Clouds On The Horizon by Susan Mackenzie Andersen
See through the wool into other probabilities!
We are coming up on a repeat local referendum of the one we had a few months ago, minus the high school project. Proponents divided the last vote into two parts after opposition was vocalized, hoping to save the middle school but both parts of the project were voted down.
Dominant Culture
Now the town leaders are giving us a new referendum on the middle school which is almost the same as the previous referendum, sending the message that the school boards don’t want to listen to the voters, raising the question, what powers do they serve?
The school project started as a repair, maintenance, and security mission before anonymous donors, led by Paul Coulombe, intervened. Mr. Coulombe arrived, in a town that had barely changed since mid-century with a mission to transform it into an extended country club, bulldozing building after building into the ground, and replacing them with contemporary McMuffin-style architecture, neither objectionable nor distinguishable.
After that, only the donor’s plan was considered, which was to save money on repairs by demolishing the midcentury building and constructing a new building. Repairs cost a lot less that way, they reasoned, but, they also said the longer we wait, the more expensive the repairs will be, and so the long delay caused by pushing an alternate agenda continues to increase the eventual costs of repairs.
Since the plan to demolish and replace the high school was voted down, there has been no word of plans to repair it, hinting that those who want to demolish the high school haven’t given up and are once again forestalling the repairs.
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In promoting the current middle school referendum, the entirety of the sales pitch is the need for repairs with a passing mention of two new buildings. Quite a feat!
The donors paid two million dollars to the architects to design a new high school and it was decided that there would be a referendum vote on that singular option. Since the intervention, there has been no exploration into other funding sources except the public referendum to fund the new school designed by the architects funded by the donors.
A project can be funded either by §5654. Conditional gifts or by a tax-deductible contribution, but not both. The school leaders passed a resolution that “the project” can be funded by conditional gifts which have donor-specified terms that the municipality must honor in perpetuity. The conditional gifts statute does not restrict the terms the donor can ask allowing for specifying non-disclosure.
A community discussion emerged in the Boothbay Register. The school boards tried to redirect the discussion to public meetings but the discussion continued online. Eventually, board members wrote letters to the editor but persisted in insisting that for the real facts one must attend their meetings.
I asked why a question can’t be answered in the Boothbay Register comments but there was no answer. I asked what is the size and the purpose of the new administrative building and the new classroom building for seventh and eighth graders but no one answered. Do I exist on a parallel plane of an alternate reality where no one on their plane can hear me? I started to wonder.
There is a local Facebook group called People for Positive Change. It doesn’t identify the administrators but judging from the file page, it must be Julie Robers, Boothbay select person. There are many local people but It is one of those monitored sites where posts have to be approved. None of mine have been approved. Julie frequently invites the public to come to her place and chat with her about local issues but she is always quite short and dismissive of me. I posted my Museum and Network proposals and shall be shocked if they are published. My Town select person does not respond when I present an idea, just like Wendy Wolf, Holly Stover, the Maine Community Foundation, and numerous others.
I came across an interesting story about life in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and posted this quote:
I am thinking of continuing to post frequently on People for Positive Change. until I get bored with it, fully anticipating that nothing I submit will be accepted for publication. The website features the school board views with printed docs that say “You deserve all the answers” but the only part that can be interpreted as a mention of the two new buildings is this:
“Deeper and more modern learning environments” does not encompass a new administrative building, but fits the new building for seventh and eighth graders. The story about instructions in storage rooms with no windows or in open hallways is frequently repeated but never explained. The choice was made to give the word space to the latter, rather than to provide further information about what “deeper and more modern learning environments” means.
Since no one has mentioned anything about getting the repairs done for the high school, I decided I would start the conversation and wrote a letter to the Editor suggesting that midcentury preservation groups might be a source of funding for the repairs.
I like the midcentury high school and the era of history that it represents. If this option is pursued and funding secured it will end the cycle of repeated and nearly identical referendums. Then funding repair and maintenance costs will be separated from new building proposals. At least the repairs and maintenance could be done with tax-deductible donations, rather than conditional gifts. It might later lead to the possibility that the state’s workforce training can be done as a privately funded Community College that could consider the Industrial Park as its location wherein it does not have to replace anything else, or it could be centrally located to several communities.
An added advantage is that we could move ahead with the repairs without prolonging the wait while the community battles over the questions of new buildings, where they should be located, and who should pay for them. The only reason for combining repair and new buildings that I can see is so that the repairs can be used as a smokescreen for the buildings.
The visuals for the last referendum were a tall glass tower that exceeded the height allowed by our town ordinances and a lobby with open balconies and stairs that are far too vulnerable in the age of mass shootings, a security concern voiced by the student body. There were no visualizations of a classroom or a “making space”, though the making spaces were often verbally promoted as a prominent feature. All focus was on tower and lobby, no more than a facade. We were encouraged to vote on the facade and not ask what happens behind the facade.
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The public responded to the symbolism of the glass tower and rejected it. The individual members of the public may or may not have consciously identified the glass tower as symbolizing the take-over of our public educational system by the corporate state, whose policies are by now historically accountable to the demise of the middle class. Architecture speaks to the instincts. The disregard for local height ordinances affirmed the disempowerment of local governance amplified in the repealed school charter that deleted the work of past generations and replaced it with the words “aligned with state law”.
Alternate Culture
The low, broad midcentury architecture expresses the culture of a great middle class where wealth spreads widely. Should it come to pass that the building is not to be used as a public school, it could make a suitable design, research, and production training center for the local small entrepreneurial community and attract more of the same to the Peninsula. The high school was constructed at the same time that Andersen Design was established so it has that historical consistency with our product and I like that correlation. A Peninsula makes a unique geographical setting for a twenty-first century cottage industry revival community., and, in my view is wasted by being transformed into the next cell of the State’s corporate grid.
The conversation is about the repairs but the referendum is about much more than that. What it comes down to, in my assessment is the state implementing its plans to use our public school system for workforce training for the Maine Space Corporation and other corporate friends of the state. In short, it is about implementing central controlled corporate dominance over our peninsula and the entire economy of Maine. This is what late-stage central management of the economy looks like. Not only does the state centrally manage our economy, through an unconstitutionally chartered, ozone-layer-destroying corporation running a “space economy”, but simultaneously the state takes over municipal ordinances and community character plotting massive housing concentration zones to house the workforces, which are more appropriately designated “the serf forces” since the crowning glory of the wealth divide is the ownership class-working class divide. We have already reached that landmark.
Housing solutions are becoming more dystopian by the hour, Now we are talking shared housing between unrelated adults, then it becomes a room, then it’s a ten-bedroom house with shared living space, then it is bunkbeds lined up in a rows and a shared kitchen and living room. These downgrades to the quality of life for the people is framed as an innovative solution to problems caused by government policy, or lack thereof, that go unacknowledged..
You can’t blame the lower-level people for trying to find answers to dilemmas created by the people at the top who conspiratorially look the other way at the causes of the housing shortage.
At least the commissioners who did the study for LD 2003 acknowledged that short-term rentals are a factor when they wrote that they decided not to include short-term rentals in the study, whereas private equity practices are a large contributor to the housing shortages which the commissioners are surely aware of but chose not to acknowledge.
And so the cause of the housing shortage is the underproduction of housing!
“Underproduction of housing” It’s the commissioner’s version of the tower and lobby, a word construct that evades explaining why there is suddenly such a big housing shortage. “Production of housing” is the targeted solution so “underproduction of housing” is a circularly reasoned cause. Who among the public will notice the quiet part that isn’t spoken out loud?, reason the talking heads.
According to the Bangor Daily News, between 76,400 to 84,300 new homes need to be built in Maine by 2030, to meet current demand and to allow the state’s population to grow. source
According to this interactive map, in 2008, when Airbnb was born, the population of Maine was 1,330,509. In 2023 the population is 1,395,702, that’s an increase of 65,193 residents in 15 years, an increase of .4.8%
The number of homes we are told will be needed (76,400 to 84,300) in the next 6 years is greater than the population increase in the last 15 years (65,193). I posted this in the Boothbay Register where ReedTV brought up the private equity cause:
Housing nowadays is an investment, not a place to live. Almost 40% of home sales since 2021 have been to investment funds, sometimes called hedge funds. The goal is primarily capital gains; with rental income a secondary objective. With new high rise construction projects, most of the units will not be rented nor occupied: simply held as one would hold gold bullion. So you need to double your housing construction objectives to actually get enough new units to folks who will live in them. source
ReedTV then said the best bet was to go into trailer parks since he reasoned there would be less hedge fund interest in trailer parks, but Blackstone private equity group (and others) are a few steps ahead of Mr. ReedTV.
BLACKSTONE AFFIRMS THE BRILLIANCE OF THE MOBILE HOME PARK BUSINESS MODEL
What Happens When Investment Firms Acquire Trailer Parks
Residents of such parks can buy their mobile homes, but often they must rent the land that their homes sit on, and in many states they are excluded from the basic legal protections that cover tenants in rented houses or apartments, such as mandatory notice periods for rent increases and evictions. One sign that a large investment firm has taken over a neighborhood is a dramatic spike in lot rent. Once a home is stationed on a lot, it is not always possible to move it; if it is possible, doing so can cost as much as ten thousand dollars. Most buyers aren’t eligible for fifteen- or thirty-year fixed-rate mortgages, so many of them finance their homes with high-interest “chattel loans,” made against personal property. “The vulnerability of these residents is part of the business model,” Sullivan said. “This is a captive class of tenant.” A leader of an association for mobile-home owners in Washington State has compared life in a mobile-home park to “a feudal system.” The New Yorker
I hold that every person or entity repeating “authoritative” but unexplained statements about the number of homes that Maine needs to build that have no sensible relationship to our population increase is fully aware of what is driving the overproduction of housing. When they do not address the cause, they become complicit in transforming Maine into a feudalistic society. While individual private living space is being squeezed or eliminated, the state builds large and glamorous “making spaces” for “innovation”. At the heart of the public educational system will be the Maine Space Complex and at the heart of the Maine Space Complex is the University Of Maine with its claims to ownership of the intellectual property rights for any projects conducted in its facilities.
Where can the people create and innovate if their own private space is being written out of the plan? Our state government operates as a corporation advancing its self-interests and those of its private partners. The only pushback to the state’s ill-conceived plans is by local governments reclaiming their Home Rule authority and grassroots movements. However, the state uses its wealth redistribution capacity to keep local governments on a string. The attitude at the local government government level is meek at best.
That’s the dominant culture. Do alternative cultures as I have been visualizing have a chance? It takes a community to reject the dominant culture model and to let something else have a chance. So far the Peninsula has been giving the attempts to transform our public school system to the use of the corporate state a hard time. There is hope!
The Museum Project *includes means to fund individually owned working spaces.
My projects are emergent from Andersen Design but are contextually larger than Andersen Design. Andersen Design’s unique and unparalleled assets can be an anchor around which other small-scale industries can grow. A small-scale maker community on a rural Peninsula can be place unique from everywhere else.
A multidimensional interlude: Let’s Get Metaphysical!
As I was composing my previous post, I lost electric power due to a storm. There was nothing to do but read a book. I picked up The Conscious Universe by Menas Kafatos and Robert Badeau. The print is small so I switched to the Unknown Reality by Jane Roberts/Seth which has larger text. I had read both books many years ago. They had a profound influence on my life. I’ve been wanting to re-read them for a while, wondering how they might affect me now. I switched numerous times from one to the other. Both books are about the same subject-consciousness, which, according to both books is more multidimensional than we realize.
Menas Kafatos is a physicist. Robert Badeau is a science historian, Their book begins with a discussion about epistemology and the scientific method as a privileged system of knowledge but since that system is based on observation, it was famously said, by Neils Bohr, that “we have reached the end of what we can know”, responding to the effect of the Heisenberg principle in which the observer affects the observed.
Seth is coming from a different system of knowledge. He is a consciousness speaking from a dimension beyond the space-time continuum. The books Seth wrote were channeled through Jane Roberts in the 1970s. When I read these authors years ago, I read Seth before reading about quantum theory. As I read that day I kept switching back and forth and the smaller text became as easy to read as the larger text. Was it the light? or the glasses? As I was reading about photons, a small teardrop of rainbow light was dancing about the page. The drop of light disappeared when I took off my glasses and I decided it must have to do with the glasses picking up light filtering through a crystal hanging in the window. The dancing rainbow teardrop added another dimension to the reading about probable realities and probable selves. As I switched back and forth between these two books, it was like switching between two probable realities in which my probable selves make different reading choices. Both books discuss the same idea. The collapse of the wave function could be a description of how we chose our probable selves so there was continuity to the experience.
Periods of normal science in which an accepted paradigm is well-established are punctuated by “paradigm-shifts” or scientific revolutions, which can be analogous to what psychologists term a “gestalt switch” The Conscious Universe by Menas Kafatos and Robert Nadeau pg 6
Time for a community “gestalt switch to a new paradigm?
Back to Earth One, as Nicole Wallace, likes to say.
I was really enjoying the read but once my power returned I felt guilty sitting around reading esoteric books.
About a week later I lost power again. Permission to read! I couldn’t find where I laid down The Conscious Universe so I picked up the Unknown reality which talks about our probable selves and how we can switch from one probable self to another. I thought I need to switch to the probable self where my project manifests in reality. A couple of days later a hopeful-looking housing solution manifested. It is a housing solution for me but not appropriate for all the assets and history that I have to house and organize- years of work!
The I Ching says that If I follow I will find my course but if I try to lead I will go astray. Following means to take the path that opens up. If this path works out as a housing solution I must find a separate solution for the historical inventory so I visualized a space just for that and it makes sense because it invites collaboration with others on a unified project. It could be the Museum, for which I need collaborators. Perhaps my sister is getting ready to participate again. It could be The Village Store or someplace else.
So I visualize another way of filling up the spaces around me. Why not. I am part of this community too! Roll over Dominant Culture, Give Alternatives a Chance!
Another storm on the horizon. You know what I’ll be doing if the power goes out!
Mackenzie Andersen is a sponsored artist with The Performance Zone Inc (dba The Field), a not-for-profit, tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) organization serving the performing arts community. Contributions to The Field earmarked for Mackenzie Andersen are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. For more information about The Field, or for our national charities registration, contact: The Field, 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 906 New York, NY 10038, phone: 212-691-6969. A copy of our latest financial report may be obtained from The Field or from the Office of Attorney General, Charities Bureau, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.
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