3/9/98.. Local ordinance.

When Columbus and Co. loomed up over the horizon, the North American peoples were roughly divided into two culture regions. Small bands of hunter/gatherers in the north, and settled communities of agriculturalists in the south. People of the deer, and people of the corn. The dividing line between types, the enthnographers tell us, ran along the 44th parallel, more or less. Starting about here, in Maine.

It still feels that way here, sometimes. Edgy. The virulent independence of Downeasters vs. the encroaching suburbanization of Fromaways. Hardcase jacks-of-all-trades vs. well-socialized organization men. Isolatos and team players. Shamans and priests.

These are universal archetypes, of course, and not confined to culture areas, then or now. Nor were the cultural patterns absolutely distinct in the 15th century. The corn people also hunted deer, and so forth. Each of us has a lone hunter lurking in our foliage, and the urge to gather in the long house for a harvest dance. But the dual aspects of our nature sometimes collide like war parties in an old growth forest.

A dozen years back this town went through the throes of writing a Comprehensive Plan, and I joined the drafting committee to protect myself from being outlawed by some yuppie's good intentions. It was painful. Coming out of our maritime experience, where community wasn't the result of smarmy sentimentality, all the gush about doing the right thing for our neighbors made me sticky. Especially when the issue at hand was creating an arbitrary ordinance whose long-term effects were incalculable, or which put someone's livelihood at risk, when he wasn't creating a public nuisance. Out in the islands you got along because you had to, and the highest good was self-interest, which included mutual aid pro forma. Nobody talked about planning what's good for your neighbors.

Despite the warnings of a few of us, a grand master plan was presented to the town, and it was roundly defeated. Too much, too complex, too restrictive. Now the issue has come round again. New select people, new town manager, new enthusiasm.. same old guff. The downturn in the economy which took the heat out of development in the Maine hinterlands, is now being followed, belatedly, by a resurgence of cashflow down here. And the powers that would be are lobbying for a comp plan to "control" development.

The only ordinance that ever slows development is a building moratorium, like the one in Bolinas, California. We don't have the luxury of saying there's no more water and septic expansion possible in Bowdoinham, for health reasons, so this town can't ban building outright, as some would prefer. So we'll have to compromise with the forces of population growth and capital expansion. Live in America.

What rigorous and consistent building ordinances do is speed up the growth process. Zoning is sold to the rusticators and gentrifiers as a way to slow random growth. What actually happens is that clear rules open the doors to the banks. No banker will lend you money to build a fancy house, if the lot next door might get a trailer on it. Zone trailers to the marginal land, and see how the money rolls in. The only defense against rapid gentrification is a jumble of conflicting and ambiguous land use ordinances. What we have now in this burg.

No bureaucrat can live with such ordinances. You can't enforce them. It ain't neat and tidy. Somebody is always shouting at you. I can sympathize with a town manager who wants clarity in the code. I just won't vote for it.

But how easily you forget. I vaguely considered going to a comp plan committee meeting, doing that civic thing again, in self-defense. Find out what the self-appointed guardians of the landscape are conniving at now. While I was waiting at the town office for the Codes Enforcement Officer to show up the other night (I was getting a building permit), I actually had a long parle with the new town manager about how comp planning was going.

Not well, I read between the lines. The town was supposed to start chewing on a draft next month, but it's been postponed six more months due to a lack of progress. Somebody walked off with the town maps mid-way in the game, for one thing. Thoughts of sabotage made me grin inwardly.

Do you remember how comp planning was the Holy Grail back in the 80s? This process was going to create a paradigm shift in rural Maine, a whole new polity.. not to mention a swelling bureaucracy to provide yuppie jobs. Legislation made it necessary for every town to buy in, and we all swallowed a mass of state-wide standards for site plan review for developments of scale, and so forth. Consultants paraded through town, and we anteed up for their advice. There was a new priesthood driving Volvos. Some of the hunter/gatherer towns balked at installing draconian restrictions on the way we'd been doing things, though, and the recession sent the bureaucrats packing. This town was too hardcase, yet.

When the building inspector arrived I went in to get a permit for my new shop. "No can do,"he told me. If I was going to make something to sell in it, I had to go before the planning board for a site plan review, jump through all the hoops that entails. I started to boil. When I pointed out that I was only going to be doing what I'd always been doing, he suggested that I was already in violation of the state's site plan review regs. (Actually, I'm grandfathered, as the ordinance was passed after I set up shop in my parlor.. but I'd better not change my operation.)

"I'm just telling you what the ordinance says," Geoff said.

Any building or modification or change of status from a dwelling to a commercial use (Ie. making a living) requires planning board approval. You have to ask permission to practice your trade.. any trade. This in a town where most people (the natives anyhow) all do something at home that makes a few bucks. I asked him which "commercial" use I should get approved. Carving? Painting? Freelance writing? Computer printing? Lawn ornamentation?

"All of them."

Absurd. And unenforceable to boot. Is the CEO really going to go door-to-door asking what people do in their houses that might earn a dollar? The teacher who brings home schoolwork? The building inspector who has a set of maps in his home office? No. Obviously the issue is whether someone is being a public nuisance, not whether he's making a living. But the arbitrary boilerplate regulation makes us all illegal. "Non-conforming." So what else is new?

"Can I get a permit to build a storage building?"

"Yes."

"Thank you."

I came away fuming, and remembered why I'd stopped going to committee meetings. The overweening stupidity of good intentions writ into law. The idea of having to ask permission to be an artist in a small town, in triplicate. Everyone nattering about environmental protection, when the upshot was petty interfering with subsistence economies. Put away that falseface. Where's my atlatl?

Peggy, too, has bumped into the limits of good intention as law this week. In that murky ground between individualism and community. A state oversight bureaucrat came to Freeport after a parent complained that Peggy wasn't providing for the Special Education needs of her child. The latest move in an ongoing conflict.

The young man in question had a stroke a few years ago, and has difficulty articulating what he's learned. His mother is angry, at fate perhaps, but it takes the form of attacking the school system (which employs her) for shortchanging her son. Because she has been an activist, the kid has his own fulltime tutor who goes with him to class, his own room at the school for tutoring, and his own computer, provided with school funds. Peggy and her partner have been to frequent long (and insulting) meetings where the Special Ed experts, and the mother, have told them what they MUST do in order to meet the boy's needs. Never mind whether their demands will disrupt the work of the class as a whole. Never mind that the experts have no experience teaching content, let alone history.

This is where we've come to with Special Education, as a result of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The individual student must have an approved teaching plan tailored to his needs, as perceived by these new authorities. Just taking the time required for arranging each special plan is destroying teachers' ability to prepare classes, grade papers, etc. Then there's the fact that what works one-on-one with a child isn't necessarily applicable to what works in a classroom full of adolescents. And the Special Ed experts have zip experience running full classes, where you try and serve ALL the needs, of everyone. But 20 years of teaching experience doesn't matter when an angry parent demands an arbitrary methodology.

In this skirmish the hunters are winning out over the farmers. The individual matters more than the group. The notion seems to be that each child is entitled to an education tailored to his particular needs. If it were possible to tailor teaching to everyone's special needs (and all our kids are special, aren't they), this would be an ideal arrangement, perhaps. Unfortunately, class sizes, and time limitations mean that teachers must teach groups of students in ways that serve their combined needs.. and the requirements of the curriculum. The idea is to teach some content, after all. But the needs of the class as a whole have no federal mandate, and we are spending a disproportionate amount of the school pittance making special arrangements for a few, at the cost of the many.

This pushpull between individual aspirations and common good is as old as America, of course. Right now certain minorities have demanded, and gotten, public entitlements in consideration of their very real needs. It seemed only fair. But the pendulum is in swing. We are beginning to realize that unequally allocating scare resources for the needs of a few isn't very fair, either.

And nobody is asking whether it's the job of teachers to teach individuals, or groups.. or, heaven forbid, subjects. We're so caught up with individual aspirations is this mass culture, maybe in reaction to the cultural homogenization, that we may forget we have to all get along together. Peggy works hard at teaching all the Juniors at Freeport High.. about our diverse but common culture.. and gets incensed when the experts tell her she's not doing her job.

Actually the inspector was savvy. The student in question is getting 90s in Peggy's class. He IS getting an appropriate education. Just because his mother wants him to get 100s for everything he does, doesn't mean the kid is being mistreated. The state is rejecting the complaint.

This week Peggy and I came down on opposite sides of the cultural divide. Again. I'm beating my rawhide drum for individual rights, while she's choreographing communal lessons in American Studies. Don't tell anyone we work at home.