Other news: As traffic gets worse, Is housing crisis the culprit? SWH wants clarity on hazardous waste plan for transfer station; what is the reach of the APPLL lawsuit?
Re: Town Hill clear-cutting. It seems that Mt Desert Island will soon live up to it's name- "desert".
Take a look at a Google satellite map of your own neighborhood to see how much land has been cleared of trees and groundcover by your neighbors and by the businesses in your neighborhood.
The mosses and grasses that absorb water, returning it to the ground, will soon be gone and in the future we all will be drinking bottled water, because our wells will be dry. Take a wider look at the downeast coast and you will see that almost any accessible place with "a view" has been cleared of the annoying vegetation and replaced by landscaping, or, as I prefer to call it, landscraping. The future has no meaning for many of the neighbors and local businesses that I love. They are living in the moment; this island and the coast will be changed by their actions, but they are not thinking of that, now.
Yesterday, Friday 4th August, it took 45 minutes to get from Somesville to Ellsworth, and I took the Bayside road as Route 1 was crawling. It’s becoming impossible. When will enough be enough?
Count your blessings you hit a light traffic day! One day 3 years ago it took me 45 minutes to get from the Hall's Quarry turnoff to the Somesville Library where I decided to pull over and read a magazine for an additional 45 minutes. If I'd been foolish enough to continue through to Ellsworth I'm guessing the complete trip would have taken about 2 hours! And whatever you do don't make the mistake of following the Bayside Road through to Water Street in Ellsworth when Jax Lab workers are headed home. It once took me nearly half an hour to get from the Ellsworth Marina to the intersection with the light on Water Street and Maine Street. As bad as this all seems you ain't seen nothing yet. A recent video on YouTube showed a traffic jam at the entrance to Yosemite National Park that was 2 lanes wide and 7 miles long! Park authorities were considering going to a car free model when I lived in the Bay Area in 1972 and here we are more than 50 years later and the traffic jams are just getting worse. As the naturalist/philosopher Edward Abbey once opined "We had a good thing In America but got carried away...."
Readers might keep in mind that the developers of these solar-panel installations receive a 30% Federal tax credit when completed. Thus the speculators (typically from Wall Street) set up a "partnership" and sell limited-partner shares to investors, who put up all the cash. the speculators make themselves the "general partners" and put up the installation using OPM, or "other peoples' money," a favorite Street approach. So, let's say the limited partners put up $100 million. The Streeters put up nothing, but when the installation is finished (and this goes also for those "wind farms") the IRS writes a check for $30 million to the general partners.
So, the general partners who put the deal together get instantly rich, all compliments of a rather stupid Congress that goes gung-ho with the idea of "going green," and a compliant IRS that writes the fat tax-credit checks. All paid for by you, the somnolent taxpayer, and suffered by the rural folks in the North Country, who have been converted into plantation slaves by your chums on Wall Street.
FYI: Solar Farm companies are targeting land owners with five or more acres on the island in an effort to find people willing to lease their land to them for the purpose of building more solar farms. The island better get on top of this or there will be dozens of these "farms" all over the island. Novel Energy Solutions is one such company.
Lets not forget the hundreds of lobster fishing folks on this commute, almost all one person to a car. Jackson lab has buses that are fairly well used during the summer months, it seems that carpooling and buses really need some governmental encouragement as well as the state of Maine doing something about lack of CDL drivers. My suggestion is to put the tax profits from all the weed stores into CDL training.
There are lots of CDL drivers in Maine, the problem is that they migrated in from other States and did not renew the CDL here. Maine has a policy of granting the CDL in Maine only once a driver has a Maine license, so the first step is to obtain a car-driver level permit, then apply for a CDL permit, effectively an upgrade to an existing Maine permit. Maine does allow the applicant to use an old out-of-State CDL permit that expired up to 5 years ago as foundation for a Maine permit, but once past that threshold, you are out of luck.
Still, there are all these quite skilled bus drivers here in Maine, who likely would be induced to keep their hand in, possibly on some part-time or Summer basis, for some extra cash. The more so now that inflation is eating away at Social Security incomes. Can Maine be more flexible in tapping into decades of bus driver experience? It is not as if one loses the touch; a skilled bus driver has the technique embedded into the DNA. Well, that would require a change in the bureaucracy, so I remain dubious. More likely, nothing will change, and the driver skills will go unutilized.
I'm just going off of information from our school district and the Island explorer, both of which are desperate for drivers. I mention taking marijuana taxes for CDL training because the word on the street is nobody wants to drive because of marijuana/drug testing. Maine and the other states affected by this definitely need to step up and figure something out. Testing similar to alcohol blood level tests would help a ton, especially in a state where weed stores are starting to outnumber gas stations.
I have operated buses for decades, owning a bus company, and can vouch that having any THC component in the blood is going to impair critical judgment skills. There is no "safe level." The real reason "nobody wants to drive" is that the public, i.e. the moms, and the politicians the moms elect, have made it so wearying. The kids have no discipline because the homes have no discipline. The schoolteachers are forbidden any discipline other than verbal commands, and for a child from an undiciplined home, that has zero value. Meanwhile, the public (the moms) are obsessed with this idea that every bus driver is a sex offender, so a new driver is confronted with this exhaustive finger-printing and policeman check in this effort to weed out candidates that have not even applied. Society wants a perfect world, well guess what, that does not exist. Meanwhile, the delays inherent in all the testing implies that the new candidate has no income for months, so the good people go do something else for a living.
What you end up with are old folks and young mothers as your driver candidate pool. School buses today are built with an infant/toddler seat built into the first row, so that the driver-mom can buckle in her infant and keep an eye on her while driving (and not watching the road, just lovely). Now, when that bus goes on fire in some collision, is that driver-mom going to devote her attention first to getting the other kids off that bus and herded to safety - or is she going to focus on her own child, strapped into that infant seat? You tell me. And if to the infant, then who is looking out for all the other kids - which will be a real handful?
This is not unique to Maine. The other New England States have acute driver shortages, to the extent that some bus routes are culled, and school schedules drastically altered to stretch out the drivers available. And that will continue until the parents finally have to drive and pick up their own kids twice a day, thereby creating the push to restore sanity to the bus driving regimen. Oh, well.
You need to talk to the folks teaching CDL courses, marijuana testing is what keeps the classes mainly empty. Obviously driving impaired is a serious deal , the problem is drivers now can snort meth, coke, get completely hammered on illegal drugs a few nights a week and still pass a drug test after just a couple of days. Someone who takes a hit or two off of a joint once a month on a Sunday evening cannot pass a drug test for a month +. Better testing will help get more folks into the driving trade. Better pay will help lure the existing drivers back as you mentioned.
Then of course you have our own little dirty problem of no housing for the working class. Lots of shortsighted thinking around here, plenty of weed.
Re: Town Hill clear-cutting. It seems that Mt Desert Island will soon live up to it's name- "desert".
Take a look at a Google satellite map of your own neighborhood to see how much land has been cleared of trees and groundcover by your neighbors and by the businesses in your neighborhood.
The mosses and grasses that absorb water, returning it to the ground, will soon be gone and in the future we all will be drinking bottled water, because our wells will be dry. Take a wider look at the downeast coast and you will see that almost any accessible place with "a view" has been cleared of the annoying vegetation and replaced by landscaping, or, as I prefer to call it, landscraping. The future has no meaning for many of the neighbors and local businesses that I love. They are living in the moment; this island and the coast will be changed by their actions, but they are not thinking of that, now.
They call it paradise
I don't know why
You call someplace paradise
Kiss it goodbye
- Don Henley and Glenn Frey, 1976
Yesterday, Friday 4th August, it took 45 minutes to get from Somesville to Ellsworth, and I took the Bayside road as Route 1 was crawling. It’s becoming impossible. When will enough be enough?
Count your blessings you hit a light traffic day! One day 3 years ago it took me 45 minutes to get from the Hall's Quarry turnoff to the Somesville Library where I decided to pull over and read a magazine for an additional 45 minutes. If I'd been foolish enough to continue through to Ellsworth I'm guessing the complete trip would have taken about 2 hours! And whatever you do don't make the mistake of following the Bayside Road through to Water Street in Ellsworth when Jax Lab workers are headed home. It once took me nearly half an hour to get from the Ellsworth Marina to the intersection with the light on Water Street and Maine Street. As bad as this all seems you ain't seen nothing yet. A recent video on YouTube showed a traffic jam at the entrance to Yosemite National Park that was 2 lanes wide and 7 miles long! Park authorities were considering going to a car free model when I lived in the Bay Area in 1972 and here we are more than 50 years later and the traffic jams are just getting worse. As the naturalist/philosopher Edward Abbey once opined "We had a good thing In America but got carried away...."
Readers might keep in mind that the developers of these solar-panel installations receive a 30% Federal tax credit when completed. Thus the speculators (typically from Wall Street) set up a "partnership" and sell limited-partner shares to investors, who put up all the cash. the speculators make themselves the "general partners" and put up the installation using OPM, or "other peoples' money," a favorite Street approach. So, let's say the limited partners put up $100 million. The Streeters put up nothing, but when the installation is finished (and this goes also for those "wind farms") the IRS writes a check for $30 million to the general partners.
So, the general partners who put the deal together get instantly rich, all compliments of a rather stupid Congress that goes gung-ho with the idea of "going green," and a compliant IRS that writes the fat tax-credit checks. All paid for by you, the somnolent taxpayer, and suffered by the rural folks in the North Country, who have been converted into plantation slaves by your chums on Wall Street.
FYI: Solar Farm companies are targeting land owners with five or more acres on the island in an effort to find people willing to lease their land to them for the purpose of building more solar farms. The island better get on top of this or there will be dozens of these "farms" all over the island. Novel Energy Solutions is one such company.
Lets not forget the hundreds of lobster fishing folks on this commute, almost all one person to a car. Jackson lab has buses that are fairly well used during the summer months, it seems that carpooling and buses really need some governmental encouragement as well as the state of Maine doing something about lack of CDL drivers. My suggestion is to put the tax profits from all the weed stores into CDL training.
There are lots of CDL drivers in Maine, the problem is that they migrated in from other States and did not renew the CDL here. Maine has a policy of granting the CDL in Maine only once a driver has a Maine license, so the first step is to obtain a car-driver level permit, then apply for a CDL permit, effectively an upgrade to an existing Maine permit. Maine does allow the applicant to use an old out-of-State CDL permit that expired up to 5 years ago as foundation for a Maine permit, but once past that threshold, you are out of luck.
Still, there are all these quite skilled bus drivers here in Maine, who likely would be induced to keep their hand in, possibly on some part-time or Summer basis, for some extra cash. The more so now that inflation is eating away at Social Security incomes. Can Maine be more flexible in tapping into decades of bus driver experience? It is not as if one loses the touch; a skilled bus driver has the technique embedded into the DNA. Well, that would require a change in the bureaucracy, so I remain dubious. More likely, nothing will change, and the driver skills will go unutilized.
I'm just going off of information from our school district and the Island explorer, both of which are desperate for drivers. I mention taking marijuana taxes for CDL training because the word on the street is nobody wants to drive because of marijuana/drug testing. Maine and the other states affected by this definitely need to step up and figure something out. Testing similar to alcohol blood level tests would help a ton, especially in a state where weed stores are starting to outnumber gas stations.
I have operated buses for decades, owning a bus company, and can vouch that having any THC component in the blood is going to impair critical judgment skills. There is no "safe level." The real reason "nobody wants to drive" is that the public, i.e. the moms, and the politicians the moms elect, have made it so wearying. The kids have no discipline because the homes have no discipline. The schoolteachers are forbidden any discipline other than verbal commands, and for a child from an undiciplined home, that has zero value. Meanwhile, the public (the moms) are obsessed with this idea that every bus driver is a sex offender, so a new driver is confronted with this exhaustive finger-printing and policeman check in this effort to weed out candidates that have not even applied. Society wants a perfect world, well guess what, that does not exist. Meanwhile, the delays inherent in all the testing implies that the new candidate has no income for months, so the good people go do something else for a living.
What you end up with are old folks and young mothers as your driver candidate pool. School buses today are built with an infant/toddler seat built into the first row, so that the driver-mom can buckle in her infant and keep an eye on her while driving (and not watching the road, just lovely). Now, when that bus goes on fire in some collision, is that driver-mom going to devote her attention first to getting the other kids off that bus and herded to safety - or is she going to focus on her own child, strapped into that infant seat? You tell me. And if to the infant, then who is looking out for all the other kids - which will be a real handful?
This is not unique to Maine. The other New England States have acute driver shortages, to the extent that some bus routes are culled, and school schedules drastically altered to stretch out the drivers available. And that will continue until the parents finally have to drive and pick up their own kids twice a day, thereby creating the push to restore sanity to the bus driving regimen. Oh, well.
You need to talk to the folks teaching CDL courses, marijuana testing is what keeps the classes mainly empty. Obviously driving impaired is a serious deal , the problem is drivers now can snort meth, coke, get completely hammered on illegal drugs a few nights a week and still pass a drug test after just a couple of days. Someone who takes a hit or two off of a joint once a month on a Sunday evening cannot pass a drug test for a month +. Better testing will help get more folks into the driving trade. Better pay will help lure the existing drivers back as you mentioned.
Then of course you have our own little dirty problem of no housing for the working class. Lots of shortsighted thinking around here, plenty of weed.