The Portland Press Herald / The Maine Sunday Telegram

March 12

Letters to the editor: March 12, 2010

Waterfront has lots to see

I cannot be alone in wondering why the front page of the March 5 paper was plastered with the headline "Waterfront Wasteland." Has staff writer Tom Bell ever visited the waterfront?

DiMillo's parking lot is 95,000 square feet for a reason; it is next to one of the largest floating restaurants in the country (as was noted in the article). In the summer months, every parking spot is taken on the streets and in the various lots. Trying to snag a parking spot is very competitive and often nearly impossible.

Between tourists, local residents enjoying beautiful weather and people enjoying the wonderful shops and restaurants the waterfront has to offer, it is booming with life. As for the "off-season," there are naturally fewer spots that are being occupied.

The waterfront is unquestionably a "working waterfront." Fish markets and distribution buildings are located up and down Commercial Street. You can tell a fishing boat is coming back from a successful trip simply by seeing the flock of seagulls that follow it.

We can't forget the waterfront has not always looked the way it does today. It used to be run-down, unoccupied and abandoned in many areas. Now there is an abundance of buildings, wharves and thriving businesses. To insinuate that the parking lots are "failures" and to say that the parking lot of the highest-grossing restaurant in the state would be better off as a hotel is both outlandish and particularly offensive to DiMillo's Floating Restaurant and the other businesses that are located in the waterfront that provide parking and are not operating yet another over-priced hotel.

The waterfront issues should be the priority, not the ridiculous, uneducated ideas of someone who looks to bring in another large corporate hotel, rather than supporting the need for local business owners who have built up their property from scratch.

Hannah LeVecque

Portland

 

Maine's economic future in the 21st century is inseparably tied to its cultural heritage. Portland's Old Port is inseparable from that heritage – a mixed-use place where historical buildings, streetscapes, shops, boat tie-ups and pedestrian spaces all evolved in unison to support everyday life before the automobile.

Then, in just half a century, those everyday lives were zoned into separate parts. It was as though we fell off Humpty Dumpty's wall and all the king's horses and men were like planning boards trying to put our pieces back together again – but as separate "zones" connected only by cars.

We forgot that the places we are always drawn to and love the most are mixed-use places – like Portland's Old Port district – not "zones" that persuade us to formulate one activity as incompatible with another.

Let's clear away "zoning" cobwebs of the '50s and '60s and restore the urban places we love but just forgot how to make.

There's a growing cadre of architectural pros now, in this 21st century, that know well how to configure mixed-use buildings that obviate dedicated surface parking; how beauty and comfort differ from "modern" sterility; how to distinguish a crafted "new-traditional" vernacular from a cookie-cutter "faux traditional" cartoon or slavish reproduction.

Our piers and wharves present perfect opportunities to put our broken fragments of city living back into organic connection – wharf and pier each re-mixed and of a piece, so we can land our catch, handle a sale, walk to work or boat, eat, drink or shop on a pier or not, as we choose.

We can sit and watch, or live on a pier over our shop and sidewalk, if we want. We are not our machines.

Park them close by, but rediscover how life was really meant to be.

John Bliss

Bath

Defense spending has a critic and a supporter

 

I wrote to Sen. Olympia Snowe regarding defense spending and my opposition to the continuing and increasing proliferation of spending tax dollars on military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In response, I received a letter explaining how the passage of the bill puts Mainers to work making Zumwalt-class destroyers, re-manufacturing Army vehicles and continuing production of C-17 Globemaster III long-range cargo jets.

She defends the $636.3 billion in expenditures, a 5.4 percent increase over last year's base funding, as providing for the common defense of the United States of America. I take offense to the premise that the illegal occupation of Iraq has anything to do with our defense.

Further, indiscriminate bombings and missiles from drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan that kill and maim civilians are creating a more hostile environment that creates a threat to our security, rather than a common defense. I suggest that we rethink the billions we spend on weaponry that is destructive and instead use our resources to produce alternative energy and useful consumer goods.

This will transfer the Maine jobs now producing global devastation to jobs that create global good. We should think about jobs in Maine from a perspective of creating something of quality for the community and the world, instead of merely quantities of jobs no matter what the global cost.

Gil Harris

Limerick

 

A recent letter-writer in the medical profession was complaining about how military spending threatens the needs of the United States, feeling that money should be directed more toward the "domestic needs" of the citizens of the United States.

Personally, I have a domestic need, as most other people do, to feel safe within my own country, unafraid of attack from without – and filling that need is not without cost.

The writer doesn't seem to know that pay and allowances make up 85 percent of the military budget. As such, he implies that our soldiers are not citizens either, and are unworthy of respect and everything we can give them in their efforts to protect us, and thus, his bank accounts.

Obviously he doesn't know that over $4 trillion, that is with a "T," is currently spent on social programs every year, about one-third of the GDP. Considering that President Obama wants to increase that amount by $1.2 trillion via his socialized medicine policies, that seems enough to me.

Implying that our military is overpaid makes one question just how much compensation the writer would be satisfied with to get shot at every day. At this time, it's about an average of $1,600 a month for our troops, better than the $1,300 a year I got when I was in the service, but still a pittance when one considers the job they do and the risks they take.

The writer may have a "domestic need" to increase his Medicare billing so as to be able to buy a bigger boat, or to send Muffy to college, but doing it by increasing the threat to the lives of our military members is specious, smarmy and dangerous to the "domestic needs" of the rest of us to be protected.

Brian Peterson

Westbrook