Dear Editor:

Dennis C. Brown seems to think that the strong negative feelings about the Boothbay Warrant come down to “don't let big-moneyed outsiders change anything.”

There's no big money-owning boogieman involved in the current dispute. The Golf Club (even if it has changed its name to the “Boothbay Harbor” club) fits right into the proven advantages Mr. Brown recognizes in the Opera House, the Y, the Botanical Gardens, Bigelow: beneficial to everyone, especially if the new owner continues the open-to-all policy he has so far initiated.

What's of no advantage or benefit to resident or visitor are the parts of the warrant Mr. Brown may not have seen, because one had to get them separately: the parts that allow huge and illuminated signage in town, for instance; or that would allow the Boothbay Selectmen to change zoning areas and land uses on their own with no public vote; or similarly reconstruct the entrance to Boothbay (which affects not just that town but all the towns here) as they deem fit.

These are the same selectmen who put forward the map and plan they are now disavowing, so many of us do not want to give them that power, but rather make such things conditional on actual, public, voting.

As for “We couldn't wait till all those tourists leave town at the end of the summer,” it's a mantra heard in every tourist town, from Nantucket to Paris: it's a simplistic way of saying “Now we'll have parking spaces; now there won't be crowds.”

Neither our residents nor visitors are stupid enough to want tourists to stay away. Without them, we're all lost. And make no mistake, if we make the town as ugly as the Selectmen and town manager propose (and again, that has nothing to do with the Golf Club) visitors will indeed stop coming.

Having been first a tourist, then a visitor and now a resident, I don't like any of those groups to be maligned. That's not what this outcry against the warrants has been about. Enhance the peninsula; don't trash it.

Rhoda Weyr
Boothbay