Blue Jeans"

In Grief, Reflection and Action

Nellie was a yes girl.

A go girl.

A girl with a dedicated focus, a fierce sense of purpose, and action.

Only death could finally stop her - and we had to say yes to that, while she staggered on at 15-years-old through the harsh winter snow in her "Help 'Em Up" harness, doing her very best to honor her purpose with us.

Grief is a critical time for reflection. 

It is so difficult to stay in it in our action-packed world.

It's a time for integrating heart with head, for being present so that our resulting actions come not only from anger at the world's injustice, but from love.

Actions that arise not only from our pain at loss but from our heart breaking open vision for a different world.

It is crazy difficult not to be angry right now, furious with the way wealthy men are swinging their power around in ways damaging to everyone else.

They are making their purpose very clear: to exploit us and the planet for their own gain.

The U.S. President has made himself and his family $4 billion richer in just the past year.

He has put armed thugs on our streets in response to our First Amendment rights.

He and his staff speak about others as if they are nonhuman.

And there are so-called "Christians" who support this!

It would be not only impossible, but wrong, to not be furious.

So we must act.

Like Nellie, we must know our purpose and be fierce, focused and dedicated in saying yes to life and love in relationship to other living beings. 

Living in a consumer-focused culture has caused too many to lose their purpose.

Why me? Why here? Why now?

Our purpose here is not simply to acquire things and to accrue wealth.

It is not even merely to take care of our individual selves and our families.

We are an integral part of this planet -- however you believe it was created -- and therefore of each other and all living beings.

"To become holy," a spiritual leader I love said recently, "we are called to commit fully to who we are called to be. Be a Light."

Not just a flashlight for your own self interest.

For others. For our planet/home.

As Bad Bunny said at the Grammy Award's: hate only builds more hate.

What does it take to say yes to love-as-action?

The fierce, dedicated focus of Nellie, who knew her purpose.

It is not enough to say the word "love" over and over.

Love is action.

Love is fiercely, directly, actively dedicated to our purpose here.

Our grief is important. It reminds us of the immense power of our love and also how impermanent it is.

I am grieving every day at all that is lost.

Let us all be focused, dedicated, persistent, fierce and loving members of our communities and planet.

Let's be like my Nellie. 

I'll Keep Doing the Work You Were Doing as if I Were Two

Photo of Hadestown: Youth Edition
courtesy New Surry Theatre

This Sunday, I am struggling to live in my broken heart and not in my rage.

So having had the joy of seeing New Surry Theatre's awesome production of Hadestown: Teen Edition last night, I am reflecting on the power of live theater not only to entertain but to move us, to change hearts and minds. For the record, if you are in this area: do not miss this show! These teens are so excellent -- amazing choreography, great voices, stellar acting. Kudos to all who worked on it for a real community triumph, the type of theater we need more of in our communities, and especially to director Lori Sitzabee for bringing out the very best in her young cast.

This also causes me to reflect on why it is so important for children (and adults!) to learn to read fiction, and stories about those different from ourselves.

The arts at their best are not mere entertainment to be consumed.

Theater, literature, visual arts are the actions by which we build imagination, which is in turn needed to empathize with those not-us and then to have compassion and even to take action on behalf of others' suffering.

Imagine if instead of unrestrained male violence and a lust for power over others we fostered these things in raising our kids: imagination. Empathy. Compassion. Action. Art: the creation of beauty. Every day, a living process.

These are the human powers and skills that Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin and many other peacemakers called for and taught.

Too often, our specific culture, which continues to be dominated by white men, guns these teachers and models down.

Our power, and our trick to bringing a different future forward, is that for every individual gunned down 10 more of us step into their place.

"It could have been me, but instead it was you,
So I'll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two
I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs
A farmer of food and a righter of wrong
It could have been me, but instead it was you
And it may be me, dear sisters and brothers, before we are through
But if you can work for freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom
If you can work for freedom I can too."

- singer songerwriter Holly Near, after Kent State, in 1970 and the 1973 torture and assassination of Chilean theater director and poet Victor Jara by the junta who overthrew, with U.S. support, the Allende democracy in Chile

We've been here before. We will be here again. Those of us who believe in peace can never let up.

And if history is going to repeat itself -- let's hope we see a repeat of Nixon's 1974 resignation.

As opposed to a repeat of 1985's Iran-Contra scandal in Nicaragua -- another attempt to overthrow a democratic effort in opposition to the U.S.'s colonialist interests.

Let justice prevail, with each of our active support.

Notes to My Self on Finding A Generosity of Spirit

Notes to my self...

As my aged dog and I were standing in the yard in the middle of last night -- she, like all of us older females, up from bed to pee; me, to take her and gazing at the bright constellations -- I saw two shooting stars.

I went back to bed singing the Gloria in my head for the rest of the night.

My heart aches for a generosity of spirit amongst us.

For us, in every community, in every meeting, in every election, in every shared decision, to drop our self-righteousness.

To stop judging each other.

Those of us who consider ourselves "inclusive progressives" have too often played into the opposition's hands -- for, like any opposition, to divide and conquer is to win -- exacerbating this nation's class divides.

Sometimes inclusion comes at the cost of exclusion: putting others outside the special circle.

My brother is missing his two front teeth, lives in a trailer, and is a Trump supporter.

Do you judge him?

Sadly, we still live in a culture in which acts of hatred violate others every day.

Immigrants. Women. All people of color. Children.

It doesn't make the world better for us to condemn those who commit these acts. 

Better to condemn the action than to condemn the human.

As Greg Boyle, who for 40 years has led the most successful gang rehabilitation program in the world, says: we are all irredeemably good.

We really are. Including those who use their privilege and power to benefit themselves over others. Including those who resent those with more privileges than themselves.

Including those who are angry for what they lack.

We have a lot of illness in our cultures. Acts of hate and violence are signs of illness -- no healthy human treats others this way. Christians used to call this sin -- the places where we remain flawed, where we are not yet god, not the perfection of love.

Not the constellations, not the shooting star.

For one thing, we are afraid of "flaming out" in death and darkness.

This fear alone causes so many hateful actions and speech.

There is a lot of anger and resentment out there. Rather than dismissing it, what do we learn from it?

Humility. Gratitude. Acceptance.

The world and its creatures are not ours to judge.

How do we each hold ourselves accountable? How do we hold each other in community, in spite of our hateful actions?

The beautiful floating milkweed at this time of year reminds me of my mother in her raspberry patch.

She was not a leader, not an actor in society.

She feared but did not judge.

Casting seeds of kindness.