William Marvel [03/25/2002]

By William Marvel

The Mount Washington Valley Economic Council seems to be all the rage now. A few weeks ago the council held an open house at its new home in the Echo Group's old Center Conway offices, and that seemed to require a lot of political firepower to bring off. Like other recent council functions, that event appeared to be primarily a grip-and-grin opportunity for favored Republican Party candidates, but most of the selectmen felt obliged to attend, as well, while their lesser constituents waited for them to begin their meeting at the town hall, next door. In a couple of weeks we will be asked to vote on a potentially devastating zoning amendment that is clearly intended solely for the council's proposed technology village, so we can expect to hear a lot of hype about how wonderful the council is and what a wonderful job it is doing for our community.Pardon me for finding parallels here with "The Emperor's New Clothes." When an organization cavalierly emasculates the town zoning ordinance for its own short-term purposes thereby subjecting the entire residential-agricultural district to the horrors of commercial development that organization can stop casting itself as the champion of the community's best interests.Let's forget for a moment that such harebrained schemes to boost the local economy have always come to naught. Let's forget, for instance, that the town of Conway and the Conway Village Precinct poured many hundreds of thousands of dollars into the blighted Hobbs Street industrial zone, and that every penny of that money literally went down the sewer. Let's forget that Jim Somerville schemed to push that boondoggle through without a bond issue, chanting the same eternal promise of more and better jobs. Let's forget that that egregious waste of money was supported by then-selectman Jac Cuddy, who now directs the economic council and whose political connections seem so essential to manipulating town affairs for the council's benefit.Let's look instead at the havoc that would be wrought by allowing nonprofit corporations to build commercial facilities in the residential zone. No neighborhood no homeowner would then be safe from commercial blight, so long as the entrepreneurs hid behind the mask of nonprofit status. Residential property values would plummet, though perhaps that's the council's backhanded way of creating affordable housing. The need for town services would balloon, as residential roads had to expand for commercial traffic. What little remains of Conway's rural flavor would be squandered as the larger lots went into commercial use.The only job the council has really created so far is Jac Cuddy's, and that came courtesy of the federal government. Businessmen like Joe Quirk and Marc Ohlson have done far more than the economic council has to revitalize the local economy, offering vastly more reasonable rents than the council does, and they have done so without a dollar of government money. Such local businessmen would not go to Sanford, Maine, to buy office furniture, as the council did, if they could have gotten it as easily and as cheaply from a Conway merchant. In the course of revitalizing their portions of the town, such businessmen have managed to preserve the architectural flavor for which people came here. The council, meanwhile, would throw community atmosphere and zoning protection to the wind for one more long-shot gamble. No one who would propose such chaos (including any of the town officials who are supporting it) is really thinking about Conway's future.