Seeking high ground: Rising sea levels may affect future development

Published in the Portland Phoenix; sidebar to a larger feature by Deirdre Fulton on development in the Bayside area of Portland

As developers, residents, and city officials plan the future of Bayside, they’ll have to wrestle with some very difficult questions. A sense of the flavor of those discussions was on display at the Portland Society for Architecture “Waterfront Visions 2050” community workshop, held a couple weeks back at SPACE Gallery.

The first several minutes were spent defining common terms, such as what the phrase “100-year storm” means. (Confusing but true: It’s not a storm that happens every 100 years, but rather a storm that has a one percent chance of occurring in any given year. They can happen in back-to-back years, or with far more than 100 years between them.)

The basics are hard enough in a room of 50 people paying close attention; when dealing with public policy, it’s important to ensure the wider public is accurately informed, which also means ensuring journalists covering the process understand variations in terminology.

For example, maps and scientific disciplines discuss sea level in different terms, such as  measuring distance above the normal high-tide line or calculating a mean sea level that equals out tides and waves. So when one person talks about sea level rising four or five feet, another might need to translate that to as many as nine or 10 feet, depending on how each is measuring the changing water level.

But even after that is sorted out, it’s not enough to think about just the parcel of land being developed. In some cases, high ground may seem safe enough to build on, but a look at the surrounding land will reveal that new shopping center will one day be on an island with no road access.

And when multiple interconnected and interrelated properties are under consideration, owners’ differences can cause tension. One small group at the PSA event seemed focused on what to do about the piers on Commercial Street — raise them, protect them, convert them to floating platforms? — while another group simply moved their projected waterfront back far enough to surrender some property to the ocean. But that would mean consigning the piers to the deep, something the other group didn’t even discuss.

Of course, expense is a problem. Developers have to determine how much they’re willing to invest in a property — which, in places near sea level, means calculating how much it costs to raise the street levels, or how much profit can be squeezed from a development in the few remaining years or decades before it’s underwater . Public officials have to figure out what’s cost-effective to use taxpayer dollars for. (See “How Wet Will Portland Get?” by Jeff Inglis, October 4.)

Also making discussions challenging is the fact that some waterfront land is contaminated (or just plain made of trash used to fill in wetlands 150 years ago both on Commercial Street and the area around Back Cove) — if that land is submerged, the contaminants may leak out into the global seas.

And beyond that is a whole host of state and federal regulations about what can be built, with what restrictions, near the shoreline.

Even if an individual project seems straightforward (and they rarely do!), each new proposal will stir up these and other important questions, as we determine how to adapt to our changing planet.

Press Releases: Getting spun

Published in the Portland Phoenix

News is far more than just what government officials say. That’s hard enough for many of Maine’s daily papers to remember on a good day, much less late on a sleepy post-Halloween Sunday production night. Which is when 2nd District Democratic Congressman Mike Michaud, who is running for governor in the 2014 election, submitted an opinion piece to the Bangor Daily News and the Portland Press Herald declaring that he is gay.

The sequence of subsequent events shows not only how good Michaud and his team are at co-opting the news cycle, but also how vulnerable Maine’s mainstream media is to a professional operation.

The reaction was almost exclusively political — talking about the significance of Maine’s first openly gay member of Congress, the historic nature of the nation’s first openly gay gubernatorial candidate, whether the move would help or hurt Michaud in fundraising and voter support, commentary from pundits about whether anyone cared about Michaud’s sexuality anyway, reaction from lunch-counter occupants that gayness doesn’t matter to them (because of course they’d tell a reporter if it did), and so on. (For a deeper analysis of the politics of Michaud’s move, see Al Diamon’s column on this page.)

Of course, some of this was unavoidable: According to Press Herald reporter Steve Mistler’s story on the revelation, “Michaud’s campaign did not take questions about his announcement or its timing . . . Terms of the embargo also prohibited reporters from seeking reaction until after 12:01 am Monday. The campaign required that the newspapers agree to the terms in advance, while refusing to disclose the topic of the column until Sunday.” With little advance notice, and agreement not to make any follow-up calls until the middle of the night, reporters were completely hamstrung.

Even in the days that followed, though, two important things were missing, both of which were no doubt just as Michaud hoped. First, even a short couple of years ago, any politician’s announcement of gayness would have merited a reporter’s phone call to Michael Heath, Maine’s loony-tunes rabid-knee-jerk gay-hater-in-chief of the state’s fringe commentariat. But times have changed in Maine’s media environment. Despite looking closely at all the reporting on the matter, I didn’t detect any attempts to find someone who might be morally opposed to Michaud’s self-identified sexual orientation. Avoiding intolerant demonization is commendable, of course, though no less noteworthy for being positive.

The other thing missing was any sense of Michaud’s humanity, or any recognition of the fact that coming out in 2013 is still an emotionally fraught process — even if the person doing the coming out is younger than Michaud’s 58 years, and even if the audience is someone more likely to be accommodating than that man’s septuagenarian Catholic mother. Sure, there were a couple of videos letting him speak his mind, but he didn’t take those opportunities to speak about himself as a person. (A November 12 Press Heraldpiece about the challenges of coming out didn’t even interview Michaud.)

The congressman/would-be governor specifically diverted any attention of that nature by asking rhetorically “Why does it matter?” and then moving right on to his policies and his legislative record. The reason it matters, of course, is not that being gay is anything bad or to be ashamed of. It matters because the process of coming out can be life-altering. It matters because voters want to elect people, not politicians.

Michaud has glossed over his own narrative, going so far as to claim that he’s “the same person today that I was last week, last year, and the year before.”

But that’s actually hard to believe. Coming to terms with one’s own sexuality and sexual orientation, and then telling family members (and the public!) is not simple or minor — particularly for someone who has spent decades in the closet and who, during that time, voted against multiple gay-rights proposals.

This is not a call for reporters to dig into Michaud’s sexual history or personal life — but it’s worth asking Michaud if he has learned anything from this process that might affect his views on certain public policies. So far, his grip on the media narrative has prevented even that basic question from arising. 

Teaching police about trans people: Maine departments lack policies but have ready examples

Published in Out In Maine

 It’s easy for police officers to become defensive when asked about the rules governing their interactions with members of the public. That’s exactly the tack John Rogers took. He’s the director of the Maine Criminal Justice Academy, which trains all law-enforcement officers at the local, county, and state levels in Maine, and when contacted by Out In Maine, was adamant that his organization trains officers to interact with transgender individuals exactly as they do with all other people.

“We train people to treat everybody the way they would like to be treated . . . Everybody should be treated equally.” He refused to even consider the idea that there should be any policies or guidelines for handling any individuals differently or ensuring that a group’s concerns be addressed. “It doesn’t matter to us.”

But another statement he made suggested he might, in fact, be in need of sensitivity training, even if he doesn’t know it: “I’m 57 years old and I don’t know if I’ve ever even seen a transgender person.”

That’s exactly the reasoning behind the Boston Police Department’s transgender policy, which took effect in June after years of development, research, and legal review.

“It’s trying to educate officers,” says Javier Pagan, a BPD office who also serves as his department’s liaison with the city’s LGBT communities. While all officers and policies strive to be respectful of individuals and their rights, it’s not safe to assume that everyone knows what respect looks like to certain people.

For example, Pagan says, the BPD has a policy about dealing with prisoners — with rules that apply to all interactions with people in police custody. But that policy also has a subsection about dealing with female prisoners, and another about juvenile prisoners, to ensure that the specific concerns of women and children — who represent a smaller population within the criminal-justice system — are considered and addressed by police.

Along the same lines, the BPD policy on transgender people acknowledges that some Boston officers might have fewer opportunities to interact with this demographic (while others might have many more, depending on where in the city they work).

The policy codifies things like what name to use for a transgender person, if their legal name differs from the one they use in daily life. Similarly, it specifies that officers should use the pronouns that refer to the person’s self-expressed gender identity, and even goes so far as to allow for ambiguity: “If officers are uncertain about which pronouns are appropriate, then officers will respectfully ask the individual.”

These practices are, of course, common sense, and even second nature, within the LGBT and allied communities, but not in law enforcement — yet.

“It’s not easy to change a culture,” says Pagan. As society changes, and as laws change, Pagan notes, it’s important for police practices to keep up. He notes that these practices and policies also protect police officers and agencies against claims of discrimination or prejudice.

Still early for Maine

Most Maine police departments have yet to even look toward making changes to promote transgender sensitivity. As Maine police academy head Rogers made clear, new officers are not taught anything specific about transgender issues and individuals.

The Maine State Police does not have a policy either in force or even in development, according to spokesman Steve McCausland.

The Maine Chiefs of Police Association, which develops model policies often adopted verbatim across the state, has no such policy regarding transgender people, according to Robert Schwartz, the group’s executive director and a former South Portland police chief.

“I would not be surprised if at some point we were to develop a model policy . . . but nothing has brought it to the forefront” to date, Schwartz says.

Portland Police Chief Michael Sauschuck says that while his agency lacks a written policy along the lines of Boston’s, “The rule has always been, if you refer to yourself as a male or a female, then that’s what we do in response.” He notes that the department does have an LGBT community liaison, Officer Alissa Poisson, and recognizes that “the city of Portland is an incredibly diverse place.”

Ian Grady, a spokesman for EqualityMaine, says the city’s inclusive and sensitive practices are “a great role model for other towns and cities in Maine,” and says the LGBT-rights group hasn’t heard of any problems arising in Maine law enforcement.

Starting in corrections

A more significant concern than on-the-street police encounters with transgender people is raised by Penobscot County Sheriff Glenn Ross, who notes that while officers on patrol may have to question or search transgender people, bigger challenges arise when incarcerating them.

At the Penobscot County Jail, “it’s a policy that is developing.” Transgender inmates are not common there, but they do arrive from time to time. “We involve our medical department early on and appoint appropriate-sex officers to do pat-down searches,” Ross says, noting that it may involve two different officers patting down different areas of an inmate’s body.

“Not all of the rules are clearly defined,” Ross notes. Litigation still occurs, and much has not yet been decided either by policy or in court.

Where to house an inmate is determined in part by the medical staff, who may evaluate a person’s progress through a transition between genders, but also includes considering the gender self-identification of the inmate in question.

Ross’s staff works from a policy developed in Cumberland County, which has been in effect since 2009, according to Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce. Departments as far afield as Chicago, Denver, and San Francisco have used the county’s policy as a starting point for their own work.

Cumberland County’s policy includes an evaluation of an individual’s case by medical and security staff, who determine whether a transgender person will be housed with men or with women.

“We really pay particular attention to how they identify,” Joyce says. “It’s trying to balance the rights of the individual and the rights of the individuals they might be in a pod with.” While at any given time almost all inmates are in some need of mental-health care, Joyce’s policy also dictates transgender inmates’ access to medications and other treatments: The jail will provide those only if the person began those procedures before being incarcerated. If they decide to start a transition after arriving at the jail, the policy is to make the person wait until release to continue.

Joyce says some of his staff were reluctant or unconvinced at first, and needed training before being comfortable dealing with transgender inmates, but he knows it’s an important step. Observing that transgender people are a vulnerable population even before encountering police, he says, “We want to not make things worse.”

He says issues of transgender rights are ”becoming more and more prevalent” — recently Time magazine called him to talk about the situation with incarcerating Chelsea Manning, the male-to-female transgender person who, as US Army Private Bradley Manning, was convicted of releasing classified documents to the public. “You can’t duck it,” he says. So the question becomes, “How can you make it as respectable and responsible as possible and respect security and everybody’s rights?”

Promising learning opportunities

There’s a very good starting point to answering that question, which has been developed right here in Maine, though it’s available to police officers nationwide.

It’s an online training class for law-enforcement officers entitled “Awareness of Transgender Issues,” and it was put together by one of Maine’s top cops: Noel March, the US Marshal for the District of Maine. He’s a former Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office chief deputy and former UMaine-Orono police chief who developed the online course while earning his master of arts degree in peace and reconciliation from UMaine.

“Hate crimes has been at the forefront of my interest for many years,” March says. He’s also a family friend of the Maineses, the state’s — possibly even the country’s — best-known family with a transgender member. They’ve been highlighted in reporting in the Portland Phoenix, the Boston Globe, and elsewhere.

When considering what he could contribute to the law-enforcement community during his studies, he thought about training possibilities. (Like many certified professionals, police officers have to do a certain amount of continuing education to keep their certifications current.) “I found that there was nothing relating to people who identified as transgender as victims, or witnesses, or complainants, or as coworkers,” March says.

In collaboration with Wayne Maines and a Maine-based security-training company led by Paul Plaisted, March put together the 40-minute course, even narrating it himself. “It really educated me,” he admits.

“Many members of the transgender community lack the comfort to interact with law enforcement,” March says, often because of issues not shared by gay, lesbian, or bisexual people. For example, if a driver is stopped for speeding, their driver’s license may show a different name, gender, and appearance than the person behind the wheel exhibits.

March says officers should do their jobs, determining the correct identity of the person in question, but shouldn’t “be so narrow-minded as to think that this person is someone who’s wearing a disguise. This may be a genuine case of someone in a transition.”

The online course covers basics of transgender terminology and etiquette as well as more specific issues of recognizing the potential for transgender people to be targets of violence, and working to protect them. It makes regular reminders of police officers’ sense of justice, equality, fair play, and duty to help people in need or in danger.

And that’s what March sees in his efforts to encourage police to improve their sensitivity to transgender people: “We need to understand the people who we encounter in our role as police officers.” 

Whence from victory? EqualityMaine looks at the next five years

Published in Out In Maine

Having secured marriage equality last year and bade farewell to longtime executive director Betsy Smith in September, the state’s oldest and largest LGBT political advocacy organization is at a point of serious transition. Smith, who had been active with EqualityMaine for more than two decades and led it since 2002, left the organization at a high point in its existence and in her career. The group’s staff and budget grew significantly during that time, and won important legal and legislative battles, including protecting LGBT Mainers from discrimination, establishing domestic-partnership rights, and winning on marriage twice (once in Augusta and the second time statewide), Smith has also left EQME with a five-year strategic plan, a set of projects the organization has already begun to tackle.

After years of primary attention on marriage, EQME staffers spent the months following last November’s victory thinking about the future. They interviewed dozens of people, got 700 responses to an online survey, and conducted multiple focus groups to determine what to accomplish next, says Ali Vander Zanden, the group’s political director and interim executive director. “People understand that we’re not done yet,” she says.

While there’s a lot yet to get going, Vander Zanden says those next steps are “starting to take shape.”

Moving forward, EQME will focus on four key demographics: young people, rural residents, elderly Mainers, and transgender people. The basic goal is clear: “We’re going to take the legal victories that we’ve won, and we’re putting those into people’s daily lives,” she says.

Starting young

A 2011 survey by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) found that “the vast majority of LGBT students in Maine regularly heard homophobic remarks, sexist remarks, and negative remarks about gender expression.” Specifically, 97 percent of students heard other students use the word “gay” negatively; 87 percent heard homophobic remarks (such as “fag” or “dyke”) regularly. The survey has a nine-point margin of error, but even with that caveat, the numbers are startling.

The survey goes on: “3 in 10 were physically harassed (e.g., pushed or shoved) based on their sexual orientation and 1 in 10 was physically assaulted (e.g. punched, kicked or injured
with a weapon) based on the way they expressed their gender.

And a great many students never reported those incidents: 46 percent never told school staff (of those who did, only 44 percent “said that reporting resulted in effective intervention by staff”) and even more — 58 percent — never told a family member.

The survey shows young LGBTQ Mainers are “living their lives in fear,” Vander Zanden says. (It’s worth noting here that while many nationwide polls suggest improving tolerance and understanding for LGBTQ people among young Americans, those polls most often involve people who are 18 and older; many school bullies are younger than that.)

Of course, she notes that not every kid is a perpetrator, but a few is enough — and often bystanders don’t step in to halt the abuse. Vander Zanden also observes that at least some of the kids bullying others are likely to be victims themselves, in other circumstances; they’re just passing along the behavior they’ve received. “Those children don’t know sometimes the harm that they’re doing,” she says.

The target of EQME’s efforts in this area include its longstanding support of school civil-rights teams, where young people can show leadership in a safe environment. There’s also a new element, of working more directly with school employees.

“We have this new anti-bullying law” in Maine, Vander Zanden says, which strengthens protections for students suffering bullying, and requires schools to train staff to prevent it, and actively address it when it happens. So EQME will be training school teachers and staff about LGBTQ bullying specifically, in a way that coordinates with other training sessions on bullying in general. Vander Zanden says the organization wants to ensure that schools have resources and know-how to follow the new law.

Beyond the cities

Organizing support for rural Mainers who identify as LGBTQ is another major initiative, which will build on the statewide marriage-equality victory in 2012.

In that effort, marriage supporters held as many as 250,000 personal conversations with friends, family members, and neighbors about the issues. As we’d all hope, what those conversations showed is that “people want to do the right thing,” Vander Zanden says, especially once they’ve made a personal connection. But also unsurprisingly, “there are a lot of people who have never thought about this from the perspective of an LGBTQ person.”

Vander Zanden, who grew up in Southwest Harbor and started her work with EQME as a rural organizer, acknowledges that the live-and-let-live ethos of New England rural life may lead some people to either ignore or be quiet about their support for LGBTQ neighbors, simply out of respect for their privacy, or a wish not to draw attention to something the LGBTQ individuals themselves may not be highlighting.

But that can still lead to situations where an LGBTQ relationship isn’t publicly acknowledged, such as a conversation at a local store in which a straight ally doesn’t ask about a lesbian friend’s partner in public. Vander Zanden says that can lead to the LGBTQ person feeling unsupported
in the community.

Nevertheless, “we’ve seen that people’s attitudes are changing,” she says, attributing that in part to the personal conversations aspect of the marriage campaign. Another effort, particularly in rural areas, has involved approaching community members and asking them to put their names in newspaper ads as public declarations of support for LGBT rights (and marriage equality in particular). Hundreds, even thousands, of rural Mainers have taken part.

She says the effects are measurable. In 2009, marriage equality lost 73 percent to 27 percent in Aroostook County, for example. In 2012, the citizen’s initiative did better; it still lost, but the margin was better: 66 percent to 33 percent.

Vander Zanden calls that “encouraging supporters to come out as supporters,” and describes it as “just good old community organizing.” The group will expand its push in this direction with a new position just created for rural organizing.

An aging population

Maine is the state with the oldest average age in the nation (42.7 years old, according 2010 Census figures), and LGBTQ people face some common aging issues, as well as a fair number of quandaries straight elders don’t.

They still have to sort out choices about retirement communities, assisted-living facilities, and finding new or additional health-care providers to address changing health conditions. But at every turn, LGBTQ elders have to navigate the coming-out process all over again. One concern Vander Zanden highlights is about home health-care workers who might not be supportive of their patients’ LGBTQ identities. To get the care they need and still feel safe in their own homes, “some people are actually having to choose to go back into the closet,” Vander Zanden says.

Another aspect of helping aging LGBTQ Mainers involves ensuring that health workers are asking the right questions and doing the right screenings — as when dealing with HIV-positive people, who are now living much longer (as long as 30 to 50 years post-diagnosis, with aggressive therapy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

In fact, CDC projects that by 2015 “more than half of all HIV-infected Americans will be over 50 years old.” The organization also notes that 17 percent of new HIV diagnoses are in people 50 and older.

(Also working to address these issues is a Maine chapter of Services and Advocates for GLBT Elders, which was founded earlier this year; see “When I’m Sixty-Four,” by Deirdre Fulton, Summer 2013.)


Still working: transgender rights

Transgender issues remind us all that “we haven’t won everything there is to win,” Vander Zanden says. For example, many insurance plans don’t cover medical services related to people’s self-identification as transgender. Some private employers do carry insurance that offers surgery, hormones, and gender-identity mental-health counseling, but it’s not required by law.

EQME will help people understand what rights transgender people have under Maine law, as well as training trans allies (in connection with Maine Trans Net; see “Trans Explosion” by Lisa Bunker, Fall 2013). “We all need to become better allies,” Vander Zanden says.

In that vein, EqualityMaine will continue to support the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which will at some point come under consideration by the full US Senate, having been approved 15-7 by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions back in July. This proposed law specifically includes protection for trans people as well as gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, from being fired (or not hired in the first place) simply for their gender identity or sexual orientation. And it will fight for LGBTQ interests in Augusta, including fighting a proposal by state Senator David Burns, a Whiting Republican, that would dramatically expand people’s, and companies’, ability to discriminate or otherwise exempt themselves from many state laws, simply by claiming the law violates their freedom to
practice religion.

In the short term, Vander Zanden will lead the organization and the search for its new executive director, expected to be hired in January — just in time for EQME’s 30th anniversary. Even that many decades in, and with as much progress as LGBTQ Mainers have seen, there’s more to do. “We’re still having the conversation about what’s next,” Vander Zanden says.

Press releases: Marginalized mainstream

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Amid a weeks-long deluge of pontification and punditry in newspapers every day and around the clock on dozens of TV channels, who would have thought that the key to the shutdown dilemma would be a five-minute video of procedural business on the floor of the US House of Representatives? Or that it would be posted not by a major media outlet — nor even a minor one — but by an obscure congressman from Maryland, Democrat Chris Van Hollen?

The clip in question, from October 12, along with a three-minute C-SPAN clip of a late-night House Rules Committee meeting on September 30, are crucial to understanding exactly how the Republican majority in the House of Representatives has subverted our democratic process.

The clips show that at the very last minute — between 10:45 pm September 30 and 1:15 am October 1 — the Republicans rigged the rules of the game to prevent ordinary members of the House from making progress on a budget resolution, without which the government will remain closed.

The original rules let any House member decide that a stalemate had been reached when determining how to amend a proposed bill, and allowed that member to force a vote on the bill without any amendments. In other words, it provides a means for a representative to compel his or her colleagues to vote up or down on the main question at hand, with no changes. This is relevant here because the Senate has passed what is being called a “clean” budget resolution, and the House Republicans are demanding it be amended to defund the Affordable Care Act before coming to a vote. The videos show that Republicans changed the rules to prevent any member from forcing a vote without amendments, and restricted that power to arch-conservative majority leader Eric Cantor, a tea partier from Virginia.

This move didn’t come to light through deep reporting or anonymous tipsters leaking information to the media. Instead, Van Hollen posted a video (of his exchange on the House floor illuminating this new rule) to YouTube. As one observer noted, it already has half again as many views as Van Hollen has constituents living in his district.

Until now, the mainstream media have seemed devoted to presenting the shutdown as a bipartisan mess. On September 30, a headline in the Washington Post blared: “In shutdown blame game, Democrats and Republicans united: It’s the other side’s fault.” On October 15 , the perspective remained unchanged: “Senate leaders’ talks on shutdown, debt limit stall as sides await market’s reaction,” read a Post headline.

Observers like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have been pointing out that these are misleading: In fact, of course, the government shutdown was a strategy employed by radical right-wingers who have always wanted to shrink government down so small that Grover Norquist could, as he famously said, “drown it in a bathtub.”

Coverage like Stewart’s and Colbert’s (as well as by alternative media around the nation), and now viral viewing of a few moments of Congressional technicalities, has led the American public to reject the mainstream-media view that everyone is to blame. On October 9, the Post ran a story with this headline: “AP-GfK Poll: Republicans get most blame for shutdown but no one’s a hero.” While there’s still a misdirection at the end, it’s clear that despite mainstream waffling, Americans are finding out what’s really going on.

Now it’s clear the Republicans haven’t taken hostages, but have rigged the rules of the game so a distinct and marginalized minority are in control of the entire legislative mechanism of this country. Will the mainstream media follow the truth, and the course set by its audience, or will the dinosaurs fall ever closer to extinction and irrelevance, for lack of courage to be honest?

Another thing they’re missing While the shutdown’s effects on US Antarctic Program operations and science have made some headlines, there’s an important connection that hasn’t: A great deal of government-funded research in the Antarctic and elsewhere studies the Earth’s changing climate. Huge gaps are about to appear in decades-long data collections, making scientific conclusions vulnerable to political assault. “They don’t have all the data,” climate-change-denier politicians will cry, ignoring that they themselves ensured that flaw by preventing spending on research. The aftereffects of this shutdown will echo for decades in scientific circles. Of course, this won’t bug people who think Jesus hung out with dinosaurs. But it should scare hell out of the rest of us.