Dear Readers,

Our summer friends are packing up the family car, emptying out the refrigerator and making one last trip to the dump. Except for a few more busloads of “leaf peepers,” our 2012 tourist season is over. We hope both our temporary and regular summer folk had a productive and happy summer. We hope our friends in the merchant/hospitality industry had a good summer, too.

Here at the Boothbay Register and Wiscasset Newspaper, we have spent the summer covering the news of our small towns. In addition to the usual run of events at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, the Boothbay Region Land Trust, the YMCA, the Opera House at Boothbay Harbor, Castle Tucker, other nonprofits and events happening in our neighborhoods, we have been reporting on some key issues that will each have a major effect on our community for months to come.

Top on our list is the possibility that our beloved St. Andrews Hospital will be closed and replaced by something called an urgent care center. It is of great concern to our year around residents and our summer folk. We will continue to keep you up on the latest developments.

Many residents and visitors have told us they are worried about a proposal to build an aquaculture fish farm project in Linekin Bay. They ask us what will it mean for the bay? What will it mean for the industry? What will it mean for residents and neighbors of the project? All of these are questions we will try to answer in the coming months.

A proposal to build a floating windmill farm 12 miles off our coast is also generating a lot of interest. There are dozens of unanswered questions involved in this project including the possible effects on the sea, the sea bottom, and the fishermen. Will it be visible from shore? Will it generate business for our friends in marine services, the shipyards, and the hospitality industry? Will it mean lower electricity rates? 

Independent Senate candidate Angus King, a backer of wind power, claims it will be a huge boon for the coast. Others are not so sure. In any event, nothing is likely to happen in the near future; but we plan to spend a great deal of our resources reporting on this project to let you follow it every step of the way.

Everyone is concerned with the eternal traffic jam on U.S. 1 in Wiscasset, but no one seems to have an answer. Every proposed solution seems to trigger dozens of objections.

You can get lots of world and national news from The New York Times, The Boston Globe, CBS, Fox, MSNBC and the rest of the lot. But they won’t mention Westport Island, Wiscasset, Edgecomb, Boothbay, Southport, Ocean Point and Squirrel Island.

If you want to keep up with these communities you have to read The Boothbay Register and the Wiscasset Newspaper. I know The Lincoln County News does occasionally write stories about our communities, but they seem more concerned with the news in Damariscotta, Bristol and points north and east.

We report the news in our community and offer it every day on our websites www.boothbayregister.com and www.wiscassetnewspaper.com. Each week, we produce one of the best little newspapers in the country, filling it with news and features, notices and photos.

Many of our friends subscribe to the paper and we mail it to them each Wednesday. We also sell advertising space in the paper and on the website to merchants who want our readers to consider their services and products. Advertising is how we finance our news-gathering operations. After all, we are a commercial enterprise.

If this sounds a bit like a commercial, it is. Before you head south, to Boston or Washington, D.C., Hilton Head or Naples, we urge you to stop in at the Register or Wiscasset Newspaper office, sign up for a subscription and drop off a check. The cost is just $35 for a year. 

We mail the paper out each week and we guarantee it will arrive. We will not guarantee when it will arrive. The U.S. Postal Service delivers it and sometimes the mailman is a bit tardy. That is why we have built two new websites to deliver the news from Boothbay and Wiscasset to your home computer, your smartphone or magical tablet device.  

Even though you are a thousand miles away, a few clicks will bring you the latest on St. Andrews Hospital, the Linekin Bay Aquaculture Project and the proposed floating wind farm.  It is also the only place you will also be able to read the latest on proposals to change our community school districts, fix roads, learn the score of the high school game, levy taxes and smile at the latest attempt to fix the eternal Wiscasset traffic jam. 

And by the way, while some of our neighboring papers are charging you to access their websites, we will not, but we will encourage you to patronize our advertisers. 

Have a good winter. See you in the spring.