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You Can’t Fight City Hall

by Eva Murray

It’s the time of year for Annual Town Meeting in many of the smaller burgs and hamlets of northern New England, and we, likewise, come together in the spring to discuss municipal affairs, harrumph the expenditures, and hash out a budget. Matinicus Island’s folklore and mythology notwithstanding, we no longer tape up the schoolroom windows for Town Meeting like we’re expecting a hurricane, just in case Those Boys decide to throw furniture. There will be no rioting. There may be doughnuts. There will be theater, but unless Those Boys show up drunk it will most probably be a quiet performance, as follows: most of the fishermen will stand as close to the exit as possible (avoiding the little school chairs arrayed in rows for an audience) with arms folded and jaws set, scowling, working hard to convince everyone that they are deeply angered by the warrant items and don’t have time for this nonsense anyway. That stance is customary whether or not it is accurate.

I say “Those Boys” because that is how I keep hearing people who are not from here refer to a storied segment of our citizenry. If conversation turns to the subject of Matinicus whether on line at Hannaford, or over the ham radio, or in some committee meeting miles away, somebody who was here for two hours once back in the 1970s, or has heard the reputation from lobstermen in other ports, starts in with me about “Those Boys” with a commiserating, if nervous, giggle. The Boys in question rarely show up for Town Meeting anymore, many of them being sort of retired (or dead,) unless somebody has gone door-to-door with a truckload of beer in an assuredly civic-minded effort to get out the vote.

Back in the day, the island’s single classroom would be packed full on Town Meeting night, but the crowd is sometimes a bit thin these days. With any luck the taxpayers who do show up will vote for the Household Hazardous Waste collection again this year, indicating their willingness to spend a couple of thousand to get rid of lead paint and used oil, a welcome change from the Olden Days (remember them?) We’ll have a group chuckle at some of the peculiar amounts requested by charities based on census numbers (the Humane Society or “the Mental Health” wants us to donate exactly $51?) Kevin Waters from Penobscot Island Air will update us on the flying service if the weather is good enough for him to get here.

The days of elected municipal positions being easy volunteer jobs, do-able by nearly anybody and paying a hundred bucks a year in December (more a Christmas gratuity than a salary) are over. This fact annoys some of the old-timers, who remember their own service as clerk or tax collector or hog reeve or fence viewer back when there was no physical town office, and officials took your payments or issued your licenses at their kitchen tables. Those jobs require a great deal more time, patience, and tech-savvy now. The grunts behind the desks in City Hall expect to be paid, need to be trained, and might be subjected to background checks. Harrumph!

Matinicus Isle, properly called, is a plantation--a term which flummoxes most outside of Maine who envision some sort of Confederate antebellum Tara. A plantation is a municipality with some official functions but not all of them, in between a “town,” legally incorporated as such, and an unorganized territory. Maybe a disorganized territory. We’re not a township and have no legal connection with any other municipality, and on that note, we also have nothing to do with the administration of either Criehaven or Metinic, by the way, despite frequent calls to our town office about those places. We appropriate, raise, and spend property taxes, plow the roads, hold elections and issue marriage licenses but do not have a zoning board, for example. There are a lot of things we don’t have; that’s another subject.

As a plantation we have assessors, who do not actually assess anything, but who act like a Select Board except that they cannot approve local ordinances. This august body of elected officials is referred to by some of the less willingly led as “the Council of Sages,” “the Jedi Council,” or “them damned know-it-alls.” Their primary responsibility is to watch the money, making sure public funds aren’t spent without transparency, and to sign various missives on behalf of the municipality. They are also the Board of Directors of our power company. Some of them, over the years, have decided that their job is to bully other elected officials, take late-night calls to break up fistfights, or short-circuit the Land Use Regulation Commission. That stuff’s all optional.

Election for a term as assessor requires that the candidate vehemently insist that she or he is not looking for the job, is utterly surprised by the nomination, is being strong-armed against his will, and of course will only serve if nobody else wants to. This means nobody is supposed to campaign, nobody “takes out papers,” nobody announces his or her interest or credentials prior to Town Meeting. Nominations are supposed to spring spontaneously from the floor at the last minute.

It might be a good idea if, at least for the major offices, people were encouraged to announce their interest at the beginning of the meeting, and perhaps offer brief comment on why they want the job or what they represent in terms of attitude, but it doesn’t work that way. Tradition demands they be conscripted from among the seemingly unprepared.

For a plantation to pass an ordinance is a slow and complex process involving the state legislature, so we have exactly one local ordinance, that being our (possibly unique) vehicle disposal fee. Following many decades of hundred-dollar-beaters being brought to the island, run until their last gasp, and left dead and in the way wherever they expired, it is now required that if someone intends to bring a vehicle to Matinicus to stay, they put $250.00 on account with the town. That money is refundable upon request if and when said vehicle is removed by ferry, dead or alive. No, towing the car out behind the breakwater with a lobster boat just doesn’t hack it anymore. Should the vehicle be abandoned, the town has the owner’s money to pay the ferry fare and hire a wrecker. The hard part was policing this ordinance for the first decade or so until everybody got used to it. There is a certain “rules are for other people” ethic, particularly among Those Boys, and it took a former island schoolteacher with a cultivated “look in the eye that would open an oyster at forty paces” to stand flat-footed on the ferry ramp and deny passage across to anybody without paperwork. We have, of course, no police. Anything you might have heard about that subject is probably wrong, too.

Respectfully submitted,
E. Murray
Municipal clerk and registrar of voters (or at least I hope I still am!)