On July 25, 1918, residents of the Town of Dennysville gathered to watch a 160-foot, four-masted schooner enter the Dennys River from Pushee Brothers' shipyard at Clark's Point. The town was then a bustling place, and town historian Ron Windhorst relates a diary entry from Fred Gardner, who witnessed the launch of the David Cohen: "She slid into the water most beautifully. Never a false move. There were thousands of people there. There were 400 autos at least."
      This scene is hard to believe today, as Pushee Brothers, the lumber mills that supplied them and even the gas stations for all those cars are gone. Dennysville today consists of a library, a town hall, a bar, a museum, 326 people and 11 miles of scenic roads where Route 1 crosses the Dennys River. And these 11 miles of roads are at the root of Dennysville's current crisis.
      Last year, when Dennysville's First Selectperson Dawn Noonan received an estimate for necessary road repairs, she was shocked. Years of deferred maintenance had taken their toll, and the town's $88,000 yearly earmark for roads was nowhere near enough. According to the estimate, $7 million was needed for the shimming, ditching and resurfacing required to get Dennysville's roads in shape. To pay a bill that size, the town would have to go into debt and probably raise property taxes to pay it off. With many of Dennysville's residents on fixed incomes, that seemed like a nonstarter. "There's no way we're going to get our roads the way they should be," Noonan says. "There's just no way."
      That was the beginning of the town's contemplation of deorganization, a process where a town officially ceases to be a town. The impacts of deorganization vary, but generally speaking, a town's government dissolves, many of its functions are turned over to the state or county, and the town becomes a township, one of Maine's many unorganized territories.
      Residents of an unorganized territory still pay taxes to the state, which in part go to paying for the town's educational needs, including tuition stipends and busing. Instead of being assessed by a local assessor, property values for unorganized territories are set by Maine Revenue Services, which also takes care of billing and collections. Zoning laws become the jurisdiction of Maine's Land Use Planning Commission (LUPC). Remaining services, including transportation and road maintenance, ambulance services, police, and voting in state and national elections, are generally picked up by the county.
      There is a long precedent in Maine of deorganization during times of hardship. Windhorst, president of the Dennys River Historical Society and minister at the Dennysville-Edmunds Congregational Church, says the neighboring town of Edmunds deorganized in 1937. This was during the Great Depression and came about when the federal government bought nearly 30,000 acres of farmland in the area to bail out debt-strapped farmers. This buyout resulted in the formation of Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge and the end of Edmunds as an organized town. Today, Edmunds Township hosts a number of businesses and a public school that serves students from Dennysville, Whiting and Trescott, but it is not a town.

Not an easy process
      The deorganization process is not easy. Many towns start the process but do not make it all the way through. Nancy Bodine, fiscal administrator for the unorganized territories in Maine, has helped a number of towns through this process. She describes what is essentially a four-step process. First, the town communicates to its residents that deorganization is being considered. Then a petition is circulated, which in this case would need signatures of support from 77 voters, half the number that voted in the state's last gubernatorial election. The town would then formulate a plan for deorganization, which would then be reviewed by the state legislature. If the legislature approves the plan, the town would vote one last time, and two-thirds of the residents would need to support deorganization for it to go through. If deorganization fails to get the support necessary at any of these points, then it is back to square one.

Lost tax revenue
      How does a town reach this sort of breaking point in the first place? Noonan singles out Cobscook Shores' nonprofit park system as sapping the town's already small tax base. Cobscook Shores owns four properties in Dennysville, and the organization has been granted nonprofit property tax exemptions for all four, which amounts to $4,400 in annual lost tax revenue for the town. "It may not sound like a lot, but in a town this small, that's a lot of money to lose," Noonan says. She questions the need for such a park, says that Cobscook Shores made its purchases without consulting the town, and says that she had heard of no offers for a payment in lieu of taxes.
      Charlie Howe, project manager for the Cobscook Shores park system, expresses sympathy for Dennysville's difficult situation and states that Cobscook Shores will be making a special contribution of $5,000 to Dennysville's general budget in 2023. He says that Cobscook Shores has been making contributions to Dennysville and other towns where Cobscook Shores has a presence, and that in 2022 the organization made donations to Dennysville's library, historical society and food pantry.
      "This is a community with an incredibly rich history," Howe says, and he points out that Cobscook Shores intends to honor that history in their new parks. The two parcels Cobscook Shores bought on Foster Lane, he notes, which are slated to open to the public this summer, are being designed to commemorate Dennysville's history of shipbuilding.

Losing local zoning control by deorganizing
      The USDA State Director Rhiannon Hampson, who grew up Downeast, points out that the USDA's Rural Development arm provides small towns like Dennysville with support, but that support is always targeted, and transportation infrastructure is rarely a focus. The USDA's Community Facilities Program, for example, invested federal grant money in Dennysville's fire station, and USDA programs are generally designed to help with specific needs like ambulance services, water and wastewater systems and community libraries, but these funds do not go into towns' general budgets, where transportation costs are paid out.
      The Maine Department of Transportation (MDOT) provides financial support for town infrastructure in the form of the Local Road Assistance Program, or LRAP. MDOT's Pete Coghlan says that the LRAP budget is a fixed 9% of the MDOT's annual budget, and that figure is then distributed to towns according to the number of miles of road they care for. State records show that Dennysville's 11 miles of road will bring in $12,244 in LRAP money in 2023, about $50 less than what the town got in 2022, and essentially on par with what the town has received from MDOT for the last 10 years. LRAP allotments do not appear to have kept up with inflation, let alone the rising costs of asphalt or the fuel needed to run road equipment.
      Deorganization would not necessarily mean the end of Dennysville's eligibility for either of these programs. LRAP money still gets to the unorganized territories, Coghlan says, but it gets distributed at the county level. Hampson says that Dennysville and its residents would likely still be eligible for USDA money after deorganization, as eligibility for many of the USDA's rural programs is based on median income, which would not change, and Dennysville residents could still receive state block grants distributed by federal agencies.
      Zoning laws might be where an unorganized territory differs most from a town. In neighboring Pembroke, for example, it was a town ordinance that blocked Wolfden Resources Corporation from opening an industrial-scale metallic mining operation. In fact, Wolfden was exploring mining opportunities in Dennysville, as well, Noonan says, but pulled out when Pembroke's ordinance passed.
      An unorganized territory would not have the autonomy Pembroke had to pass any such ordinances. Bodine says if residents of an unorganized territory were unhappy with zoning decisions, their only recourse would be to write or call the state or county agencies, like LUPC, or their legislators. For example, Wolfden Resources currently has another mine in the works, the Pickett Mountain project in northern Maine, in unorganized territory near the town of Patten and Baxter State Park. Because Pickett Mountain is outside of Patten's town lines, LUPC has jurisdiction. Wolfden withdrew their application in 2021 but reapplied to LUPC for Pickett late last month.
      Noonan admits that it is not even clear that deorganization will make the town's budget worries go away. "It's like when you throw a pebble in the water, the ripple effect. It's hard to say what's going to happen." Property taxes, for example, she says, could even go up, depending on how Maine Revenue Services does the math.
      The town will gather for their annual town meeting on Monday, March 27, at 7 p.m., when deorganization will be among the topics to be discussed.