William Marvel: Sewers and Sybarites

Precincts are an odd municipal animal, created to satisfy exaggerated levels of desire for safety or comfort. As a defined political district, precincts appeared in the United States before the Civil War, initially as an urban subdivision authorized to levy taxes for funding fire departments. Because they were monitored little by the public and press, precincts soon became seedbeds for incompetence, nepotism, and graft.

Not until the late 1980s did I pay much heed to precinct politics, and only then because North Conway's precinct gave hints of following that dubious tradition. First, the commissioners spent millions of dollars burying sewer pipes. Only when finished did they learn that they couldn't dump effluent into the Saco River, and they had to find suitable land where the sewage could be treated adequately for a discharge permit. One piece of property that fit the bill turned out to be owned by a banker who held the mortgages of two of the three commissioners. When they voted unanimously to pay that banker several times the market value of the land, the commissioners wondered why people grew suspicious.