Dear Editor:

Will promises to pay millions in guarantees (if need be) satisfy skeptics? Or will those promises be seen as ratification by the suspicious that Boothbay is for sale?

Resentment that moneyed interests can dictate and trample a way of life which happily has passed down the generations, carve up a community, rearrange roads, build new ones, to serve only a golf magnate intent on creating a monument to a sport which, when complete, will lure thousands to golf a masterpiece, the costs to play on it, far greater than the average townsperson can pay. Will this be sufficient to extinguish one person's pipe dream?

Will anger that a yes vote is asked by selectmen who, away from prying eyes, quietly met with this very golf magnate, his lawyer and a builder, and suddenly were overwhelmed with a vision, which translated into millions of dollars in new-found wealth and prosperity for all, does this fury insure defeat?

Four score years of living and observing how plans hatched in darkness when exposed to blinding daylight often fade, crack and crumble, only to become the graveyard of empty promises provides insight. As for promises, those given to make Boothbay whole are simply that and have little value in a courtroom. A judge will say, “Show me the contract.”

Yes or no. Is Boothbay, place of beauty, a New England treasure, a venue where Mainers build ships and boats, harvest its glorious rivers, so broke that our elected representatives would cast it away, vaingloriously in search for a kingdom of golf?

Paul E. McArdle
Boothbay