MONHEGAN ISLAND, Maine - There's ingratitude, and then there's
Bill Payne. While some people might be satisfied to question the
motive of a corporate donation from the comfort of their homes,
the first assessor of Monhegan Plantation has been taking a ferry
10 miles to the mainland, strapping on a sandwich board, and picketing
the credit card company MBNA Corp. for giving money to the island's
two-room library. Payne's stand against MBNA's grant has prompted
head shaking among his neighbors on Monhegan Island, who say they
are happy to have the money, and at MBNA, whose rapid growth as
an employer in midcoast Maine has been accompanied by a shower
of gifts to local schools and libraries. What, they ask, could
be so sinister about rebuilding the bookshelves in the mysteries
section so that ''The Case of Lucy Bending'' could stand upright?
From a wood-heated house on a pristine island that has staved
off mainland influence for years, Payne acknowledged that he may
be tilting at windmills, and even that his support on the island
is small. But his criticism comes as MBNA's power and largesse
are becoming part of the region's fabric - delighting many with
new jobs, and discomforting others who are wary of the outsiders'
influence. Some see a replay of Mainers' ambivalence about the
mills that sustained, and then bankrupted, a long line of company
towns.
Payne, 52, sees himself as the gadfly of the moment, ''bearing
witness'' to subtle changes that are reaching even to Monhegan,
whose year-round population is about 70. ''Do you know the story
of the frog and the boiling water? If you drop a frog into a pot
of boiling water, he'll jump right out. But if you drop him into
a pot of warm water, and turn it up slowly, the frog will not
notice he's in danger,'' he said. ''The MBNA money is not a lot
of money, but it's a turning up of the heat. These things need
to be thought about.''
Skepticism over outsiders' gifts is nothing new here. The drive
for self-determination is a fierce impulse everywhere in Maine,
and especially among the fishing enclaves in the Gulf of Maine.
In Port Clyde, the port where the ferry to Monhegan Island originates,
residents repeatedly turned down federal grant money earmarked
for a new public boat landing in the 1970s, fearing the grant
would threaten their self-determination, said Jimmy Barstow, owner
of the Monhegan Boat Line.
And Susan Lessard, the town manager of Vinalhaven, another Gulf
of Maine island, recalled a recent town vote that prohibited town
officials from accepting state or federal grant money for improvements
to an airstrip without approval from the residents. ''Imagine
a community where 80 percent of the population is self-employed.
People who don't work for other people, it's like trying to push
a rope,'' she said. ''Telling them to do something is just a totally
unsuccessful way to operate.''
In the case of the library grants, that impulse has collided with
one of the state's fastest-growing corporations. MBNA made its
first two dozen hires for a call center in Camden in 1993 and
has mushroomed in Belfast and Orono, replacing lost manufacturing
jobs with a raft of call-center jobs in telephone marketing and
customer service. By the end of this year, MBNA will have 5,000
employees in the state, making it one of the state's largest private
employers. Keeping pace with the expansion has been a blitz of
charitable giving so huge that Alexandra Fogel, director of the
Maine Philanthropy Center, said she ''can't keep up'' with how
much MBNA gives away in grants, even though the company is represented
on her board. Now, she said, MBNA is by far the largest corporate
donor in the state.
MBNA's approach, from the beginning, has been to donate most liberally
to the communities where its workers are concentrated. The company
has given away $1 million apiece to public libraries in Camden,
Belfast, and Rockland, and within the $18.5 million, four-year
commitment of the MBNA Excellence in Education Initiative, $10
million is set aside for students from Knox and Waldo counties
and the Gulf of Maine islands to attend Maine colleges. Camden
Hills Regional High School in Rockport received $1.5 million,
and Lincolnville received $1 million toward renovating its elementary
school, according to news reports. MBNA has also given to local
nonprofit organizations, helping fund the Farnsworth Museum's
new Wyeth Center and the Island Institute, whose aim is to sustain
island communities.
Responses have been overwhelmingly positive, said an MBNA spokesman. In Maine, or at MBNA's other bases in Ohio and Delaware, Payne's protest ''is the only time that I can remember encountering anyone who didn't think it was a good idea to help the quality of education,'' said David Spartin, an MBNA vice chairman.
Last year, links with the Island Institute inspired the grant
program. MBNA cofounder and president Charles Cawley visited two
libraries and, moved by their needs, allotted $500,000, to be
spent on small projects on the 14 islands with year-round populations,
said Philip Conkling, the institute's president. ''You'd just
have to see the Frenchboro Library, which is such a wonderfully
heartwarming, bootstrap-type of operation - it's a 20-foot room
with a lot of donated books that are frankly too old,'' said Conkling.
''So he was struck, and said, `Well, gee, even a $1,000 grant
to add to their book collection would be a real revolution.'''
''I think it's pure altruism,'' Conkling said. ''Let me be not
completely naive. These are small communities that are cherished
things in the state of Maine, so identifying themselves with that
is, I'm sure, good business.''
In December, the grants were expanded to include 22 libraries
in Knox and Waldo counties, a move that has been met with gratitude
from librarians who could share in the windfall, and envy from
those who are shut out. Carolyn Wiley, town librarian inWarren,
population 3,500, said the MBNA grants will ''put hands and feet
to our dreams,'' funding purchases of young-adult books.
On Chebeague Island, said library board member Donna Damon,
fund-raisers would have had to sell 48,000 cookies to match the
$12,000 donation from MBNA. Several librarians, though, said there
has been hesitation about the grants, based on a general wariness
of the communities' increasing dependence on the credit card company.
''No matter how good they are at giving it away, they're also
taking it from someone,'' said Nancy Brown, who is on the board
of Appleton's public library. ''But we decided we might as well
take part because, well, there it was, and we ought to take advantage
of it. But we're not happy about that.''
The single public skeptic is Payne, who moved to Monhegan Island in 1968 to teach the island's six students - and to receive a draft deferment for Vietnam. Payne is the son of an airline executive, the product of an Arizona high school and Princeton University's philosophy department, but, like a wave of young people in those years, he was drawn to the simpler life Monhegan offered. At one point, disgusted by his background, he cast his diploma into the sea.
Over the years, Payne made a decision not to be ''intimidated
by island politics'' and pursued a range of controversial agendas.
For example, he opposes accepting a state grant earmarked for
low-income communities that would bring centralized electricity
to the island, on the grounds that Monhegan is not a low-income
community. He went public with his anger over the MBNA grant at
the end of February, when he marched outside the Island Institute's
Rockland offices with a placard that read, ''Island Institute
undermines Maine island communities.'' In local papers, he pulled
no punches, accusing the library board of accepting money that
would leave the island beholden to MBNA: ''By taking MBNA money,
Monhegan Library is serving notice that humanity's oldest profession
is alive, well, and thriving on the Maine islands.''
The accusation has stung members of the library board, who saw
MBNA's grant as ''saying to all these little towns, `Hey, you've
won the lottery, now you decide what to do with it,''' said one
board member, Alice Boynton. The two-room library, built in memory
of two 16-year-olds who were swept into the sea in 1926, has received
$2,200 for an inventory of the card catalogue. Other projects
include adding interactive television coursework through the University
of Maine. The grants are earmarked for small projects.
''I can't believe he is attacking us,'' said Mary Beth Dolan,
the librarian on Monhegan for 10 years. ''What's been happening
is, we ignore him. We say, he's just Billy.''
Conkling, of the Island Institute, said the impulse to turn down
the money comes from ''a mythical view of islands'' as wholly
self-sufficient, a view that has been off the mark since trade
routes moved onto the mainland and the islands became remote outposts.
He also thinks most people won't be convinced. ''It harkens back
to the wonderful comment John D. Rockefeller made when he was
asked, `Doesn't your money taint these organizations?' and he
said, `The only taint in the money is when it `taint' enough.'
I believe in that kind of pragmatism,'' Conkling said.
Nevertheless, Payne is planning to return to the mainland with
the message that money is never a free gift. And the targets of
his criticism are learning to expect him. ''Someone said to me,
`There goes real Maine,''' said Fogel, of the Maine Center for
Philanthropy. ''Sometimes, New Englanders feel that people have
to take care of themselves and bring themselves up by their bootstraps.
That's a kind of New England - and I hope dying - independence.''