About Question 1

Bill Packard: Don’t take Mainers for buffoons

Bill Packard

Thu, 10/19/2017 - 6:00pm

Every once in a while I try to be a responsible citizen. Most of the time I find out what’s going on after the fact and have to Google a subject in order to participate in any conversation. That’s not the case with Question 1.

First off, I didn’t know there were questions already and had no idea what Question 1 was about, but I got flyer in the mail encouraging me to vote YES on Question 1.

Almost all of the time, I do what I’m told, but since nobody had told me to vote NO on Question 1, I thought I would do a little research.

Let me say right from the get go, that I don’t support a casino in any part of Maine until the Indians get one in Washington County. Washington County certainly needs the revenue and so do the Indians, so nothing to do with any sort of moral stand on gambling, I’ll continue to vote against casinos in Maine until one is approved for Washington County. OK. We’ve got that out of the way.

This Question 1 deal is interesting. The mailer I got said that the Office of Aging and Disability will receive $1,009,606+ in additional funding every year. That’s pretty impressive! Not a million or over a million, but $1,009,606+.

That seemed like a good thing, so I decided to do what I’ve never done before and see who was sending out the flyer and find out what I could about them, but before I could do that, the lovely Kathleen got a flyer from the same outfit.

Hers was fancier than mine and had more pages and that seems sexist to me, but that’s a cause that I will work on as soon as I get this straightened out.

Her flyer quotes the same wording of the bill, but hers says that the money will go to reduce property taxes by $3,028,817 and, get this, create college scholarships of $3,028,817!

Can you believe it? The reduction in property taxes is the exact same number of the scholarships. Amazing. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

They also say that $11 million will go to education each year, and her flyer says there will be hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Veteran’s Assistance Fund every year. I’m just overwhelmed with the prosperity that is about to come our way.

So, as I said, I did a little research and of course in today’s world it’s almost impossible to find anything factual about anything, but here’s what came up when I Googled Progress for Maine, the group that sent out the flyer.

Nobody seems to know who really is behind it. Could be Shawn Scott or possibly a Chinese company that gets green cards for people who donate a million dollars, or maybe a group out of California, but there’s some folks in New York City that appear to be involved, too.

It reminds me of the Yogi Berra quote after an incident at a bar late at night; “Nobody knows anything about nothing.”

It also appears that the wording of the referendum question is such that whoever is behind it is the only entity that can open the casino if the bill passes, but we don’t seem to really know who that entity is. I don’t care if there are casinos or not and it’s nothing to me if people enjoy gambling. How you vote on question 1 is your business and there is no intent here to sway your vote, but it looks like someone is trying to sell the voters of Maine a bill of goods. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

The promoters of both the existing casinos promised that my life would be better if I voted for them, and so far I haven’t seen any big windfall of money.

We’ve just experienced our first Indigenous People Day in some communities in Maine, and while I have some thoughts about that, it seems like if there are going to be more casinos in Maine, we’d be better off to have them operated by the Indian Nation in Washington County, than Shawn Scott, or whoever is behind Question 1 down in Northern Massachusetts.

It irritates me when people take us Mainers for buffoons.

Bill Packard lives in Union

Bill Packard lives in Union and is the founder of BPackard.com. He is a speaker, author, small business coach and consultant.