Meeting to Decide
Yesterday I told the story behind the decision that Gouldsboro needs to make about its two bronze bells. Now let’s have a look at how the town is making the decision. The approach grows out of traditions here in Maine. It touches on the values underlying the mission at Acadia Partners.
After the Gouldsboro Women’s club decided against returning the Queen Victoria’s bell to the people of Prince Edward Island, it seemed pretty clear that if anything was going back to Canada, it would be a copy, not the original.
That was the thinking in town up until just a few months ago, when Dick Fisher completed a beautiful replica of the original. It was time to begin thinking seriously about things such as an appropriate ceremony for giving the replica to the Canadians. That thinking led to some new viewpoints. A number of people expressed the idea that maybe Gouldsboro should return the original, and keep the replica for display here.
Like many towns in Maine, Gouldsboro is a participatory democracy. We practice “retail†government, not government where business is handled by middlemen. So, the town had a public meeting before one of the regular selectmen’s meetings, to hear people’s views on the question of which bell to put where. That meeting packed the conference room in the town office to capacity, so the town held a “bell workshop†a week or so ago in the Community Center in Prospect Harbor.
Most of the people speaking at the evening workshop favored keeping the original in Gouldsboro. But that view was not unanimous. Some speakers felt that returning the original bell from the Queen Victoria would be the more honorable path.
The speakers included a vacationing Canadian, from Halifax, who attended after hearing about the debate and meeting. He urged Gouldsboro’s citizens to consider keeping the original, arguing that the bell was given to Rufus Allen, and ultimately to the people of Gouldsboro, as an expression of thanks. He felt that keeping and displaying the bell in Gouldsboro honored that expression.
Another neighbor said that we were not limited to choosing between keeping one bell or the other. He suggested that there might be value in using the bell to build a stronger tie to the people of Charlottetown, and that we might share both the replica and the original, periodically exchanging them.
At the end of the meeting, Jim Watson, a town selectman, noted that, every few years, the town runs into an issue like this, where feelings are strong on two or more sides of an issue. Jim said that is issues like this that brings people out to meet together and listen to each other. In his experience, these issues can be difficult, but they do seem to have the effect of bringing the people of the town together.
I think that Jim is right. One of the valuable things that happens in Gouldsboro and other towns in Maine is that people still meet in public to talk, think, and make decisions, working with their neighbors. Five years ago, Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone, a book about the disappearance of community and social capital in the U.S. Jim is talking about the traditions and impulse toward engagement in our part of the world that stands in opposition to the broader social trends chronicled in Bowling Alone. Mostly, we still remember that we are neighbors, trying to figure out how to live with each other and get along.
Of course, things are more complicated than that. Gouldsboro and other towns along the Downeast coast are changing because of increased second home development, coupled with economic stress due to changes in fishing, a key economic engine for Gouldsboro and other coastal communities. We might be “bowling alone†after all. The Downeast Initiative is one possible response, but it brings its own demands for increased community cooperation and decision making.
There are also important questions to ask about how our pace and approach to decision making matches up with the problems we will be facing in the next ten years.
These are topics that we can pick up in future postings to the Acadia Partners blog. Stay tuned.