Border dispute

Victor Bourre, get a life

By Jerry Fraser

My taste in television runs to football, baseball, and stock-car racing, and when they’re not on I watch the Discovery Wings channel. As a result, there are times — from the Super Bowl to the Daytona 500, for instance — when all we watch at my house is newsreel footage of old planes.

“By Godfrey, they don’t build ’em like the Corsair any more,” I’ll tell my wife, beaming.

“Get a life, would ya,” she’ll reply.

“Me?” I say, incredulously. “You should be married to Victor Bourre.”

Bourre is a former Portsmouth Naval Shipyard (a.k.a. the Navy yard) worker who has been obsessed with the border between Maine and New Hampshire since the late 1980s, and has been protesting ever since.

Bourre and others of his ilk, among them U.S. Sen. Robert (Never mind being right, I’d rather be president than Republican) Smith of New Hampshire, contend that Seavey Island, off Kittery between mainland Maine and New Hampshire, is in the Granite State. The Navy yard is on Seavey Island; ergo, they say, it is in New Hampshire.

At Bourre’s first protest, which I covered back as a fledging reporter for the York County Coast Star, he and his merry men and women threw a giant teabag into the Piscataqua River. The point, I guess, was that this was a dramatic re-enactment of the Boston Tea Party.

Nearly 15 years later, Bourre has retired and is channeling his revolutionary fervor into a search of moldering papers, papers that he says will prove once and for all, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Seavey Island is in New Hampshire.

“This is very, very serious,” Bourre told the Maine Sunday Telegram. “That’s why nobody has ever figured it out.”

Bourre’s wrong on two counts. First, there is nothing serious about this. The only people who aren’t laughing are the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, who thought they’d resolved the matter 25 years ago when they settled a boundary-line dispute between Maine and New Hampshire lobstermen. Second, other than Bourre, Smith, and a few kooks, everyone has figured the border out, beginning with the high court and ending with former Maine Gov. Joseph Brennan, who in the 1980s saw dollar signs in the sky over Seavey Island and enacted the so-called spousal income tax.

The spousal income tax requires nonresident couples to pay Maine income taxes if either spouse works in the Pine Tree State. It’s hardball tax policy, I’ll grant Bourre and company that, and especially galling in “Live free or die” land, where residents do not pay income taxes to their own state. It’s one thing to pay Maine income taxes because you work here; it’s another to pay them because your spouse works here.

Nonetheless, hundreds upon hundreds of Granite Staters work on the shipyard — and elsewhere in Maine — and the tax dollars of their spouses have been a breath of fresh air in our treasury. And the fact is, there’s ample precedent for the spousal income tax around the country, which is why the flap over the border is a red herring. Bourre and his legion are tax cranks who wouldn’t care if Seavey Island belonged to Saskatchewan if it didn’t cost them any money.

But if I’m a skeptic when it comes to Bourre’s mission, he does have a point: Things are not always where they claim to be. Take the Cliff House, in York. Since 1872 the operators of this 70-acre resort have been using an Ogunquit address to flog tourists their way even though they are miles from “the beautiful place by the sea.” I showed up there 12 or 13 years ago, covering a visit by U.S. Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, then stumping for the White House, not Viagra, and when I tried to set the record straight, my fellow journalists laughed me out of the place. Even the Associated Press used Ogunquit in the dateline.

As an earnest, if no longer fledgling reporter, I called the Cliff House a few days later days and asked whether management aspired to associate with Ogunquit or was ashamed of being in York. “That has nothing to do with it”, I was told. “Back when guests arrived by rail, the nearest stop was in Ogunquit. So to avoid confusion, we used the Ogunquit address.

“It’s a customer service thing.”

So what if the train stopped running 100 years ago?

To say nothing of the New York Giants, or the New York Jets, neither of whom plays in New York state, let alone the city.

“New York City doesn’t have a football team,” says my father, who is a diehard New Yorker and doesn’t understand why anyone would move to New Jersey just to shake down the city for a hundred-million dollar stadium with luxury suites.

As for Victor Bourre, I just wish he hadn’t taken early retirement. The surplus in Augusta is evaporating, and it’s nice to have income from taxpayers whose cars don’t clog our streets and whose kids don’t tote handguns in our schools.

So thank-you Victor. In fact, why not recall the immortal words of George Bush the elder: “Thank you New Hampshire.”

Jerry Fraser can be reached at cfraser@maine.rr.com.