Maintenance database SQL_ASCII

After a new pgsql installation the "postgres" maintenance database has
an encoding of SQL_ASCII. pgAdmin III gave me a warning about that, and
I may want to create users or databases that are not restricted 7bit ASCII.

I was going to backup and recreate this table, but it can't be dropped.
I guess I could backup all of the other databases and start over from
"initdb", but that would be a hassle. Do I have any other options? The
strange thing is that I have two very similarly configured Ubuntu
machines and the other created the "postgres" database with UTF8 encoding.

The locale on both machines is the same:

$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

-Brad