Dear Editor:

Title: The study and resultant law commonly referred to as LD 2003 is a long document. Each re-read brings out information previously missed.

LD 2003 deserves to be studied in the context of policies created by the Maine Legislature since 1979 when it arguably overrode Home Rule, and Article IV Part Third Section 14 of the Maine Constitution and chartered The Maine Development Corporation, declaring that “centrally managing the economy is an essential government function,” to be achieved through public-private relationships.

In 2022 unelected special interests in the developers and real estate industries are charged with conducting a study for a law that usurps local municipal ordinance authority protected by Home Rule and delivers everything desired by their industry.

Outrageously the commissioners include restrictions on free speech, prohibiting municipalities from referencing “overcrowding,” “overpopulation” and “character of location” and imply that those who protest the overcrowding of our communities are racist.

The exclusionary zoning policies are often accomplished through low-density regulation, large minimum lot sizes, parking requirements, height restrictions, explicit population growth controls, and sometimes excessive bureaucratic procedures and delays. These exclusionary zoning laws have disproportionately affected people of color.” (source The commissioner’s study)

The logic found in the study is that by definition low-income residents and colored people live in densely packed housing projects so those opposing the overcrowding of our traditional New England villages are racists.

According to this line of thought Lewis Mumford, the innovative thinker in urban design, popular in Europe after World War II was motivated by racism because he believed that human living should be integrated with nature. Lewis Mumford singled out New England, with admiration, as an exception to the overcrowding that was so prevalent during the Industrial Revolution.

Mumford’s greatest popularity was at a time when Europe was rebuilding after a war against an aggressor practicing mass genocide of the Jewish people. The decrees put forth by the unelected commissioners who wrote the study that became the law commonly referred to as LD 2003, make defamatory insinuations about thinkers such as Mumford, This is a pill that should not be swallowed.

Susan M. Andersen

Boothbay Harbor