Words always matter, wherever they are written, on a subway or old mill with spray paint, or into proposed town rules with, these days, a keyboard. Kudos to Wiscasset and Alna for what they are doing right now, facing head-on the laborious, sometimes tedious job of ordinance writing or rewriting. And as both towns saw in the past week, an ordinance is only as effective as the words in it, which, depending on an issue and your stance, can be either a good or bad thing. 

Wiscasset’s government, from staff to committees, worked to get a set of marijuana ordinances to voters last June, and voters passed them all. But the final version of at least one was missing piece(s) those who drafted it meant it to have and, while some safeguards made it through, the town is working on a fix, which will also take voter approval. 

And Alna’s appeals board determined the town’s appeals board ordinance did not give it jurisdiction to hear an appeal over selectmen’s handling of a matter under the selectboard’s fairly new ethics policy. Lawyers’ interpretations on the jurisdiction issue even partly rested on punctuation, words’ sometimes under-rated partner.

Lincoln County Regional Planning Commission’s Emily Rabbe’s comment in our recent interview nailed it, about ordinances. “We’re all humans,” Rabbe said.

If you have ever erred in a letter, email, company report, or taking down someone’s lunch order, you were probably surprised once you realized it. So even though we can probably all agree there are few pieces of writing as important as an ordinance, we can also understand omissions and/or ambiguities in that arena, and can then get a revised version passed, if voters see fit. It is also possible voters like these ordinances just the way they are.

We are still a democracy (yay), so may rule-writing and changing continue as towns and cities and their voters see fit. And let us recognize an ordinance might never be forever done. We would not say a city or town is completed now. Nor are its rules.