The president of University of New England’s proposal for a mediator to negotiate with Biddeford officials has landed with a thud.
Twice now UNE President James Herbert has reached out to Mayor Liam LaFountain seeking a meeting with a peacemaker present.
Judging from a second letter from Herbert to the city’s top elected official the school president’s request won’t be getting its baccalaureate.
“As you know, you are in receipt of correspondence from UNE on April 15 requesting an independent mediator to address disagreements and litigation,” Herbert wrote April 27.
The college and city have been mired in a fight over whether the school will be allowed to build a research pier in the Saco River.
The project received the green light from a coastal regulatory board but city officials are delaying its moving forward.
Lawsuits have been filed back and forth, apparently frustrating Herbert’s plans to proceed.
In his latest letter Herbert complains to LaFountain about emails from anonymous sources – including so-called mooring owners – opposing the pier plans.
The school is also fighting a moratorium the city imposed on future projects already approved.
“Let’s sit down around a table, like adults, with an independent mediator and resolve these differences,” Herbert said. “Because otherwise we end up in protracted court battles. We need to be working together, not fighting each other.”
In a statement to WMTW-TV, the mayor talked around Herbert’s insistence on a sit-down.
“City leaders are committed to advancing a positive and mutually advantageous relationship, based on facts, data, and our shared history,” LaFountain said. “The process needs to play out logically, and with patience and wisdom, and I’m confident it will.”
Translation: see you in court, dude.
UNE is a liberal cesspool of a college
Here’s the backstory.
In the fall of 1947, much of Maine burned, including Acadia national Park.
There was a big fire in Kennebunk that burned to the sea, and I think this included the land UNE is currently on.
This is how Kennebunk has a massive town forest right over the Biddeford line, the trees and everything were gone along with people’s cottages so they just abandoned the property. UNE was in Biddeford at the time, and I think that’s how they acquired this campus.
As late as the 1980s, the lack of mature trees in the burned over area was quite noticeable, not so much anymore. And my guess is that the city of Biddeford is thinking how much all that shorefront land would bring in property taxes where it to be developed into housing lots
As to these anonymous emails, it’s very easy to tell where they’re coming from.
First, at least Yahoo has the originating IP address in each message. It’s in the headers, and you have to know how to read headers, but memory is that it says originating IP address and list it.
Second, you can also go to the headers and look at how the message got to either Yahoo or Gmail. Yahoo itself will be in the California time zone, but you look what time zone the machine was that sent it to Yahoo. If it doesn’t have the -0400 on it, it didn’t come from the eastern daylight savings time zone.
And then you can do things like traceroute and look IP addresses, this is all public information, and then what you do is look for numbers either side of the actual IP address. While IP addresses a virtually mapped, most people buy blocks of them, so the adjacent numbers often belong to the same person.
This is to do, and if I were UNE, I’d be doing it…
Two lefties can’t figure out how to screw each other so they need a mediator
@Dr Ed, Kennebunkport or Kennebunk ? That school has grown quite a bit since I grew up there. The fire of 47 was something else. Burned until it hit the water at Goose Rocks Beach.