Editorial: Bad for business

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (June 23, 2005): We hear a lot about Maine having a bad climate for business, and most notably we heard it again last week from Harvey Rosenfeld, Scarborough’s top person for drumming up business. It’s getting worse, and that needs to change.

“If profit’s the main goal, there are other better places to be” than Maine, Rosenfeld told members of the Scarborough Community Chamber of Commerce.

It was Thursday lunchtime when he told chamber members the real value for business in Maine is “quality of life” for workers, rather than actually making the owners money.

The following night, Maine’s lawmakers voted to accept a state budget that made Rosenfeld’s statement about profits ring even truer.

The Legislature did not just raise corporate income taxes, but also cut back on state reimbursements to companies for major investments in equipment. The state’s expected revenue from the changes? $16 million over two years – not nearly enough to be worth the loss of goodwill, or perhaps sympathy, from big businesses with a presence in Maine.

Gov. John Baldacci talks the good talk, saying he is defending Maine jobs and has a plan for developing Maine’s economy. If this is that plan, he needs to think again, and fast.

While the state is certainly in a budget hole, taxing business more is not the way to get out of it – especially not taxing large businesses that have invested heavily over the years and are longtime cornerstones of local, regional and state economies.

These businesses are the ones that employ large numbers of people in their own and surrounding communities. They are the barometers of Maine’s economy.

They should be expected to pay their fair share of the state’s expenses, but should not be looked at as a cash cow for state budgeters when other wells run dry.

The companies are rightfully upset and reconsidering future investments in Maine, which should have occurred to lawmakers before they voted.

UnumProvident, which has been shifting staff members and assets out of Maine in recently years, says it doesn’t like the message the state is sending. We can’t afford to shove companies like UnumProvident out the door without any plan for replacing the jobs and local investments they provide.

But an increased tax on business investment is worse than no plan for replacement – it’s a deterrent for companies that might be considering Maine’s quality of life in the future. They certainly won’t be considering making any money here.

And UnumProvident is not the only company angered by the new taxes.

National Semiconductor says the new budget has broken a promise made by state officials in their effort to get the company to invest here – a promise that the state would reimburse the company for every penny it pays in local taxes on business equipment.

States don’t break promises to big business without huge long-term consequences.

Rosenfeld shared with the chamber members a vision of Haigis Parkway as home to top-notch research centers, high-tech companies and precision manufacturing.

If Scarborough – or Maine – is to have a prayer of that vision coming true, the state’s increasing taxation of businesses has to be reversed now.

Jeff Inglis, editor

Historic ship gets refurbished home

Published in the Current

SOUTH PORTLAND (June 16, 2005): An important piece of American history and Maine lore has a refurbished home on Spring Point in South Portland, as well as a tribute to a man key in its preservation.

A portion of the clipper ship Snow Squall, launched in 1851 from the Cornelius Butler Shipyard on Turner’s Island in Cape Elizabeth (now South Portland), is part of the permanent collection at the Portland Harbor Museum.

The gallery has been refurbished and was reopened for the first time last week, showing off the new elements of the exhibit, including a display in memory of maritime historian Nick Dean, the man who rediscovered the wreck of the Snow Squall in the Falkland Islands in 1979 and spearheaded her return to Maine.

Dean, who was also the first director of the museum when it was called the Spring Point Museum, died in January at age 71. His widow, Zibette Dean, attended the gallery’s opening, as did Dave Switzer, who with Nick Dean wrote a history of the ship, called “Snow Squall: The Last American Clipper Ship.”

The ship was a fast freight ship carrying cargo around Cape Horn between the east and west coasts of the United States, as well as across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

In 1863, she escaped from the Confederate raiding ship Tuscaloosa near the Cape of Good Hope in an all-day race pitting crew skills and ship speed against each other.

In 1864, the Snow Squall was on her way from New York to San Francisco but ran aground near Cape Horn. She limped back into Port Stanley in the Falklands and was abandoned.

“It sat there for 114 years,” said Hadley Schmoyer, the museum’s new curator, who started the job April 20.

When it was discovered in 1979, it was one of a few remnants of the American clipper shipbuilding years, and a rare specimen of how the ships were designed and built, Schmoyer said.

Because clipper ships were built so quickly and with many changes from ship to ship – all in search of a few extra knots of speed – there were few models left to show how they were built.

Dean, an Edgecomb resident, recognized the value of the find, and coordinated the work required in returning her to Maine.

Other parts of her hull are in the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, South Street Seaport Museum in New York City and the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park in California.

The evening also saw the opening of the new seasonal exhibit at the Portland Harbor Museum, called “Old Salts and New Directions” and focusing on the people who work in and around the harbor.

Among the artifacts is a scale model of the Casco Bay Lines steamer Maquoit, handmade by Capt. Larry Legere of Cape Elizabeth. Legere, the operations agent for the lines, is the son of Capt. Edward Legere, who captained the ferry steamers for many years, and the father of Alexandra Legere, who also works for the ferry company.

Editorial: Hail and farewell

Published in the Current

CAPE ELIZABETH (June 16, 2005): As graduation season winds up for another year, we wish all of the graduates well, their parents too – and a special "good luck" to the graduates’ younger siblings, who now step up a rung in their own growth ladder.

Scarborough’s 202 graduates and Cape Elizabeth’s 129, all newly minted this week, join 221 of their neighbors in South Portland who became alumni last week, taking on new roles in the community and in their lives.

Many of them will leave town to attend college or other professional training, or to enter the military. Some will stay near home, either living in town while attending classes nearby, finding a new job or sticking with an old one.

To all of these – and any other subgroups – we offer hearty congratulations and wishes of good luck.

By now, you have chosen your role models and begun to follow them. But you will find still others who affect how you live your life. Choose cautiously those whose models you will follow, as no road is truly clear from the outset.

One example we hold up this week, not just to celebrate an extraordinary graduate making an unusual choice, but also to provide food for thought and discussion among parents, students and teachers, is Megan Barnes of Cape Elizabeth.

As we read on Page 1, while many of her classmates are headed to college, she is delaying that route – not forever, she says now, but perhaps. Instead, she is headed to Ecuador to work in an international school where she studied during part of her junior year, seeking out international experiences to enrich her learning and development. (Plus, it’s fun.)

It’s very common in this country to go directly from high school to college, and for many students, that’s the proper way to do it. But there are a whole lot of high school graduates for whom college right after school may not be the best idea.

Schools and parents should be open to the idea students who don’t follow any of the three traditional American paths for high school graduates: college, work or the military.

In other countries, from Europe to Australia and New Zealand, it is very common to take a year or more before college for what is sometimes called an “OE” – overseas experience. Some young people work, as Barnes is doing, while others just travel. Many do a mix – traveling until they run out of money and then working for a bit to make it back.

That type of experience is very valuable, and even those going directly to college should seek some sort of study abroad if they wish to truly understand this incredibly diverse and wonderful world we share.

People on an OE meet others in similar quests from other countries, visit faraway lands and explore not only other cultures but their own, and themselves.

High schools strive to prepare their students for the “real world,” but can go only so far – staff and teachers know it just as well as parents and students. Some sort of additional education or preparation is needed before these young adults are fully fledged.

There are a number of routes available – including college, work and the military. But there is another, and Barnes has found it, all on her own, and stuck to it despite advice to the contrary from teachers, guidance staff and administrators.

She should be proud for growing up to be the young woman that she is, as all the graduates should be proud of who they have become.

We look forward to hearing more of Barnes, and of all of the class of 2005. May they all grow to know their own minds, choose their counsel wisely, and refuse to take no for an answer, no matter how authoritative the rejection may seem.

Jeff Inglis, editor

Pipe bomb found on Cape beach

Published in the Current

CAPE ELIZABETH (June 14, 2005): A pipe bomb found in the surf stayed on a Cape Elizabeth neighborhood beach for five hours Sunday, while children and adults played nearby.

Cape police and a State Police Bomb Squad member said the item was dangerous, and warned the public against going near any such device.

But, when officers handled it, they did so without any special protective gear. The bomb technician said his training has taught him to handle dangerous substances properly.

“It was high noon, the beach was full of kids” when Cameron Gale, a beachfront resident, found the pipe while picking up trash on Casino Beach with his 4-year-old daughter, Annie, putting the garbage in a child’s sand pail.

“My daughter and I go down once a week and do the rounds,” he said. “There was no way to know it was a pipe bomb,” so Gale “tossed it in the bucket with the rest of the trash.”

“It sat next to our towel for five hours in the roaring hot sun,” Gale said. “Everybody was walking by it.”

The pipe was “rolling around in the debris” in the surf, and looked like a harmless piece of copper pipe, Gale said.

"There was no fuse," he said, and no way to know what it really was.

It was still shiny copper, Gale said, so it had not spent much time in the water. “I think if it had washed up it would have been more corroded,” he said. “The little bar code was still intact.”

Not until he brought the pail up to the house and started throwing away the items did Gale peel a piece of tape off the eight-inch pipe, revealing a hole drilled in it. At that point, he realized it was more than a pipe.

He took it out of the bucket, put it on his woodpile and called the police.

Sgt. Andrew Steindl came to the house, picked it up – spilling some gunpowder in the process – and drove it back to the police station, where he covered it with a sandbag in case it blew up.

“I felt it was safe to handle,” Steindl said Tuesday. Otherwise, he said he would not have touched it.

A bomb expert from the Maine State Police came to the station Monday to collect the pipe and destroy it, Steindl said.

That officer, Sgt. Mike Edes, is a member of the State Police Bomb Squad. He took the pipe away and blew it up. "We don't try to dismantle it," Edes said.

The pipe bomb contained gunpowder, he said. "It was very unstable."

Edes said Gale "really put himself in a great deal of danger" by handling the bomb.

Steindl said he handled the bomb with care but without special protective equipment, and Edes said he did the same. Edes said his training taught him to be more careful than perhaps Gale was being. "We know what we're doing," Edes said, calling Gale's actions "the dumbest thing I ever saw."

Steindl and other officers searched the Casino Beach – a neighborhood beach just off Shore Road – on Sunday and again Monday, and found nothing.

“We kind of think it was a one-time thing,” said Police Chief Neil Williams. He suspects someone was either getting rid of the bomb or wanted to see it blow up.

Steindl said the investigation is considering all possibilities for how it got to the beach, including washing up from a boat or being intentionally brought to the beach by someone.

“This is not a terrorist bomb,” said Gale. “Kids do it and they’re going to keep doing it.”

That is his theory – some neighbors mentioned they heard fireworks on the beach Saturday night, and Gale’s trash collection efforts turned up some bottle-rocket debris in nearby rocks.

Edes, from the bomb squad, said pipe bombs are more than just fireworks. "A real pipe bomb is going above and beyond" usual mischief, he said. "We don't see a lot of them just as jokes. When you're dealing with pipe bombs, you're usually dealing with some bad actors."

Cape police have distributed leaflets in the immediate neighborhood, with a picture of the pipe bomb and a warning to people not to touch “anything remotely resembling this.” Instead, people should stay away from it and call police, at 767-3323.

221 graduate from South Portland

Published in the Current

SOUTH PORTLAND (June 9, 2005): South Portland High School graduated 221 seniors Sunday, in ceremonies marked by bright skies, cool breezes and beach balls bouncing among the graduates.

The first diploma was awarded to the family of Anthony Varanelli, a member of the class who died during freshman year.

Honor Essayist Jeana Petillo challenged her classmates to contribute to society. “Giving back is something we can all do, regardless of where we are going next year,” she said.

“Everyday people will continue to influence and inspire others with small acts of kindness,” she said.

Honor Essayist Leia Crosby, who recently returned from a semester in Thailand, echoed the theme, urging her fellow graduates to “have an open mind and an open heart and the courage to take risks.”

She recited a quote from the diploma she received at the end of her Thailand semester: "To live is to risk dying, to hope is to risk despair, and to try is to risk failure. But only a person who risks is free."

She said the school had given them a good foundation on which to build their futures. “South Portland High School has not just given us an education; it has taught us to develop our education on our own,” Crosby said.

Class Salutatorian Shana Kieran, who said she is “going back to basics these days,” told of the recent rediscovery of her favorite childhood book, “Miss Rumphius” by Barbara Cooney.

It is a picture book about a girl who dreams of growing up, going off to see the world, settling by the sea, but has been taught that “she must do something to make the world more beautiful,” Kieran said.

So when she gets older, Miss Rumphius settles by the sea and plants lupin seeds all up and down a hillside outside of town.

“Once in a while we need to get outside of ourselves,” Kieran said, reminding her classmates, teachers and assembled friends and relatives that the class “began our freshman year on Sept. 4, 2001.”

“Over the last four years our awareness of terror and fear have been heightened,” she said. “This is a time when we need people to do things,” like improving the world and helping people gain understanding of each other.

She said there are a lot of groups, even in the school, with people divided by political lines, social issues, class, race and even “people who listen to rap, people who listen to country.”

“Be open to new ideas and new ways of thinking,” she said, suggesting that people do something to make the world better. “It’s not about fixing the world or eliminating evil,” just making things nicer for each other, she said.

Valedictorian Tim Cahill began his address by invoking the age group that has been called “the greatest generation” – the people who were young adults at the beginning of World War II and faced huge challenges that they rose to and overcame.

“Our generation comes of age at a time of uncertainty and fear,” said Cahill. “The challenges for us are great.”

But, he said, in his own class there are “ordinary people already doing extraordinary things.”

He praised nearly two dozen of his classmates by name, and the rest by association, saying they are working in a wide range of ways to make South Portland and the world better places.

He said Hannah Dunphy has "devoted countless number of hours" with Amnesty International, leading the school's group and representing all Maine students to the larger organization.

He told of Shana Kieran and the Key Club's efforts to make money and give it to needy causes, and of Matt Fitzpatrick, "who is too young to join the Marines" but volunteers on weekends training and recruiting others, and will join when he can.

Cahill honored the achievements of Seth York, who will attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; Martha Shaw, who is joining the Air Force; the class's three Eagle Scouts, Nick Meyer, Sam Jackson and James Kemer; and Kyle Dixon, owner of his own landscaping business and a dedicated volunteer in the community.

He recognized the artistic ability of graffiti artist Eli Shank, whose work can be seen at the legal tagging wall in Portland, and on the class of 2005 T-shirts; and Tyler Dyment's caricatures and Ben Braley's photography.

Cahill told of athletic prowess, too: record-setting track athletes Courtney Albin and Eric Giddings, Whitney Morrow's 1,000-point basketball career, and columnist and softball star Amanda Aceto.

Some students have other interests, too, Cahill said: "Annie Clancy is the heart and soul of all our auditorium performances. Alex Trout is the go-to guy for any kind of technical assistance. ... Casey Doucette and Jeana Petillo work harder than anyone will ever know to keep our class fired up and on track."

He pointed to two students in particular for extending the reach of South Portland High School around the globe: Leia Crosby, who spent a semester in Thailand, and Xibei Ding, who moved to Maine from China this year. "They have shown us how to be citizens of the world," Cahill said.