Gov. Paul LePage last week made national news when said the state’s heroin epidemic involves dealers who come here to sell their wares and to impregnate “white girls.” The insinuations behind the statement were that drug dealers are black men, Maine’s “girls” are white and unwitting, and there is no local drug trade. Meanwhile, Donald […]

No one doubts that land use controls periodically need to be updated. Environmental conditions, population shifts, housing needs, technologies and employment opportunities all change over time. Comprehensive neighborhood and city-wide planning processes focused on ever-changing real-world conditions facilitate these land use control changes. More troublesome are land use control changes said to be necessary to […]

I’ve given gun safety issues a lot of thought over the years, perhaps more than most. I grew up around guns; my grandfather was Maine’s chief game warden, and also a decorated infantry general, a veteran of both World Wars. But I also lost my brother 40 years ago to an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. […]

Thank you Steve Woods (Intentionally Unreasonable: “Why we can’t be friends”) for articulating so well my own feelings. Willful ignorance is so much easier than doing the work of informing oneself. The result is either the continuation of bad policy on nearly all issues, or those bad policies becoming dramatically worse. The citizen with limited […]

As a resident of Thornton Heights in South Portland, I support a moratorium on the proposal by NGL Supply Terminal Co. to build a 24,000-gallon above-ground propane storage facility at Rigby Yard. I understand that if NGL sought a zoning change, my neighborhood would have been informed through a mailed notice and invitation from the […]