Dear Editor:

As the world turns into the AI order, many jobs requiring a college education will no longer exist, including legal work, financial analysis, writing and content, software development, medical analysis, and customer service, as explained in recent viral articles such as Something Big Is Happening and The One Question NOBODY Is Asking About AI and Jobs.

Our peninsula is no exception to the disruption. Our endangered water supply makes the Peninsula unsuitable for corporate culture, which is being unconstitutionally enacted by state-wide municipal ordinances, such as HP 1489, mandating overcrowded housing zones for residential and “workforce” use, uniformly in every Maine municipality.

A one-size-fits-all state municipal ordinance violates Maine’s Home Rule, added to the Maine Constitution in 1969, seven years before a 1976 legislative fiat deemed centrally managing the economy to be an essential government function.

Ever since, the wealth divide has expanded year after year.

When the state enacted the state-wide municipal ordinance HP1489. There was no protest, and so the state continued its power-grab.

LD 997 is a state-wide municipal ordinance permitting residential units in commercial zones, excluding “home businesses," which, according to unique definitions made up for the act, do not qualify as “commercial”, unlike short-term rentals, which deliver a 9% sales tax to the state, including related services.

"For purposes of this section, commercial use" means the use of lands, buildings or structures the intent or result of which is the production of income from the buying or selling of goods or services. "Commercial use" does not include a home-based business, the rental of a single dwelling unit on a single lot, or incidental sales of goods or services as may be allowed by permit or standard.”

The discrimination against businesses that make a product or a service rather than buying and selling is consistent with the state’s long-established discrimination against individuals and small businesses, systematically excluding them from participation in community councils.

As AI cancels human employment in the large corporate sector, the small business sector is what remains. Excluding the makers makes no sense.

Mackenzie Andersen

Boothbay Harbor