How smart is GrowSmart?

Published Jun 30 2009, 04:59 PM by Jeff Inglis

Al Diamon took GrowSmart Maine to task a couple weeks back. The anti-sprawl, pro-Maine's-future group is having money troubles. Mainebiz reports today that the organization is moving to downtown Portland.

Why, you might ask. Well, it seems, as Mainebiz says, "The smaller and more centralized space will reduce rental expenses and is expected to cut staff commuting costs by thousands of dollars."

So an anti-sprawl group has figured out that driving from Portland to Yarmouth costs money. Maybe their new location will be on a bus line, or somewhere bikeable. Or maybe they'll just get parking spaces for the staff.

1 Comments

Christian said:

Christian from GrowSmart here -

Until recently, GrowSmart's staff came from all over: Lewiston, Freeport, Durham, and Portland. Our office in downtown Yarmouth made sense then: it was relatively centrally located for our statewide organization. A number of us were able to carpool or (for those of us in Portland) use some combination of METRO's route 7 and a bike for the final 5 miles.

Your line about "figuring out that driving to Portland to Yarmouth costs money" presupposes that the trip between our offices and Portland is the most important one our organization and its workers make. But that makes the mistake of assuming that Portland is the center of the universe (a mistake that people from other parts of the state find extremely annoying, by the way): the question is not how far our office was from Portland, but how close we could be to a geographically diverse constituency.

As of this month, though, all of GrowSmart's remaining staff live in Portland. We still make frequent trips to Augusta, Bangor, Waterville, and elsewhere, but for day-to-day operations, being able to walk to work will be a huge bonus for all of us. And we expect to get a hefty discount on our rent, since we won't need to lease any parking spaces.

The savings will be huge, but there's also a risk that people in other parts of the state will write us off as a Portland organization - the old "two Maines" perception. We plan to work hard to combat that impression by redoubling our grassroots outreach through the summer and fall and doing more work on the local/municipal level for towns and cities all over the state.

July 1, 2009 11:18 AM