Bud Lewis of Auburn, a longtime engineer with Bates Manufacturing, has known Mill No. 5 for half its life. It’s arguable that nobody knows the building as intimately as he does.Recently, Lewis recommended razing the 365,000-square-foot mill. It’s unique, he wrote to the Sun Journal, but its foundation is unsettled, its ceiling cracked, its infrastructure […]

Some thoughts on Sunday’s Super Bowl:A sentence is not a sentence, without punctuation. Perfection is not perfection, without a championship.Yet excellence, by its very definition, requires imperfection, because the description relies upon comparison with, and the surpassing of, mediocre and nondescript competitors.By this measure, the New England Patriots are the personification of excellence. They are […]

Only a remarkable government report can be invoked to support and oppose a major policy initiative, at the same time. Such is the power of the Brookings Institution and its magnum opus, “Charting Maine’s Future.”Some critics of the proposed merger of Maine’s natural resource agencies – Agriculture, Conservation, Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and Marine Resources […]

Aside from Monday’s fly-by from Ron Paul, and some Tagg Romney sightings on Friday and Saturday, Maine is again being ignored during this presidential campaign, despite high hopes that this – finally – could have been our year.Yeah, right.With Super Tuesday looming like rapture for delegate-hungry candidates, our measly caucuses are being crunched like Mike […]

We’ll admit it. At first blush, when hearing about Portland’s bid to host the 2009 MasterCard Memorial Cup, our response was, “Hey, why is Portland trying to steal this event? Lewiston is the home of the Maineiacs.”Call it a slide into parochialism. All the years competing with Portland, being compared (often negatively) to Portland, and […]

In an editorial published Jan. 31, “City must salvage top job search,” we wrote that former Auburn Mayor Normand Guay was “acquitted” of a charge of drunken driving. Guay’s case was never heard in court; the Maine Attorney General’s Office declined to press charges against him. We regret the error.

Somebody on the Auburn City Council, it appears, has “unclean hands.”That’s the phrase city officials used against the Sun Journal in 2003, when the newspaper received a 16-page report relating to the controversial drunken driving arrest of then-Mayor Normand Guay, prior to its public release.The document detailed the events leading to Guay’s arrest. He was […]

When jail consolidation started, we urged Gov. John Baldacci to “keep going.” Proving the state could run the costliest county function more efficiently was the best first step, we thought, toward phasing out counties entirely.Consolidation, however, gave county officials palpitations. They fought the proposal vigorously, and won a compromise this week. If approved by the […]

Leave it to Lewiston to turn the blogosphere into the “blobosphere.”Even semi-retired humor scribe Dave Barry mentioned the city’s doughy obstruction on his personal piece of cyberspace, replete with the infamous color picture of the ugly, grayish, otherworldly…thing.Even we, the normally stoic editorial board, had some fun with it. One quip had to do with […]

A detail that stands out from the murder trial of Scott Poirier deals little with revelations of abuse, or the minute-by-minute retelling of last fall’s killing, when Poirier shot his father during his 65th birthday party.Rather, it’s from the day after the shooting, when Poirier’s defense lawyer reportedly received 74 phone calls from people citing […]