Patch - Freeport town leaders back plan to make
shopping district safer for pedestrians (wgme.com) — Freeport’s Town Council just backed a major
Village Corridor Initiative to slow traffic and make the Route 1 shopping
district safer and more walkable, while adding significant new housing. The
plan would narrow parts of Route 1, prioritize pedestrians, and potentially
create thousands of new condos and apartments over decades, aiming to
keep Freeport livable for workers, seniors, and young residen
Opening
of LL Bean’s new structure
Press
Herald - Eliot Cutler will soon return to jail to serve two and a half
months for repeatedly violating the terms of his probation, a Hancock County
judge has ordered. The disgraced two-time gubernatorial candidate appeared in
court in Ellsworth on Friday morning and made an impassioned plea to Superior
Court Justice Patrick Larson that he should be allowed to continue his
probation as normal, despite allegedly violating the terms of his release six
times since his 2023 conviction for possessing thousands of sexually explicit
images of children.
The Hill - As fuel costs rise amid the U.S.-Iran and Russia-Ukraine wars, Americans in the Northeast may have to pay significantly more to heat their homes this winter. With the price of diesel, in particular, increasing, so too will the cost of a home heating fuel known as heating oil or fuel oil that is commonly used in Northeast states.
William O’Neil, principal
research analyst at S&P Global, said that heating oil and diesel prices
tend to move together, so when diesel prices go up, heating oil usually does,
too.
“The price of diesel historically
has a pretty strong relationship to the price of heating oil because they’re
effectively chemically identical. They just have different additives, different
treatments,” O’Neil said. He said that
those Americans could end up paying nearly 50 percent more this year to heat
their homes than they were last year.
Press Herald - This summer, the Maine Trust for Local News commissioned a survey of 824 Maine residents by the Siena Research Institute, the primary pollster for The New York Times...The results were predictable in some ways and surprising (and even contradictory) in others.
Overall, three out of four people
surveyed described the quality of life in their community as positive. In
southern Maine (Cumberland and York counties), that jumped to 84%, but in
northern and western Maine, it fell to 68%.
Perhaps paradoxically, 38% said
life was either getting somewhat worse or much worse, nearly twice as many as
the number of people who said things are getting better. The why here was
perhaps the most predictable: Housing and other economic factors, including job
opportunities.
.Affordability ranked lowest
among the four main categories — and by a wide margin. The high cost of
housing, childcare, groceries and fuel contributed to those negative feelings.
The best thing about living in
Maine, according to respondents, was the quality of life and sense of
community, followed by nature and the environment.