Fortunately, last night the Farmington selectmen reversed their recently proposed ban on political activity on town property. The town manager and selectmen who initially supported the ban should be applauded for both rescinding it and for the straightforward way in which they apologized for approving it to begin with. The words “I was wrong” are rarely uttered by public officials on any level, and it is refreshing to hear them.
One option for us now is to just forget this episode ever happened. After all, the ban never even went into effect and now it’s dead as a doornail. To do so though, I think, would deprive of us of what educators call a “teachable moment.”
The point of this editorial is not to beat up on Farmington’s town manager or selectmen. We all make mistakes, and we really can’t ask more of people than that they admit it when they do and then correct them. Rather, this editorial is meant for the day next week or next month when someone somewhere else is badly treated and, as a result, someone proposes that what we need is a new law to make things right. Our legislature does this every year, and as a result we end up with more and more laws which we really don’t need.
Consider this unrelated scenario: In your haste to return home tonight, your car grazes the side of your garage as you swing in to park. Of course you wouldn’t be happy, but my guess is that you wouldn’t immediately call workmen to tear the garage down and build a bigger one so as to avoid similar accidents in the future.
Instead, you’d take a few deep breaths and then realize that the size of your garage wasn’t really the problem. With a little thought you’d recognize that you’d been safely parking your car in that same garage for the past ten years and that what you really needed was a little more caution and not a $20,000 renovation project.
Our legal system is no different. For nearly 200 years people in Maine have had to deal with loudmouths and nitwits and troublemakers. There truly are very few problems which come up today which our time-tested legal system hasn’t been dealing with sufficiently for many years.
That’s why we almost never need new laws to deal with old problems. And this is particularly true if those new laws place restrictions on the important rights that the rest of us enjoy.
But year after year our legislators figure that enacting new laws is the answer. If some knucklehead from Kansas threatens to bring his brand of hate speech to a funeral or some good, admirable person is killed by a bad driver, suddenly the same laws which have protected us for years are no longer good enough. So we get a bunch of new ones. Usually new ones we don’t need cause more harm than good.
Asking one simple question would spare our legal system from many changes it doesn’t need. That question is this: Is this problem so new that our current legal system can’t adequately deal with it?
If the Farmington selectmen had asked themselves that before approving their ill-fated politicking ban, the idea never would have seen the light of day. Now we should make sure we ask it of every new law that gets proposed. When we do, I think we’ll realize that we don’t need many of them.
Good points Woody. Any law named after someone is usually redundant or intrusive
Woody,
Please do not stop at just the creation of new “laws”!!!!
The feds, the state, and the state and municipal bureaucrats continue to create endless “rules,” permit systems, or ordinances that erode our private rights to the core as well, whether it be our property rights or parental rights. Unfortunately many of these “rules” are never really known about until the individual has to take on the town or other large entity all by him self, typically at great expense, instead of having the weight of the people behind them helping to protect what should be his rights protected under a true Republic.
We need to stop enacting new ordinances as well! Each one continues to take land rights away, without due process or fair value of the loss to the land owner. The current shore land zoning ordinance that we have on our Farmington books is a great example, yet the state DEP is pushing for even further erosion of the private owner’s rights in the newest proposal as outline by Tom Eastler at last night’s town meeting. These have been pushed through far too long without a true citizen’s need or more importantly, an understanding of the actual implications of the new rules.
However, we also have an “Emergency Ordinance” that will make the selectman’s ban action seem pale if it is ever invoked. This ordinance allows the Town Manager (tomorrow, next year, a decade from now) to declare a “State of Emergency” or “Town Martial Law” when ever he deems fit. This would allow the Town Manager to take over private enterprises (Hannaford or your home) as though they were his to control, all constitutional rights are thrown under the bus, and in the end, he would not be held responsible for anything he ordered, as the ordinance is currently written. This ordinance was also a knee jerk reaction to a hurricane badly handled by everyone in the south, and modeled after a dooms day TV series where nothing is left of the USA but a town in the mid west.
Please – it is up to the investigation of a free press to expose these issues to the public in order for the people to take action, I am hopeful that perhaps the Daily Bulldog and other media can truly take on the role, especially at a local level.
Woody – Thank you for your stand on the ban issue. However it should be pointed out that a citizen, Licia Kuenning, raised these very issues at the selectmen’s meeting that first night but her warnings were dismissed by the Town Manager and Board members. So kind thanks goes out to her citizen’s endeavor for making our town government “of the people!”