Letters to the Editor

President is doing damage

To the Editor:
    It is great news that the Government Shutdown is over. President Obama knowingly underestimated the cost of his health plan. He took $716 billion from Medicare. He wants to cut essential services such as medical, hospitals and military power. During his time in office, President Obama has increased the national debt by over $5 trillion.
    I am a registered Independent voter very much against ObamaCare and his tax and spend policies.

James W. Buchanan
Willimantic

The answer my friend is boiling
in the ground

To the Editor:
    The BPs nice lady commercial voice did a pitch pointing out that fossil fuel wells were often miles deep.
    Southern Methodist University, a Texas college has a department that deals with the study of geo-thermal energy. hot enough to make steam at 250F degrees. I guess we need to be careful about oil well fires all the time?
    The fossil fuels America pumps to our refineries is finite and doesn’t come in repeating batches, it will run out one day. It used to be fish fecal matter — salted poop. After it’s all gone, then we will need something else to make the heat that produces the steam that makes the electric generators whirl that industry uses to keep manufacturing expanding.
    “Jobs, jobs, jobs” are on every political candidate’s lips.
    Down in Texas many years ago they checked this out at SMU, using the super hot water from exhausted oil wells like steam boilers, and found even small but with deep wells turbine connected, could be boilers with a little hookup. The trial boiler/well experiment revealed that each small single well pipe’s earth heat could supply all the electricity needed to power 1,000 homes. No coal piles or giant smokestacks were required, just home-made steam.
    How many wells in America? 800,000 and drill rigs are all over the country these days making holes in the ground by “fracking,” night and day, drilling for fossil fuels that began forming millions of years ago.
    Once the chemistry has turned to oil, and we fracture the rock to get every tiny drop, the game is over for chemistry fossil fuel, but the earth two miles down is still hotter than the hinges of hell and ready to make steam, as it has been since the beginning of time, and can make electricity now.
    But hold on one minute, we could make steam for a couple million years, or longer. Our atmosphere could be clear and clean.
    But the guys boring the holes won’t tell us anything about the nature and chemistry of their secret juice they concoct to frack.
    Why? Because after it is finished powering the steam engine generators the water drops that forms will drift off in the clouds, but the secret sauce that fractures rocks will coat the golf courses, playgrounds. highways. lakes and rivers, fishing grounds, wheat fields … everything.
    In no time at all our heritage, the irreplaceable fossil fuel single batch will be gone, and a million oil wells that could have been boilers for endless millions of years will be marked “POISON — DO NOT OPEN.”
    For as long as they last we can twist inner tubes like rubber bands to grind our wheat and fly our planes? Waste not, want not.

Charles MacArthur
Sangerville

Sangerville a leader
in self governance

To the Editor:
    I am happy to return to questions about the purpose and strategy of the Community Rights Based Ordinance that the Town of Sangerville enacted by a 86-40 margin in September. The RBO was written outside of town government by the Sangerville Community Rights Group, a group of concerned citizens in Sangerville, who are opposed to the proposed East/West Corridor.
    The SCRG has no connections to town government, even though many of our members are, or have been, involved in town government. SCRG’s members are all graduates of the CELDF Democracy School, which graduated over 150 people in Sangerville and surrounding communities over the past year.
    At Democracy School, we learned how the regulatory law process works; and how regulatory law, the kind of law enforced by the EPA and the DEP, favors corporate interests over the interests of local communities. We learned how corporations became “persons,” because the court system, beginning in the early 1800s, “found” corporations in the individual rights enunciated in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. We learned that, as it stands today, communities, i.e., the municipal corporations, do not have the right to say “No” to unwanted corporate projects.
    But, we also learned about CELDF’s Community Rights-Based Ordinance, whereby we, as a community, can assert our “inalienable and indefeasible right to institute government, and to alter, reform, or totally change the same, when their safety and happiness require it.” (Art.1, Sec.2, Maine State Constitution) Inalienable means that these rights cannot be given away by, or taken away from the possessor. And indefeasible means that our rights cannot be lost, defeated or overturned. We have the right to change government when it does not suit us. Our Legislature practices this right at every session, and we, townspeople, exercise this right at every town meeting. This is the right to self-governance.
    In respect to the threat of the Corridor, there are many paths of resistance. The SCRG chose to write the Sangerville RBO first, because it could be done quickly. Regulatory law, written through the Planning Board and lawyers can take years. It is essential that RBO’s be put into place before the unwanted project goes into “permitting” with the DEP or the Army Corp. of Engineers. By enacting our RBO in September, we have ensured that, since the Corridor does not officially exist yet, that any corporation building a corridor will not have “standing” in a suit against the town. They are not “vested” because they have not been injured by our actions. We said “no” before they started.
    Our RBO asserts we value clean air and water, a healthy climate, the scenic beauty of our land, and our commitment to sustainable infrastructure. We, also, specifically, assert the our right to self-governance. This is an extremely important statement for Sangerville, because we failed to pass a Comprehensive Plan. If the RBO ever is challenged, one of the considerations the judge will face will be to determine the intent of the town at the time the RBO was enacted. With no Comprehensive Plan, the Bill of Rights section of the RBO, serves as a statement of our values and intent.
    Some people, in Sangerville, labor under the misconception, that the Select Board must develop and write all ordinances. Nothing is further from the truth. The Select Board is the administrative branch of town government. Our responsibility is to take the direction the town gives us at our annual Town Meeting, and make sure that the money and the projects authorized by the legislative body, i.e., the people who came and voted at Town Meeting, are expended and carried out as they wished until the Town Meeting reconvenes. The SCRG, by developing the RBO and bringing it, through petition, to a vote of the town, has demonstrated that the people, themselves, direct town government.
    As a Select Board, we are taking the initial steps toward developing a Road Ordinance. Anyone involved with town politics understands how divisive an issue roads can be. A “rulebook” that spells out how we build, maintain, and manage the roads in Sangerville can only help. If there are sections of that proposed ordinance that prohibit corridors, then that is all to the good.
    Sangerville has received state and national kudos for its first-in-the-nation infrastructure RBO, as well. People report being moved and awed by the model town meeting that we all participated in on September 18th. (They saw it on YouTube.) We can be proud of our positive contribution. Any of the members of the SCRG would be happy to explain any part of the ordinance to anyone who still has questions.
    My father taught me, as a child, not to mock the things I don’t understand, but to go out and seek answers.

Melissa Randall
Sangerville