A lot of clever yard signs this election. Makes you want to just vote for the best jokey saying. But if you stop chuckling and think about Rockport’s future, deciding if you should advise your kids to vote for the class clown or the girl that can figure out the hard problems.

A lot of good, serious people —  Rockport taxpayers, residents, and officials, worked long and hard to solve the waster treatment problem facing us, the one we have been ignoring for so long,

Their solution, Rockport’s own treatment facility — modern technology, easily added capacity capacity for our future (and our neighbors’), is described in boring detail in Article 3, written for lawyers, not poets or parents.

Voting NO does not just kick the problem down the road, it ensures additional costs and difficulties, may miss out on grants or federal assistance, and creates the immediate and expensive problem of what do we do now that Camden and Rockland are refusing to negotiate in good faith.

If the wishful opinion that Camden is willing to have us back on fair terms is even a little bit true, why hasn’t there been a single public statement to that effect by any Camden official?

Need more reasons to vote YES? Here they are:

1. We have more open land, with less density and smaller populations than Camden or Rockland, but new development remains stymied by a lack of sewer lines along the route 90 corridor. Septic fields require much more land, bringing un- wanted sprawl, and preventing community amenities like parks and ponds. Robert Frost didn’t write “Good sewers make good neighbors”, but he could have.

2. Both Camden and Rockland have old, under-maintained, waste treatment facili-ties with limited capacity. It is difficult for them to handle what we have today - Pen Bay Medical Center has to hold its waste until night, when Rockland has capacity. Camden’s facility is regularly in non-compliance with environmental standards. Both have told us “no more”. Major renovations or replacements of their systems are needed for their own future, let alone ours. Any negotiation they agree to would require us to pay for their problems, current and future, while keeping their own citizens’ rates lower than ours.

3. The numbers show that building is more sensible than continuing dependency.

4. Without both sewer and waste treatment capacity for new housing, developers won’t build and families and businesses won’t start up, expand, or move here. Over the first 10 years of operation, each household on sewer will pay about $4,000 less in wastewater costs than if Camden were to continue under the last agreement. Since they have raised our rates 73% in the last five years, it’s foolish to bet that they won’t raise them again in the next 10. And what might Rockland do?
5. We also have an opportunity to build the area’s resilience. New treatment tech- nologies are scalable at reasonable cost: we could build enough capacity to help our neighbors when they need us. Centrally located, it can be a model for cross- community cooperation.
6. Without a new sewer line, all those possible new homes and businesses won’t happen. Without a waste treatment plant that can accommodate our existing and new waste stream, the sewer line won’t happen. And every one of those missing homes and businesses would be paying property and school taxes, which w need to help lower our existing taxes. Wastewater bills? My property and school taxes are several times that amount.
7. Finally, money that has to be raised after any grants, state and federal aid, is paid for by users, not by those who are not connected. But non-users will also suffer the economic and social costs of our failure to invest in our community for every- one’s future. Please vote with the future in mind.

Jan Rosenbaum lives in Rockport