As a resident of South Portland, I am grateful that the fat lady has not yet sung and dropped the curtain on the SoPo waterfront controversy. I attended many of the public meetings during these debates and observed that there are only 300-400 people, some of them from out-of-town, who donned blue T-shirts and regularly rallied and regularly spoke against every part of the oil industry in South Portland. So often did the same speakers speak that I could, by the time of the July 21 council meeting, predict with pretty fair accuracy what each one of them would say. It is clear that many of them hold their fears and beliefs pretty dear and would like to see even the present level of petroleum activity on the waterfront shut down.

There are, however, 24,855 of the rest of us, 18,114 of whom are registered voters in South Portland. Many of us have lived in Maine for a long time and recognize that, during our lifetimes, many traditional industries (paper and textile mills and the shoe industry) have fled the state, leaving many of those with technical college or high school educations jobless. One of the assets that we have left, with potential for their employment, is our deepwater port, one of the best on the East Coast. The Blue Shirts would like to turn that port into a park. Some of them even said so.

But most of us, I think, would like to see the continuance of the mixed use of the port and to revitalize the industrial side. We’d like to see the Portland Pipeline and Sprague Oil and the rest of the petroleum industry come up with a plan, shared with the public and especially with the City Council, which would reverse the flow of the pipeline safely and rebuild the tank farms to modernize those facilities and prevent pollution. Then the rest of us could celebrate North America’s transformation from an oil importer to an oil exporter and participate in the benefits from that. If we don’t, others will.

Margaret T. Johnson

South Portland