Last week’s town meeting was remarkably unremarkable. No hot issues to discuss (the only ones with any potential for contention – the discontinuation of four town roads—had been settled in Tuesday’s balloting), non of the usual moves to cut town employees’ salaries, not even a peep as townspeople voted in a $53,436 increase in Municipal Public Works. We voted money to run the town office, the school system, maintain the roads, and to put $100,000 in our town’s savings account for future capital improvements. We appropriated a fairly measly $7,435 for six “provider agencies”, the area non-profits that take care of us when we’re in trouble. We decided to close out the Police Cruiser Reserve fund, thereby apparently closing the door to any future municipal police presence in Lincolnville, an issue that nearly tore us apart as a town a mere two years ago.

So, as Garrison Keillor says, a quiet week in our hometown.

Even as things seem pretty stable in our neck of the woods, at the state level, as Chris Burstein, our Representative in the Legislature, can attest, matters are anything but.  As she wrote in a June 15 update: “It's been very busy in Augusta. We are in the last few weeks of the legislative session and meeting five days a week and into the night.

Negotiations are still in progress to pass a Biennial Budget. … Soon, the budget will head to the House and Senate floor, where it will need to earn two-thirds of the vote to pass and overcome a veto from the governor. The budget must be in place before July 1 to prevent a government shutdown.” If you keep up on state news (and we all should do that, either by reading a state-wide newspaper, on-line or on paper) you can read between the lines in Christine’s update. As of this writing, it appears to be, not so much Rs versus Ds, but most of the Legislature versus the Governor, who, after Christine’s report, vetoed the whole thing. What a strange, and sorry, state of affairs.

As for national politics, I can’t begin to go there. Way out of my league.

I much prefer to play in our local sandbox; I think I do understand that. Now that our municipal budget is passed, and our “housekeeping” articles passed, we can all settle into the business of keeping our town running smoothly. We do it with seven town employees – four full-time and three part-time – as well as a few contractors maintaining our roads, harbor, beaches, legal matters, etc.

Oh, and some 23 boards and committees with a total of 111 citizen-held positions. Some 10 or 11 individuals serve on more than one board or committee. These are as diverse as the Wage and Personnel Policy Board and the Conservation Commission, the Megunticook Dam Committee and the Breezemere Park Bandstand Trustees, the Veteran’s Memorial Committee and the Planning Board. Check them out on pages 4 and 5 of the Town Report. Didn’t get a Town Report this year? They’re still available at the Town Office. Do you remember, before postage rates went sky-high, when the T.R. was mailed to every single household in town? And the years after that when the Selectmen hand-delivered them to each house?

      Here are a few other facts gleaned from this year’s Town Report. As of April 1, 2015 we had a total of 1,799 registered voters – 618 Democrats, 616 Unenrolled, 452 Republicans, and 113 Green Independents. Between July 2014 and June 2015 eleven girl and thirteen boy babies were born; eleven females and four males died; eleven marriages were recorded. 499 dog tags were issued. 66 hunting/fishing combo licenses were issued, which is a steady downward trend for the past five years; boat and all-terrain vehicle registrations were also trending down, but snowmobiles showed a slight up-tick, no surprise after this past winter.

      Hank Lang, our Emergency Management Director has been receiving training from the Waldo County Emergency Management Agency in how to help the town plan for, respond to, document, and recover from large scale emergency events. Check pages 32 and 33 of the Town Report for Hank’s specific suggestions for us to be better prepared for emergencies. Remember the loss of power most of us experienced a few times last fall and winter? Some folks found themselves in a real pickle with no heat, lights, or phone.

      Frank Therio, one of the town’s part-time employees, is our CEO or Code Enforcement Officer, our Health Officer, Plumbing Inspector, Building Inspector, and Addressing Officer. Unless you’ve ushered a building project through the permitting process lately, you may never have met Frank. Thanks to my involvement with moving the Center Schoolhouse and transforming it into a Library with Open Air Museum next door, I got to know Frank pretty well, a very nice guy.

      Vernon Ziegler’s our Assessors’ Agent, is a part-time employee who understands all things pertaining to property tax. I suspect many readers have had occasion to speak with Vern.

      Bernard Young, Lincolnville’s long-time Road Commissioner reports that “….this year’s headline has to be SNOW! SNOW! SNOW! What a winter we experienced. The snow started in November, took a bit of a December break, and then it never let up well into spring. No mid-winter thaw, and after a few snowfalls, nowhere to push the snow…” As most of us know, both Bernard, his son Todd, and Larry Thomas, all long time town snow-plowers, are giving it up this year. “I can’t say we’ll miss the long days and nights of work,” Bernard writes, “but we might.” Well, I’m sure we’ll miss them…

     Harbor Master Mike Hutchings reports that “The pier sees a tremendous amount of use between the fishermen, recreational boaters, workers servicing the islands and Islesboro boat yards, supply and bait trucks, day sailors’ and water taxi users. We continue to maintain the pier as need be while planning for larger, future projects to extend its useful life.” At the moment a large crane can be seen working on reconstructing parts of the wooden wave screen, a project largely funded by a grant.

      So it takes seven employees, several contractors, and around 100 town committee members to run this town of 2,164 souls? Hardly enough.

      The Fire Department’s 26 volunteersanswered 137 calls; some of these were five chimney fires, six lift assists, 17 vehicle accidents, 12 mutual aid, 1 structure, 4 search/rescue, and 6 car fires. While not town employees or contractors, the Fire Department and its members are nevertheless an integral and necessary part of the running of the town. Many of the firemen have young families and are in the thick of it all – earning a living, raising their kids, maybe helping elderly parents, i.e. the busiest time of their lives. And through it all, they manage to make two meetings a month for training and to answer over a hundred calls for their help every year, calls that can come on Christmas Eve or during their child’s birthday party, and they never know what danger that call may involve.

      The other morning, a chilly one at the water’s edge at 6:30 a.m., I watched two hardy souls, Corelyn Senn and Richard Glock, drive up in their respective cars, hop out wearing old sneakers and shorts and carrying coolers and other gear. They headed across the broad tidal flat to the water’s edge, several hundred feet out. Now these two are no spring chickens, one in her 70s and he past 80. I watched them as they reached the water and began gathering samples. At one point Corelyn was standing thigh-deep in the bone-chilling water. The water samples they collect are sent to the Maine Healthy Beaches project for analysis and a recommendation on whether this beach is clean enough for swimmers. Corelyn and Richard do this every Tuesday at both Lincolnville Beach and at Ducktrap throughout the summer. Why do they do it? We could ask them, but I believe I know: they care about our town, about the environment, and because someone needs to do it. So they do.

     Here’s a partial list of organizations and other entities that are volunteer-run in our town:

 Lincolnville Community Library, Lincolnville Historical Society, Lincolnville Improvement Association, Lincolnville Women’s Club,  Coleman Pond Association, Pitcher Pond Association, Healthy Beaches, Tranquility Grange, King David’s Lodge, Mountain Goats Snowmobile Club, Megunticook Watershed Association, Coastal Mountains Land Trust Stewards, Cemetery Associations/Trustees of Maplewood, Youngtown, Union, Hills, Center Burying Ground, Hillside, French Cemeteries, Partners for Enrichment, sports team coaches and their helpers, Parent-Teacher Organization, Gardeners at the Beach, Petunia Pump, and school, Lincolnville Business Group, Bayshore Baptist Church, Crossroads Community Church, United Christian Church, Lincolnville Band.

     Then one morning last week I counted my now-adolescent turkeys and came up with four. How was it possible? The last time I’d checked, there were five. They live in a small fenced area within the larger chicken yard. Their house is secure, both fences unbreached. How did one disappear? Then a friend mentioned that ravens had stolen his chicks; he’d watched them do it.

     Oh yes, ravens. They hang out in the big pine that grows inside our hen yard, watching for the food scraps we toss out for the hens. I saw one sail off with a whole Dunkin Donut in its beak the other day, a prize from a box we’d found at the Beach. Could it possibly have swooped down from above and snatched a young turkey? That led me to think about living in a small town, and how we know each other well enough to know the good, the bad, and yes, the ugly about our fellow townsmen. And still to value them, love them even.

     After researching unsuccessfully on Google, and specifically the UMaine website built for the purpose, I went out about 11 a.m. today to have another look, and …they were gone! All of them. I couldn’t find even one deep in the grass or on any of the three sides of the house where they had been before. What were they? Where did they go? How? And what will they become?”

     Barbara followed up a day or two later with the information that the worms are Armyworms, and they weren’t gone at all, just curled up within the stems of the grasses, as is their habit in broad daylight; they apparently emerge later to feed.

     After reading her post about this invasion of worms on the L’ville Bulletin Board, Alleson Bixler replied: “A number of years ago (probably 20 by now) I had an army worm invasion on my property on the Green Acre Road. They marched up my field and completely took over my house. Yes, they were in my house by the hundreds over a number of days! I had an ell attached to the old farmhouse that wasn’t very tight, and they made their way in. I would vacuum them all up in the morning, and I had to vacuum again when I’d get home at the end of the day. Then they’d rot in my vacuum bag! Needless to say it was all very DISGUSTING! But I was young(er) and loved my old farmhouse and just hoped that they’d go away. They seemed to come up to my house, hit the woods, turn around and march back down to the field. I may be making that part up, but I never did see them go farther on my property than my house, which is at the top of an open field at the edge of the woods. I have been here for 25 years, and that is the only time it has ever happened to such a degree. I see the caterpillars occasionally, give a shiver, and thank goodness it’s only one. Since that one time, I’ve had a (tight!) renovation done to my house, so if it does happen, I will at least be able to keep them from invading my floors! Thanks for the memories… ;-)”