If you can’t handle town business at the dump, where can you do it?

That’s not just a question for the town manager of Clinton, who got an earful from residents at a meeting Tuesday after banning petition gatherers from collecting signatures at the transfer station. It’s for everyone who laments the loosening of community ties, and who thinks their town is better when its residents have plenty of opportunities to see each other in person.

Transfer stations fall into a category sociologists have labeled “third places” — they are not your home, and they are not your workplace. They are somewhere in between, where people can meet on neutral ground to socialize, discuss, gossip — even mobilize politically. They put everyone on equal footing, closing gaps around income, neighborhood and background.

Third places are in flux. Participation in church and fraternal and service organizations is generally on the wane. You can see other places rising to fill the void: community centers, gyms, even McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts. In many Maine towns, transfer stations are an important third place.

But more and more, the internet is becoming people’s third place. There are certainly benefits to being able to connect online, but there are more than a few dangers — not the least of which is the loss of a physical contact with the community immediately around us.

The effect of that is hard to overstate. When our towns become solely places where our houses are, and not where we really live in the full sense of the world, we lose something very special — a sense of community, and a real stake in its future.

There are certainly questions in this story unique to Clinton. Town Manager Earla Haggerty said the town is no longer allowing people to do anything but dump trash at the transfer station because it is dangerous. That seems overblown.

And it doesn’t help that Haggerty and selectmen may have not followed procedure in changing the rules, or that the petition in question came from residents unhappy with the performance of the town manager and selectmen. That raises questions about why the transfer station policy was changed now.

But all town officials should take a look around, and see if their communities have enough third places.

 

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