Hypocrisy, Fraud, and Abuse, at All Levels of Government in Maine Housing
It’s time for the Maine people to start representing themselves
Suppose you had any faith left that the Maine government serves the interest of the people. In that case, the opening paragraph of the Boothbay Register’s 20 new workforce homes coming to Boothbay through state and local partnership should dispel it for those who have been following this newsletter and other coverage of our State and local government, and can contextualize statements within a factual background :
A major investment from MaineHousing’s Affordable Homeownership Program (AHOP), along with substantial local support, is helping bring 20 new condominiums to Boothbay — eight of which are directly funded through AHOP’s latest round of subsidies. 20 new workforce homes coming to Boothbay through state and local partnership
The “substantial local support” is spun as if the entire community got together and donated for this workforce housing barracks project, when in fact such a fundraiser was never publicized and so it is reasonable to fill in the missing information as the “substantial local support” being the same as the “anonymouis donors” who gave to the Demolish and Replace campaign for the school ballot referendum. In that case, one could send an FOOA request to obtain their identities, but in this case, it is just dark money in community development, most likely organized by the same oligarch who organized the anonymous donors for the school campaign financing project from far and wide outside of the community.
The Maine Government, from top to bottom, is implicated in the intentional transference of funds intended for developing housing for low-income people to developing housing for those with an income at or below 120% AMI, who will soon become the intended target range of “affordable” housing when all those making less are driven out of the community by the gentrification agenda of developers and their friends in high places.
This is nothing new. The first thing I noticed in my independent studies of Maine economic development policy was that there is only one system of value that registers with the Maine Legislature, which is the monetary system. The plan for economic development in Maine was simple- get more rich people to move into the state.
This slippery description of ”affordable” housing policy was published on the Maine State Housing Authority in 2022
These funds will expand housing options that are affordable to workers and their families to own or rent, through financing programs administered by MaineHousing. A redesigned and expanded Affordable Homeownership Program will invest $10 million in subsidized financing to increase the building of new homes available to households with incomes up to 120% of area median income. The remaining $40 million will be made available to housing developers in 2022 to accelerate the construction of additional affordable rental units accessible to low-income households in Maine.
I wonder what the Maine Housing Authority means by “low-income Housing when it has shifted the meaning of “affordable” from 80% AMI or below to 120% AMI. Should we believe when the Maine Housing Authority writes “low-income” that it means anything definitive? When you read slippery statements like the one above, all definitions and words become meaningless.
I was briefly taken in by the Oct 2023, the State of Maine Housing Production Needs Study, published by the Governor’s Office of Policy and Innovation, after the enabling study for LD 2003 HP1489 pushed through the enactment of a transference of Maine constitutional municipal authority over “matters local and municipal in nature” to the state. (HP 1489 was co-authored by the Boothbay Regional Development Corporation’s VP, Erin Coorperrider.)
What is innovative about giving subsidies to developers rather than making the land directly available to the rhetorically intended inhabitants of those houses? NOTHING! It is just enabling state central management to take over our communities by doing what the Maine Legislature has been doing since it bulldozed over the constitutional Home Rule Amendment of 1969 to statutorily assert that “centrally managing the economy is an essential government function” and the wealth divide has been expanding ever since, for which the Maine Legislature accepts no accountability to their central management of everything economical.
When one follows the development of how this “affordable” market-rate housing came into being through a process of intentional public deception, openly planned in the local media, as if deception is a cultural norm that there is no reason to hide, one eventually feels that everything is a lie.
Rather than seeking to fill the needs of the housing crisis for those identified as the neediest but for whom the BRDC deems irrelevant to their plans for the Boothbay Peninsula, Ms Cooperrider frequently stated that a traffic study revealed that 1500 cars commute to the Boothbay Peninsula every day, and these are the populous targeted by the Boothbay Regional Development Corporation. She did not source this statement of fact because why would she need to verify any statement she makes?
Nonetheless, citizens weighed in on the conceptual plan, which Cooperride admitted did not reflect the favored scale of density that the 339 residents who filled out a survey last winter concerning the RES parcel.
The density is higher, she said, as a matter of economics. The Penobscot Bay Pilot Public responds skeptically to 84-unit commercial/residential development plan for Rockport’s RES parcel
I recently started wondering if this statement of fact were true. I searched for a traffic study but came up empty. However, I knew there were reports of the number of vehicles that travel to the Peninsula during Garden’s Aglo, reported by the Portland Press Herald to be 22000, in total, for the event in 2022. The event is approximately 45 days, and so it is approximately 489 vehicles traveling to the Peninsula per day during a high traffic seasonal event, or less than one-third of the number of cars per day Ms Cooperrider claimed to be occurring on a general daily basis, as reported in the unidentified study. (I believe Gardens Aglow is on only 4 days a week. That puts the traffic per day at about 814 vehicles, still considerably lower than the 1500 vehicles that commute to the Peninsula per day, as cited by Erin Cooperrider).
Why would a developer lie about such a statistic? Are the statistics for the vehicles travelling to Gardens Aglow based on a specific time frame during the day? The reports do not say so, and why would it be assumed that someone attending Gardens Aglow would not make a day of it and visit other locations in the area? Isn’t that one of Garden Aglow’s marketing points, and haven’t Boothbay Harbor merchants been coordinating with the event?
So why lie? Is it because the BRDC was not formed to fill an existing need for affordable housing on the Boothbay Peninsula? It was formed in coordination with the demolition and replacement plans for our local school system to increase the population on the Boothbay Peninsula while simultaneously gentrifying the Peninsula for a higher-income population that needs its servant classes, and Plantation, I mean Peninsula, servants must be housed. Does this statement of pseudo fact represent that the master plan is to increase the population of the Peninsula by two to three times, ignoring the warning since the 80s that our water supply is endangered by further development?
In the last decade, affordable housing developers started using the term workforce housing during permitting to describe the financials with the low-income housing tax credit, Cooperrider said. The income bracket that the project's target includes includes many service sector jobs. Workforce housing also avoids using the term low income or affordable to describe the projects, she added Housing, water projects highlight Planning Commission annual meeting
Do the people in the government sector not know that Ms Cooperrider has a propensity to lie? She has been around for a long time, so how could they not know? The government’s acceptance and promotion of Ms Cooperrider into the unelected ruling class of Maine implicates the government’s own relationship to the truth.
The State of Maine Housing Production Needs Study specifically stated that the “emergency” is in housing for those whose income is far too low for Ms Cooperrider and the Boothbay Regional Development to bother with.
There appears to be no one in Maine serving the interests of the people, or even listening to them. Therefore, what is needed is a grassroots unification of the working classes in Maine to stand up for our rights, philosophies, and beliefs. A core proposal of a new working-class united organization is to create a network that can quickly mobilize to amend, repeal, and compose legislation armed with the petition signatures equal to 10% of the electorate in the last gubernatorial election. Then, when a bill such as LD 2003 -HP 1489, which deprives local government of its Maine Constitutional Home Rule rights, is enacted, the network can mobilize into action to repeal or amend it.
I know everybody has a different perspective, and no network represents universal agreement among all members, but such an organization could also be a dialogue forum for the working classes and the people. From my years of independently studying how Maine economic development policy came into being, one thing that sticks out is that so often when the Maine Legislature claims to be creating a program or benefit for a specific group of people, that group is not consulted. Instead, the overlord class claims to be their voice.
If you have any thoughts on this idea, please do comment below.
