Carlson lives very close to where my kid attended summer camp for several years. It is near a small rural town with great lakes, streams and topography
10 years ago the local dysfunction was beginning to set in, but the town was still keeping things together halfway decently. We were definitely on the path to woke, especially after Rolling Stone called our mayor a racist for his completely accurate prediction 10 years before that. Still, he probably had a pretty good experience in a pretty normal town with an unusually large and growing immigrant population.
It’s almost like living in a different country now. The population count of 40k has remained almost unchanged in 20 years. It is just a completely different population of people now. People come and go everywhere. Some are like me and moved there for work or life reasons to carve out a living.
Many, many more are here because of incentives brought about by Democrat policy and their partnerships with NGO’s and other non-profit organizations. The level of need is now greater than ever but the ability of the people who live here to meet it is lower than ever, all while Democrats promise that they will solve the problem if elected.
Our council is currently in the process of talking themselves into opening up several “low barrier” homeless shelters, which is another word for a tax-subsidized flophouse, near our schools and parks. This place of supposed healing and treatment will apparently be fully staffed, even though our normal hospitals cannot come remotely close to staffing the needed nurses to deliver the healthcare that is guaranteed by Maine state law. Standards to teach in our public schools no longer require a degree in teaching, and we’re still short staffed there as well.
Meanwhile, more and more regular people who do regular things like practice nursing, teach children, fix cars and solve manufacturing problems are no longer seeing the appeal of the town. My kid’s tuna fishing career is one of the few remaining reasons for me not packing up and moving tomorrow. It’s just not something you can do in most sensibly governed states.
I have to apologize wrt lumping Nicole Shanahan into the same waste bucket as KamalalaDingDong. Shanahan actually sits down and talks to people that ask questions. This is clipped from an hour long interview (apparently Lawfare is one of the planks of “Demockracy”):
Well, that’s a little disappointing as I’ve always wanted to visit Maine as I had always heard that it is a beautiful state with many quaint, friendly small towns. I guess that even far-off places have begun to be slowly influenced by the blights I only associated with larger, “urban” cities. Although I’m sure there are still some good places to visit…right?
I was in Brunswick last year visiting a couple friends who grew up there and it seemed like not too much had changed from the last few times Ive visited more than 10 yrs ago. So, as an outsider, it still seemed quite nice and a place I’m sure you’d love to visit.
Tourism is the main industry here and there are still a lot of great places to visit. Outdoor recreation hasn’t gone anywhere either. Portland still has a lot of great spots too, it’s just that you’re now likely to see someone shooting drugs into their foot, a penis here or there and perhaps a few psychotic breaks.
The day to day quality of life and affordability is the real crusher. I wouldn’t tell someone Maine isn’t worth visiting anymore, but I wouldn’t advise anyone except very wealthy people move to southern Maine to raise a family.
This was posted this morning on my town Facebook page, capturing the sentiment of so many people who never imagined wanting to move from the area even 10 short years ago.
"Lewiston. My home town. I’ve always been proud to live here. I’ve always been offended when people would say the dirty Lew or things like that. I raised my first daughter here. I’m 10 years into raising my second daughter. I live two houses down from my parents. Around the corner from my brother and his family. My kids go to school where I did. All great things. But everyone has their breaking point and I’ve reached mine. When I bought my house my taxes were $1600. When I renovated in 2006 they were supposed to be around $4000 at completion, but ended up being $5200. I always wanted to add a pool but my taxes would have gone up $1200 just for that. I’ve watched the culture change here. I’ve watched the crime increase and always said well that’s just downtown. But the fiscal irresponsibility in this city is out of control. Most recently and the most absurd is the latest school budget. Absolutely ridiculous and no accountability. My taxes breached the $7000 mark. Because of the school budget. A top heavy, administrator rich, out of control school budget. This doesn’t even include my revaluation which will be happening soon! Enough!!! We can only spend so much!!! I just reached my breaking point. I helped build my home with my own two hands. In the neighborhood I grew up in and the neighborhood I thought I’d die in. Nope. I will be leaving Lewiston. It breaks my heart, but I’ve had enough.
They use the school budget to fund social programs that should be funded separately. It’s very sneaky because if you take issue with it, they question if you care about the kids.
I am certainly not a communist, and I don’t want to turn maine into anything other than maine. I have a colleague who (with his family) is moving to Portland, from Alaska this fall because he fell in love with the place after visiting a few times. I can certainly understand why.
As for the property tax increase, it appears the median home price in Lewiston increased by more than 100% since 2006, so a ~40% increase in the property tax bill, sounds about right. Prop13 is one thing I think CA did right, limiting property tax increases on existing homeowners so they don’t force longtime homeowners out of their homes.
You sound exactly like our local democrats, desperate to tell everyone who has lived here for decades that they are imagining things or that things would somehow be worse if all of these massive responsibilities weren’t ever assumed by government enacting Democrat policies.
Meanwhile, we all have eyes, ears, an understanding of math and full awareness of the exodus of makers and influx of takers.
The home price went up? Or was it the appraissed value assessed by the government that went up? You could be a retiree on a fixed income and the town can say your house has doubled in price, which means nothing as you can put whatever price on your home, it doesn’t mean anyone will buy it. Did all of the homeowners have their salaries double? You are such a rube.
Even though my local politics is totally pertinent, as we are one of the places in the USA where Democrats have had the most success with enacting their policy priorities, I’d like to point out how completely bonkers the entire Harris campaign is.
Since being named as the Democrat’s candidate, there have been no actual press conferences or any situations where Kamala Harris will take unscripted questions and speak without a prompter. This is a continuation of the same policy with Joe Biden, where he was rarely allowed to speak and it was often disastrous when it was caught on film. POTUS being ushered around the White House lawn by a guy in an Easter Bunny costume is not good for anyone in the USA. This wall of silence is not normal for the USA at any level of government.
Harris was literally last place in a field of about 20 or so candidates in the last Democrat primary. She was first out of the race with statistically zero percent of Democrats voting for her. There were 19 other people (including the stunning, brilliant and majestic Tulsi Gabbard) who were more popular with Democrats, but somehow she’s the nominee.
Joe Biden didn’t want to drop out of the race, according to Joe Biden. What do you call it when an elected official is forced out of office to transfer power without anybody voting for the replacement? There was a word we had for it when it was happening in places like Central America. I remember sitting around the television as mom would explain how lucky we were to live in a place where stuff like that doesn’t happen.
Now the same people who assured us that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation and that the Covid Vaccine worked are explaining that she’s experienced a bump in popularity. Just like that she’s the leading candidate for President of the United States without anyone ever voting for her in a party that’s trying to keep all opposition off of the ballot in addition to defaming them, suing them, imprisoning them and now seemingly inviting assassins through the front door.
The entire situation seems extremely odd to me, much more so than an eccentric rich playboy entering politics late in life and winning an election. But hey, they put it on their T-Shirts so it must be true.
Is there any hope of action from the State level? Like are there a lot of republicans from less urban areas, who can make state-wide laws against drug use and vagrancy that supercede the local policies?
It is the state level policies that are largely responsible for the framework that local law enforcement must operate under. The laws are still technically on the books, but we are now operating under an emergency protocol enacted by Maine Democrats in Augusta that results in our public spaces like parks and libraries becoming places to get high and hang out at. Drugs are de-facto legal to use here in Maine, and a walk around town is all you need to do to see the difference these policies make.
My city council’s top priorities the past few weeks have been to usher in “low barrier” shelters (which just means you can be using drugs and still crash) to attract and enable more addicts and install public “toilets” for them to get high and die in.
Median and average home price more than doubled over that time. From a brief Google (take with a grain of salt), it seems like assessed value lagged waaaay behind and much of the recent pain was caused by the city/county making an effort this year to update assessed values closer to the actual sales value.
It also looks like average household income went from ~40k up to ~63k over that timeframe, an increase of >50%, while the apparent tax bill only increased by ~40%.
Sounds like you and I both agree that CAs prop13 is generally a good policy. I guess CA does get some things right
We are told that we’re taking an evidence based approach to public health. The Democrat policy is based on the idea that we must allow people to get high in the park if we ever hope to have parks without people getting high in them again.
