Bass Park

Monday night’s caustic Bangor City Council meeting — the bitter words and the shameless grandstanding — can lead the public to only one reasonable conclusion: Demons inhabit Bass Park. They will not allow the city to let go of the place.

On March 7, when the Council voted 5-4 to negotiate a lease arrangement with Bass Park Associates, it appeared that nearly five years of intense wrangling over who should manage the park had ended.

In fact, for most of the decade of the 1980s the Council, the corporation that once oversaw the park, the park director and the public furiously chased each other in a tightening circle. Accusing fingers wagged incessantly. There was a constant undercurrent of mumbling about corruption at the fiefdom-complex. Respected people babbled nonsense at corporation meetings. Any political entity that touched the facility had to have its tainted fingers pried off.

There was a clear consensus in the community that the city would do itself and the park a tremendous favor if it could find a private operator who would lease the civic center, raceway and fairgrounds, run it professionally without political entanglement, and cooperate in making an investment to rejuvenate its deteriorating physical condition.

The Council took a step in that direction on March 7, when it agreed to have a city negotiating team talk real numbers with Bass Park Associates. No commitment. Just discussions. The problem, however, is that the Council chose what a variety of special interest groups in the city, for different reasons, considered the wrong private party.

Every organization has its political baggage, and Bass Park Associates is lugging the fact that its three main players — Thaxter Trafton, Larry Mahaney and Charles Day are very well known. They are people who are experienced, competent and qualified to run the complex if they can negotiate an acceptable financial package with the city. But for many Bangor residents, familiarity with one or more of the individuals heading up BPA has bred contempt for the entire organization.

Local opponents circulated a petition to bring the March 7 decision to referendum. The catch in the petition is that it pulls the plug on BPA and instructs the Council to negotiate with either United Leisure Services Inc. (the choice of the city administration), or the City Staff. The staff has been running the facility, but it is not a private operator, which is what the city was after when it got into this mess in the first place. This fact is irrelevant to the petitioners, who also have come under the park’s spell.

Their effort to demand a public vote to rescind the Council order has spawned more confusion. The Council, accurately anticipating that in such a hostile atmosphere 500 signatures could be obtained easily, voted Monday night to put the matter out to referendum in June. The catch, and there’s always a catch with Bass Park, is that the vote would be non-binding. The petitioners are howling that they have been disenfranchised. Lawyers are being called in to decipher the city’s intentions and obligations. The final decision as to whether Bangor and Bass Park will remain a banana republic or become a mini-Switzerland, where most matters of importance are resolved in referendum, may be left to the courts.

Meanwhile, dangling out there tantalizingly, is the solution: Let the city negotiating committee, which is dominated by people who do not favor BPA, carry out their discussions with BPA in the full light of public scrutiny. When the negotiating is over, even if the committee has a package with which it is comfortable, the Council still will get another crack at it. The city staff will be running the complex this summer anyway. Everyone wins, at least for the time being.

But, lest we forget, the issue is Bass Park, and it isn’t supposed to make sense.