Civic Action: Talk now about the future of Congress Square?

Published in the Portland Phoenix

If you have ideas for the future of Congress Square, the city of Portland is interested in hearing them. Except, of course, if those ideas include revitalizing the concrete plaza at the corner of Congress and High streets. The city council voted Monday night to sell two-thirds of that public space to Rockbridge Capital, which is renovating the old Eastland Park Hotel.

If you think the sale is putting the cart before the horse, you’re far from alone. In fact, we warned about this very prospect more than a month ago: See “Getting Congress (Square) to Work,” by Jeff Inglis, August 16.

Nevertheless, the city has gone ahead and made the deal with Rockbridge. Opponents say they’ll go through the courts to challenge both the decision and the city’s refusal last week of a petition that would have increased restrictions on selling city-owned parks.

If you still want to have your voice heard — or at least listened to and then ignored — then put these two events on your calendar:
Monday, September 23 @ 6:30 pm | State Theatre, 609 Congress St, Portland
Wednesday, September 25 @ 6:30 pm | Williston-Immanuel United Church, 156 High St, Portland (enter off Deering Place)

And if you’re unable to attend but still want to put in your two cents’ worth, visit neighborland.com/congresssq or portlandmaine.gov/planning.

Of course, even if everyone in Maine put in their two cents’ worth twice, that still wouldn’t equal the $524,000 price Rockbridge is paying for the formerly public space.

Water Rights: Activists fight Poland Spring, conflicted regulators

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Objecting to the prospect that allegedly biased state officials might approve a decades-long deal that would let Poland Spring bottle and sell for massive profit Maine’s naturally occurring drinking water, a growing group of Mainers is stepping up its activity with an audience-participation protest in Portland during this week’s First Friday Art Walk.

The deal, arguments for and against which were heard by the Maine Public Utilities Commission on Tuesday, is between Nestle, the Swiss-based multinational conglomerate that owns Poland Spring, and the privately owned Fryeburg Water Company. It is a 25-year agreement that would have four five-year automatic extension periods.

Under the contract, which needs PUC approval to take effect, Nestle would pay for at least 75 million gallons of water each year (roughly the amount it now takes, though it’s allowed to take nearly twice as much).

The current rate of one-tenth of one cent per gallon means Nestle is agreeing to pay just $75,000 for all that water, though if the water company raises its rates in the future, Nestle would have to pay more. Nevertheless, the markup is pretty big: a 24-pack of 16.9-ounce bottles of Poland Spring water can be found for $6.99, or $2.20 a gallon — 2200 times as expensive. The deal would also have Nestle pay a flat fee of $144,000 a year in rent for its use of water company land as a loading station for trucks taking water to Nestle bottling plants in Hollis and Kingfield.

The protest event’s announcement comes just days after Portland Press Herald investigative reporter Colin Woodard revealed that all three members of Maine’s Public Utilities Commission, which will rule on the contract, and the head of the Public Advocate’s Office, which is charged with defending the public interest in utilities-regulation proceedings, have longstanding professional ties to Nestle.

One PUC member, Mark Vannoy, who worked as an environmental engineer on as many as 15 Nestle projects in Maine, has already recused himself. So has Public Advocate Timothy Schneider (his deputy, William Black, is handling the case). PUC member David Littell, who was a former partner in Pierce Atwood, Nestle’s lobbying firm, but never worked directly with the company, has said he will not recuse himself. The remaining PUC member, chairman Thomas Welch, is an attorney who used to represent Nestle; he is considering recusing himself — which would render the PUC unable to approve the deal.

Friday’s event, called “45 Years of No,” in reference to the projected duration of the deal, will have large and small stencils of the word “NO,” decorated by various artists, and blank ones to be filled in by visitors to the show. Various art supplies will be available for use; guest speakers will address issues related to the topic of water rights, and other activists will be in attendance to answer questions from the public.

The show, including the audience-participation elements, will be up through September, after which it will go on the road, taking the big and small “NO” artwork to the State House in Augusta, as well as Nestle’s Maine headquarters in Poland, and the town of Fryeburg.

A special element of the road show will be what organizer William Hessian calls “a human gallery” — all the artists, professional and amateur, will be invited to attend the exhibitions and stand with their artwork, to show not just their opinion of the deal, but their faces.

‘45 YEARS OF NO’ | September 6 @ 5-9 pm | Meg Perry Center, 544 Congress St, Portland | megperrycenter.org

Palpable suffering: A crushing tale, beautifully told

Published in the Portland Phoenix

It’s rare that we can put a human face on American foreign policy. And even rarer that the visage belongs to a person who steps willingly into the limelight — though admittedly for other reasons. A House in the Sky, a new memoir by Amanda Lindhout and co-written by Portlander Sara Corbett (a writer for the New York Times Magazine, among other publications), splits the difference beautifully, and devastatingly.

In 2008, Lindhout, a Canadian reporter cutting her teeth in the harshest places on the planet (Afghanistan and Iraq during the wars), went to Somalia to write about the unrest there. Warlords, tribal leaders, and government officials with varying degrees of popular legitimacy were engaged in a massive tug-of-war; the US, through the “war on terror,” backed several opposing players, sometimes simultaneously.

Lindhout stays away from the geopolitics; her story is very much her own, though it is important to read it not just as a human tale of suffering, resourcefulness, and survival, but also as an object lesson about the real cost of US intervention overseas.

Four days into her trip to Somalia, Lindhout was captured by a band of militants who held her for 459 days. That’s not a spoiler: The only spoiler that could possibly exist is Lindhout’s name on the cover — which is at times the only reassurance a reader has that she actually survived the ordeal. (Also, you can meet her on Friday at the Portland Public Library.)

No matter what you imagine might become of a white Western woman kidnapped by Islamic  militants (who are mostly in their late teens) in the middle of an anarchic gangland, the reality is far worse. Seriously: This is a soul-breaking book about the daily, hourly, secondly ordeal of surviving a mental and emotional crucible that would, at many times, have been easier to exit feet-first.

With Corbett’s expert help and reporting, Lindhout’s story is told directly, vividly, without artifice, hyperbole, or euphemism. A scene in which she hears her mother being beaten, and her mom fighting back against her boyfriend, is told quietly, understatedly. She expertly seals the deal: “In the bunk below me, Nathaniel started to cry. ‘Are you scared?’ I whispered, staring at the dark ceiling. It was an unfair question. He was six years old.” Lindhout was just nine. Her stark self-awareness forms the foundation of a uniquely probing reader-author connection.

The account of her captivity, which forms the second two-thirds of the book, is an unrelenting read, detailing the range of physical, psychological, emotional, and sexual weapons employed against her in an attempt to extract a ransom, but always including elements of Lindhout’s impressive depth of spirit. She explains — often approaching detached wonder at her own resilience — what, exactly, happened to her, and how she found within herself the will, the means, the power to carry on.

During one particularly brutal assault, she describes an out-of-body experience: “From above, I could see two men and a woman on the ground. The woman was tied up like an animal, and the men were hurting her, landing blows on her body. I knew all of them, but I also didn’t. I recognized myself down there, but I felt no more connected to the woman than to the men in the room. I’d slipped across some threshold I would never understand. The feeling was both deeply peaceful and deeply sad. What I saw was three people suffering, the tortured and the torturers alike.”

It is left to us, as it is to Lindhout herself, to make sense of, or peace with, this horrific tale — and we in the US must pay special attention to the detailed personal accounting she offers of the ripple effects of American power.

Perhaps we can even start to take our lead from Lindhout, who has chosen to transcend her suffering by bringing to her tormentors not condemnation, but compassion — in the form of a foundation providing educational support to young people in Somalia, kids very like her captors.

AMANDA LINDHOUT + SARA CORBETT | at the Rines Auditorium, Portland Public Library, 5 Monument Square, Portland | September 13 @ 6:30 pm | portlandlibrary.com | Free
A HOUSE IN THE SKY | by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett | 384 pages | Scribner | $27

Crime Watch: Downtown shops ‘under siege’ from thefts

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Two prominent Commercial Street retailers are installing video-surveillance and other security equipment in the wake of a summer marred by thefts.

Late last month, both Motifs and Old Port Wine Merchants and Cigar Shop stepped up security, and are trying to get help combating crime in the high-pedestrian-traffic area around their shops.

Motifs owner Paula Jalbert says crime “has gotten aggressive this summer, very aggressive,” well beyond “normal run-of-the-mill shoplifting.” Thieves are “more organized, and it seems to be groups”
operating together.

“On July 5 my petty cash bag was stolen right out from under us,” she says, among other thefts of money and easily marketable items. “They’re looking for purses, wallets, cell phones, iPads, computers.”

The thieves are “older — they’re not young kids,” Jalbert says.

Earlier this summer, a woman selling jewelry from a sidewalk table set up to cater to cruise-ship visitors was found to not have made the pieces herself but stolen them from Motifs and at least one other Old Port shop.  When confronted while brazenly selling them in the open air just down the street from where the items had been taken, the woman packed hurriedly and left the area; she hasn’t been back, Jalbert says.

So in August, she stepped up security, or, as she puts it, “I’ve gone on lockdown.”

“Now I have security cameras and they record video;” she has added a keycode lock to her office door, and all the shop’s clothes have security tags on them, too. She says the preventive steps have resulted in a significant dropoff in thefts.

Next door at Old Port Wine, owner Jacques deVillier has also stepped up security, a move he lamented in an email to customers.

He lost several hundred dollars’ worth of wine a few weeks back, and earlier in the summer police caught a well-dressed middle-aged man with a bag full of stolen cigars from his shop.

“This street is rampant,” deVillier says. Now he has four cameras feeding live video to monitors at the cash register, as well as recording footage for later review if needed.

It’s not a move he made willingly. “With much trepidation I have wrestled with the decision to install video cameras,” deVillier wrote in an August 26 email. “I have put off doing this because I think of this store as not just a wine shop but a place where all of my friends can congregate. Placing cameras seemed to be a matter of distrust and not the message I’ve received over the last seven years in Portland or the message I wanted to communicate to my friends. I love being here and I had hoped with Portland’s growth things could remain the same; things do change unfortunately, and not always for the better.”

Both shop owners say police and city officials need to do more, though Steve Hewins, interim executive director of Portland’s Downtown District, a nonprofit comprised of businesses in the city center, says he didn’t hear anything about the topic at his group’s August membership meeting.

“We’ve got great police, but how much can they do?” deVillier says.

Jalbert, who has owned retail stores in the Old Port since she opened Communiques in 1981, says she feels “like we’ve been under siege.”

She says police officers on patrol now “make a point of walking through every store” — but that only started about three weeks ago, after offices upstairs in Jalbert’s building were hit by thieves. She says officers blame the uptick in thefts on drug users, telling her illegal “drugs are on the rise in the Portland area.”

Portland Police Department spokesman Lieutenant James Sweatt says some thefts — such as those of electronics or other easily resellable items — could be connected to the drug trade, but others — of merchandise, for example — may be because a person actually wants the item stolen.

He says, though, that “there hasn’t been a significant change whatsoever” in the number of thefts reported citywide this year, compared to 2011 and 2012. He doesn’t have data broken down by region within the city, but “we’re not seeing a trending pattern here” at the police department. Sweatt did say that “businesses that do a little bit better job at security . . . are less likely to be targeted.”

Boost your skills: And improve your job prospects

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Want a new job? Or a promotion at your existing workplace? You have to learn more, do more, get more skills. It’s as simple as that.

But first, let’s get the bad news out of the way. Many employers want new hires to have skills they haven’t yet learned, even if they’re college grads. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, these are things like efficient work practices, how to handle customers on the phone, and how to communicate effectively in a businesslike way. Some of the people competing for job openings will have experience doing that stuff; if you don’t, your chances of getting a welcome-to-the-team phone call drop through the floor.

The good news is that you can acquire these skills fairly quickly, and without spending a lot of cash. Portland Adult Education — which is open to all Mainers (though Portlanders get a discount) — has classes on a wide range of job skills, in the realm of office work as well as the skilled trades. The fall schedule just came out, so check it over carefully at portlandadulted.org.

Most classes happen a couple times a week for a few months, and cost between $85 and $125, though some are more expensive. In other words, this is a relatively cheap way to buff your CV, without taking a big chunk out of your bank account — or your schedule.

Some of the classes teach pretty basic material, but it can be good for an intro if you haven’t used a particular piece of software before (like Microsoft Access, a database-management program), or if you need to brush up on accounting, or practice public speaking.

They’re all taught by local instructors, many of whom are professional active in the fields they’re teaching about, and may be able to connect you with employers seeking people with just the skills you’re learning.

You can start new projects, taking classes in website design, or specific design applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign). Or you can give your existing knowledge a boost, with “in a day” workshops, where people with basic knowledge of a piece of software can take just a few hours to pick up more complex techniques.

PAE also has courses to introduce you to a range of trades: woodworking, welding, electrical work, and plumbing. They can be good starting points to see if you like something enough to pursue a degree or certification, without risking a lot if it turns out not to be quite what you had hoped.

If you’re really committed to professional education, you can enter one of PAE’s certificate programs, which give you an unlimited amount of time to finish taking a prescribed set of courses. The three main certificates are for being an office assistant, accounting clerk, or working in a medical office. They each carry a core of eight basic office-skills courses, plus five certificate-specific classes to get you ready to take an entry-level job. (There’s also a “Microsoft Office Applications” certificate, if you take the classes teaching the basics of the five most commonly used Microsoft programs.)

And there’s a Certified Nursing Assistant program, which can be a good starting point for a career in the medical field. It’s true that being a CNA can be one of the toughest jobs in a hospital or nursing-home environment, but positions are always open for immediate work, and you might be able to score a post that will help you out with costs of getting more education and higher certification.

The long and the short of it is, if you want to learn something new to improve your work environment or job prospects, you owe Portland Adult Education a serious look.

Are you a business owner?Check out Corporate Training

Portland Adult Education also offers custom-teaching services to local businesses, helping them teach employees new skills and boost productivity.

Business owners can meet with a PAE consultant to see what classes might best serve the company’s, and workers’, needs. Then PAE will design classes to meet the goals you’re aiming for — whether with existing employees, new workers, or a combination of both. For example, Goodwill has worked with PAE to design a class to improve non-native speakers’ English.

PAE can also connect business owners with existing classes to improve workers’ skills, individually or as a group.