Drive by Cooks Corner lately, and you’ll see our unelected partners at MRRA edging out our town’s long term goal of livable development. The former entrance to the Base? Irretrievably ugly. Every tree leveled, big buildings pushed as close as possible to the road, generic construction. Brunswick once adopted a strong vision for Cooks Corner’s development, but, what’s a community’s goals for visually pleasing and welcoming growth against profit?

But there’s more. If you live in Brunswick, you’ve just spent $100,000 to envision a new connector road out at Cook’s Corner. The town is likely to throw in another million or so, and use Tax Increment Financing to pay for more.

The road’s public benefit claim is to help ease traffic congestion, but it also happens to open up considerable land to new development. The first phase enables approximately 100 residential units. But a second phase, a further reach of the connector road, would open up many additional acres, yielding hundreds of units of housing. The public road will create enormous private profit for the property owners. And will this help with traffic congestion? Remember the Coastal Connector?Any New Jersey town looking back on the 1980s can give us the answer: a resounding “no!” Ask a decent planner: new roads enabling sprawling development further from town increases traffic pressure everywhere. And residential development, in studies done right here in Maine, does not pay for itself in property taxes. Despite decades of acknowledging that Brunswick has a worker housing problem, we’re not even talking about leveraging at least some affordable housing with this public investment.

But this isn’t out of character for our town, not any more. We saw in the debate over public access to coastal water that the public interest holds little sway over private interest. Look no further than the current state of things on our Mall, site of the summer farmer’s market, gazebo, ice skating, and lunch carts. Many years ago, the town invested (with the Brunswick Downtown Association) in new sidewalks with paved “pads” for the lunch vendors. With taxpayer-paid electricity and taxpayer-paid garbage disposal, the vendor pads were a bargain then at $1,200, now at a mere $1,500. Past Councils have been loathe to raise the fee for the vendors on the Mall, despite the competition with the downtown restaurants whose building owners pay much higher property taxes.

Last year, a new soft-serve vendor wanted in on what is known to be a lucrative gig. Unable to say no, or, say, hold a bidding process, the town constructed a new pad, at town expense. But the new vendor does not like backing up his cart on and off the Mall.

For at least 20 years, and maybe forever, this very inexpensive public accommodation for private vendors has come with one condition: remove the carts when you close. Why? The carts are shuttered most of the time, semi-permanent carts on the Mall at night are an attractive nuisance for our police to protect, the view of the Mall from Maine Street is directly affected by the line of carts, and you know, the shuttered carts are just ugly. Their permanent presence in the summer will constantly commercialize our public green, converting it from public space to commercial storage. But a majority of our town leaders indicate that they support this request.

The expectation that public space remains a significantly uncommercial space is not an attempt to return the Mall to its natural state, but to hew to its unique civic purpose. Despite the rather snide comments from some Councilors, no one expects a “pristine” downtown Mall. The demand that the carts do what they have done for at least a full generation — get off the public’s Mall unless they are engaged with the public — is hardly some high-falutin’ standard. If Danny’s Dogs cart can get on and off the Mall every day, so can the smaller soft-serve owner and the rest. Even with a more appropriate fee, it’s still a tremendous bargain.

This reflexive governmental eagerness to put commerce and private gain over the public interest goes well beyond roads or carts, Brunswick or Maine. At its worst, it’s literally why the answer to gun violence from Republicans somehow involves selling more guns, why their response to climate change is more petroleum extraction, why they’re larding government with advocates for school privatization, relaxed environmental standards, and the sale of public lands. It seems there’s no value to the public interest in today’s America, but quite a bit of value in selling it to line someone’s pockets. Turning that around, in Brunswick and beyond, is the challenge of our age.

Jackie Sartoris is a former Brunswick Town Councilor and former State Senior Planner