When temperatures drop to perilous lows, a landlord-tenant relationship must shift from commerce to safety. There’s no excuse for landlords to fail to heat, or monitor the heat, of their buildings. It is more than maintenance; it is life and death.During the past few weeks, we’ve chronicled the challenges faced by residents of 153-155 Bartlett […]

You can lead councilors to savings, but you can’t make them think.If they did, those in Auburn wouldn’t have voted to snuff joint services. It was a decision made in a vacuum, that hints of the same betwixt their ears.For over a decade, some of this community’s leading citizens have supported joint services as the […]

If there ever was a week to cheer the hometown team, this is it.News the Lewiston Maineiacs are mulling a move to the Montreal suburbs shouldn’t surprise in this modern era of itinerant sports, when professional franchises often snub beloved homes for greener pastures, usually burning all their bridges in the process.Look around. This coming […]

From the window of a passing jetliner, the social makeup of Lewiston-Auburn looks easy to evaluate: former mill towns, mired in economic transition, influx of immigrants, revival.Et voil – instant cause and effect.There’s a real jetliner in this case – a glossy printed one. Newsweek, in its Jan. 26 edition, profiled Lewiston as the city […]

Disrespectful.How else to explain Auburn Mayor John Jenkins’ zeal for killing joint services and the citizens commission that has spent years devising ways to save money? On Monday, the Auburn council will hear Jenkins’ resolution to scuttle the panel, before even talking to it.Volunteers from both riverbanks have spent too much time and taxpayer coin […]

Cheers and jeers from around the news:• Jeers to legislative spoilsports. In a year of restraint, with lawmakers submitting about one-quarter fewer bills than previous years, some still offered ideas to turn us cross-eyed.We’re looking at you, Rep. Alan Casavant, D-Biddeford.LD 9 is Casavant’s emergency bill to “prohibit the force-feeding of birds” to produce the […]

Following a transition filled with fits and starts, FairPoint Communications now – in the words of its chief executive, Gene Johnson – “controls its destiny.” This month, the ambitious telecom finally transferred all of Verizon’s operations in Maine to its management.Until now, the companies were unfit partners. FairPoint purchased Verizon’s infrastructure desperately needing attention, under […]

The Maine Principals’ Association is to athletic cost-cutting as the Legislature was two years ago to school district consolidation: Steward of an unpopular mandate, grating against rooted traditions of local control.Maybe the MPA’s position is worse. In consolidation debate, athletic impact was just an example of a negative outcome. Under the MPA proposal – which […]

There was something for everyone in President Barack Obama’s inaugural speech, which was a stirring step toward the post-partisan promises his administration has vowed to fulfill. In these critical times, a united government is an absolute for progress.Obama wisely called for an end to “worn out dogmas” that “strangle our politics” and to cease “protecting […]

Overlooked among the Inaugural hoopla was a Washington Post report that said, according to sources in the Obama administration, former Maine Sen. George Mitchell would become the president’s top envoy to the Middle East.If so, that is yet another significant responsibility entrusted to Mitchell, further polishing his political and public resume that few from this […]