The Medomak Valley Community Foundation (of which we are both honored to be board members) received a cruel and unanticipated blow from the Waldoboro Board of Selectmen at its meeting last Tuesday evening.

I am 12 years old and live in Richmond. Photography is one of my interests and I absolutely enjoy it as a hobby, hoping to have either photography or ornithology as a career sometime when I am older.

In an incredibly forward-looking policy, the nation of Kenya last fall enacted the most stringent law against plastic bags in the world. Kenya has joined 40 other countries, including China (2008), Rwanda (2008), Italy (2011), and France (2016), in making plastic bags illegal.

My wife, Heidi, and I had no business being out last Wednesday night and I am not talking about the weather. True, it had stormed most of the day, but by the time we were ready to drive to Damariscotta, the roads were mostly clear. A few weeks before I had heard about an open house at The Lincoln County News. It was scheduled for that evening as part of a Business After Hours event for the Damariscotta Region Chamber of Commerce. Having no real connection with either, I wasn’t sure why, but I knew I wanted to attend.

As one of the Whitefield parents who spoke at the “contentious” RSU 12 school board meeting on Dec. 14, I would like to clarify some of our concerns and requests that were brought to the meeting. Though I do not claim to be the voice of all of the parents in the community, I have spoken to enough of them to know that the thoughts presented here are not unique, and our family is not alone in our concern.

As a member of the Bristol Dam Advisory Committee and former selectman, I feel it is imperative that the residents of Bristol should be fully informed of the findings of the dam committee. Our mission was to investigate, with the aid of the Wright-Pierce engineering firm, ways to increase fish migration to the headwaters of the Pemaquid River. As noted in the LCN for the past months, the committee has worked on three options.

The recent arrival of snow is a clear sign of winter and the holiday season. One result is that people everywhere tend to band together a little bit more, knowing that while there may not be peace on earth, home, at least, can be a place of security and reassurance. While world events seem sometimes as if we were all afloat in the same small boat on a storm-tossed sea, our own personal port in heavy weather can be a very safe place indeed.

In the new year, we will likely be asked to vote on a series of options regarding the future of the Bristol Mills Dam and fish ladder, which are both in need of significant repair and severely limit the passage of alewives upstream. I’m writing to encourage residents to become as educated on the subject as possible before any votes are cast.

Development in Damariscotta has been a hot topic these past few months. In the pages of this newspaper, in multiple public meetings and hearings, on social media, and in coffee shop conversations. Everyone has an opinion. Unfortunately, not everyone has the facts.

I am a member of the Main Street advisory group, however, I am writing this as a citizen and taxpayer and do not speak for the group.

In response to Marion Whitmore, of Waldoboro, I have not seen the usual birds around our home either. We were away all of September, and I always remove my birdfeeder in the summer, so when we put it back up Oct. 1, I figured it would take a few days for them to find it again. But they still haven’t come, and it’s the middle of the month. I’ve seen one pair of titmice and a stray chickadee at the feeder, that’s it!

In the past 105 years, there has been no rush to duplicate the original ship. It was a bad experience and bad experiences usually are not repeated – good designs are kept and the bad ones are filed and forgotten. Unfortunately, this is not the case in politics.