A tie vote

does not a

decision make

On Monday, after years of discussion and a tremendous amount of negotiation, Paris citizens voted on a plan to merge their police department with the department in neighboring Norway.

The vote? Firmly tied at 41-41.

The result was so surprising, voters actually gasped aloud when Moderator Vern Maxfield announced it.

When the people of Norway took up the same issue in June, they voted to support merger by a whopping 430-117. There, voters favored the concept of creating greater efficiencies between the departments and establishing Paris as the shared patrol station and headquartering investigators in Norway.

Norway and Paris have a well-established mutual aid agreement and the departments’ chiefs and officers work well together. The proposed merger, supported by the respective departments, was intended to be a one-year pilot program.

During that year, each department would fund its own staff and buy its own equipment, so there would be no shift in financial responsibility for either town. It was intended to be a test to see if merging actually resulted in greater efficiency in staff and investigative resources.

These towns are good neighbors to one another. Their teenagers attend school together, along with other children in the Oxford Hills, and they have long shared waste management services under the authority of the Norway-Paris Solid Waste Board. For someone new to the Oxford Hills area, a person might not even realize they’re driving between Norway and Paris because the friendly nature of the towns are aligned.

Monday’s vote in Paris was held after a brief 15 minutes of conversation and, after the paper ballots were counted, police chiefs in each town said they would not seek another vote.

That’s a shame.

Improving shared patrol routes, consolidating investigative efforts and merging fundamental tasks to create one better department makes sense, especially for a trial period that doesn’t change taxpayers’ financial commitments to fund police protection.

The folks in Norway certainly thought so, where some 11 percent of the population turned out to be heard. In Paris, a tie was determined among 1 percent of the population, which is hardly representative of that community.

We understand the desire to walk away after a tie. It’s been a long process of committee meetings and drafting agreements to get to the voting stage.

But a tie vote doesn’t decide anything. It’s like leaving the field of a championship game without deciding a victor between participating teams.

The votes in Norway and Paris were nonbinding, so there’s no reason why Paris voters could not take up the issue again. We urge them to do so.

If not, citizens will always wonder whether they walked away from creating more efficient government. Isn’t that something they want?

Take note of patterns

There is a lot of road construction and repaving going on in downtown Lewiston as the city prepares to narrow certain streets from two lanes to one lane and establish diagonal street parking. The project is welcome work but, unfortunately, painting yellow and white street lines will be the final task so the new traffic patterns aren’t exactly clear.

The temporary pavement nubs and light dots of paint marking the new patterns are hard to see and not terribly definitive along some stretches of road, and drivers accustomed to motoring along two lanes on Ash Street, for example, are continuing to do so even though the nubs indicate traffic flow is now narrowed to a single lane.

As road construction has moved along drivers have developed a game of “which lane pattern is the car ahead of me or behind me going to follow” as each tries to avoid accidents.

The city could mark the streets better, but the real responsibility here is for drivers to pay attention to marked traffic patterns rather than default to habit.

Traffic patterns downtown are changing and it’s going to take some getting used to, but the end result will be a better street surface and more on-street parking.

In the meantime, please read the painted traffic patterns and watch where you’re going.

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