Long, long ago, Maine had a thriving industrial base, even in its most remote communities — especially in its most remote communities. Every town grew independently, and every town seized something now almost sacred in Maine governance.

Local contol.

Local control was easy when towns had pots of money coming into the coffers. Local control meant towns could not only make the rules, but could easily finance what they decided to do at town meetings, because the shoe factory or the paper mill or the cannery or the nuclear reactor or the shipyard was meeting most of the town’s fiscal needs.

They got great schools, and community centers, and parks, and people had great jobs with great pensions and benefit packages, and everyone was willing to put their oars in the water to help drive the little ship of state forward to an even better future. Seniors were willing to help fund schools, since someone had funded their educations; young people were working to support pensioners since they expected others to help them in their retirement.

Nobody wanted to tax the nonprofits, who were, of course, providing public benefits to the people, including arts and enrichment, schools, health care, support for the poor, and places for people to go and congregate and have a dance or a bean supper once a month.

Public servants didn’t complain, because they were providing everything the people wanted and demanded — street lights, water, paved roads, buses or streetcars, a strong library, a fire department, a police department, a good school, regular trash pickup, nice parks and playgrounds.

Times were good, until they weren’t, and then the chorus of complaints began.

The townspeople began to turn on one another, instead of uniting in common shared interest. Seniors suddenly objected to paying for schools. Younger people began to think about privatizing Social Security. No one could approve of proposed town improvements. Even the state of the roads is something that people don’t want to pay for.

The reason, of course, is that the big employers have either gone to China or have downsized or have been shut down for safety and environmental reasons, and now the townspeople are paying for everything themselves in their property taxes, with a tiny sliver of funding coming from other taxes collected by the state, called revenue sharing. And now the governor wants to take back even that little sliver of funding.

But the one thing the complainers and everyone else still don’t want to give up is local control. West Bath and Wiscasset pulled out of their school districts this year. Towns still want their own fire departments, even if they can’t get the volunteer bodies to run them. They want their own bike and pedestrian committees, even when most of the work they do is regional. They want their own shellfish commissions, even when shellfisheries are in decline for the entire Gulf of Maine.

County government, something Maine has not ever warmed up to, can do much of the work of the towns more cheaply — the infrastructure already exists, after all — than each independent town can do. County government is Maine’s oldest form of government, predating statehood. Its officials are directly elected by the people.

Why not give the counties a chance to see what they can do? We don’t know what they can do because we’ve never given them a chance. And the only reason we haven’t is because of our attachment to the sacred Local Control. But without adequate funding, local control is an albatross, not a blessing.