Organizers looking to submit bill for the next legislature
CARIBOU, Maine — Despite the Maine Legislative Council’s Oct. 23, 2015 vote against the Caribou Secession Committee’s request to move forward with their plans, advocates for separation have no intention of throwing in the towel.
The committee’s goal is to give rural Caribou citizens the opportunity to secede and form a new town called Lyndon. If the bill had passed, the next step would have been to hold a referendum vote for Caribou’s rural population to see if they are in support of breaking away from their urban neighbors.
Though the group feels there are many reasons to secede, one of the primary arguments for their movement, as outlined in a 54-page report written by the committee, is that Caribou does not treat its rural citizens as well as those who live in the urban area.
According to the report, “rural residents comprise less than 33 percent of the City’s population, but contribute to nearly 40 percent of the property taxes collected by the city while receiving less than 50 percent of the services provided to the residents of the Urban Compact Zone.
“The City’s Comprehensive Plan makes it clear that they are unwilling and unable to provide the full complement of services economically to rural residents. Rural residents have become victims of institutional discrimination in that our per capita tax burden is higher while our level of services is much lower.”
“The next opportunity for us to submit a bill for the legislature will be for the 128th legislature,” said Secession Committee Chair and Spokesman Paul Camping. “Currently we have the 127th Legislature sitting in their second secession. In November 2016, we will elect new officers and representatives. Just after those elections, they will be accepting bills and we will submit again.”
Camping states that they will not make any changes to the bill when his group resubmits.
“The bill did not fail passage because of its content,” said Camping. “It was an issue of the type of bill that it was and the timing of the second session of the legislature. The gates are wide open on the first session, and they are very narrowly open during the second session.”
Committee Member Maynard St. Peter feels the bill still may pass in its appeal stage.
“It depends on how the legislature feels,” said St. Peter. “It’s going to be a short legislative period. They are going to look at how many bills they have to take up, and then choose between the other bills that people submitted appeals to. They only accepted 32 out of the 400, and those on appeal will now be looked at.
“I feel that we have a decent shot at it. They will be looking at all the bills on the table that have requests for reevaluation, and I feel strongly because ours adheres to the law, because it’s the law that requires this to move forward,” St. Peter added.
Approximately 80 percent of Lyndon’s proposed boundaries will exist within Caribou, but will not overlap with the Urban Compact Zone of the City of Caribou.
Detractors of the Caribou Secession movement believe that breaking apart rural and urban Caribou may have detrimental effects on the city.
“There have been comments about how this movement has hurt Caribou,” said Secession Committee Member Doug Morrell, “All the woes of Caribou have been put on the secession. Those problems came along far before the movement started. We make the beds we sleep in, and Caribou has done the same. The residential, commercial and business problems with Caribou are 100 percent on the back of the legislative people in Caribou. That’s the way it is. Whether we’re trying to secede or not really has no bearing on that, to me.”
“We did a tax impact study,” said Camping. “That’s required by the law. In our 54-page report, you will find our analysis on the effects of Lyndon and the effects on Caribou. We determined that it would be a win-win for both municipalities — a fact that was not challenged by the Caribou City Council. I flatly deny that secession will do any harm.”
“If a person says that we will do harm,” added Morrell, “it’s a blanket statement. When we did our analysis, we could show it would be pretty much revenue neutral.”
“We’d be taking away a third of the population,” said St. Peter, “ and that’s a third of the population that they would not have to support. If they decrease their government by one third, they will be ahead of the game. They will actually be able to do everything cheaper than they are now, but if they continue to try to keep the same city government operational, the burden will fall upon taxpayers within the city.
“If we weren’t doing this, then city government would run rampant. We know that as a fact because, in the two years we since we have started this process, city government has held their budget in check,” said St. Peter.
“Over the last 10 years, a lot of houses have been built,” said Secession Committee member Milo Haney. “Once they are built, people realize that they are being taxed out of them. People who build in Caribou realize they’ve made a mistake. What we’re trying to do here is fulfill their wish. Lyndon will be better, because we feel we can streamline the government to keep the taxes down even better than what a lot of other small towns are doing.”
“I went to the hearing in June,” said Larry Shea, who is part of the committee, but not as a representative. “I saw the way people on fixed incomes were in arrears because their taxes went up by 100 percent or more. I saw how veterans and people with disabilities were treated and said to myself that there is something really wrong here, and that I’m going to throw my support behind secession, because those people didn’t do anything wrong.
“At the very peak of the housing crisis, the market value was up to 32 percent in 2011. That’s when Caribou decides to revalue. Now we have market values that are 22.5 percent below assessment values on average. The average tax on a $100,000 property is $1,230. It’s $2,246 in Caribou. People can not survive,” he added.
Camping urges anyone interested in learning more about the secession movement to follow the “Caribou Secession Committee” page on Facebook, adding that it “provides the most accurate and latest news about our movement.”
