Two incumbents, two newcomers seek election to council

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ELLSWORTH — Two incumbents are being challenged by two other Ellsworth residents for seats on the City Council. Voters will make their preferences known on March 4, when a city election will be held.

Stephen K. Beathem believes his reputation for being fair-minded and accessible will serve him well in his efforts to seek a third term on the Ellsworth City Council.

The incumbent designated Ellsworth’s future handling of its solid waste as the city’s most significant problem, adding that reduction of waste through recycling should be a primary goal for local residents.

“I think we have very few options as far as solid waste is concerned,” Beathem said. “I think that as time goes on those options are going to become even more limited. The choice of whether or not to have a landfill are becoming limited because the costs of having a secure landfill are so astronomical that there aren’t many communities that can afford to have a secure landfill. Those costs would be at the multimillion level and that’s just not feasible for the city of Ellsworth.”

Beathem said Ellsworth residents want an efficient government with limited bureaucracy, but not so streamlined that it can’t prepare for the future. He characterized that targeted balance as a “very fine line to walk” for council members who are working for government that is responsible but not burdensome to taxpayers.

The Stoney Ridge Road resident is the City Council’s representative on the Ellsworth Recreation Commission — a volunteer board that recently resigned en masse with the exception of Beathem. He views advisory boards as panels that usually end up delaying council decisions.

“You can have a lot of advisory groups to advise the council, but I think that’s just putting off the decision-making process onto somebody else,” he said. “I think the council is elected to make those policy decisions for the city of Ellsworth. I don’t want to be involved in the day-to-day running of the city. We have a city manager who is hired to do that. We have to set the policy to guide the manager in the running of the city.”

Beathem perceived the issue of YMCA funding as a broad recreation question rather than the narrower focus of support for the YMCA.

“I think the important question is what kind of recreational programming is the city going to get for $35,000 and is it realistic?” he asked. “If the YMCA chooses not to run the programs, are we prepared to step in and start our own?”

Although the city councilor did not characterize the Ellsworth City Library administration as fiscally irresponsible, he did say that a decreased funding appropriation for the library might have the positive effect of making the board more “fiscally responsible” and prompt the trustees to develop some supplemental funding plans.

“It’s a tough time. Money is tight and we’re in a recession,” he said. “The citizens voted for the new building. But if we delay the amount of money needed to stock it with books for a year or two the building isn’t going to disappear, still going to be there.”

Emphasizing that he enjoys receiving comments about the City Council’s work from city employees and Ellsworth residents, Beathem said he has concluded after six years that a councilor can accomplish more by listening than talking.

“If somebody wants to talk, it’s my job to listen,” he said. “I think that’s one of the things I offer as a councilor: I am willing to listen. I don’t think anybody can make decisions unless they are willing to listen to all the information. But we have a very large silent majority and sometimes it’s hard to get them to say anything.”

A resident of Ellsworth for 40 years, Roger W. Dow has volunteered a good portion of his life to city boards and panels. When Sarah Smith resigned her seat on the council last year, Dow was elected to fill the balance of her term.

The well-known accountant and Pleasant Street resident believes his campaign for reelection the Ellsworth City Council has coincided with a critical juncture in the city’s development. Dow is adamant in his demand for responsible city spending.

“We had a nine percent tax increase three years ago, 23 percent the second year and 42 percent last year,” he said. “It seems to me that on a 42 percent increase we ought to be able to level the taxes off. I’m not saying that we’re not going to get a tax increase this year. There’s no way that I’m going to sit on the City Council and keep taxes at a zero basis and make the city go backward. I think the city must go forward, but we can’t have these big jumps, we’ve got to level these things off.”

If reelected, Dow will push for more council workshops aimed at developing long-range strategies to deal with city and road maintenance, solid waste disposal,the city library, the city recreation appropriation and the water district.

“I don’t think anything has ever been planned in this city and this is one of the problems,” he said. “I think that in most cases, even some of the smaller towns plan four or five years ahead. But the city of Ellsworth, as far as I know, has never done this. I’ve only been on the council six months and these are some of the areas that I think we need to get into and take them step-by-step.”

After serving on the Ellsworth School Committee for 15 years and the Ellsworth School District trustees for another 15 years, Dow said his government and accounting background have provided him with a good basis to serve on the City Council.

“That’s where I think I have an advantage over some others on the council,” he said. “I’ve been 40 years working with municipalities and cities doing audits. So I know how the system works.”

Dow chose to seek reelection after it became clear to him that former Ellsworth City Manager Herbert Gilsdorf and previous councils failed to explore problems facing the city in any great depth or review.

“One of the things that really upset me was the water company,” he said. “They went clear out on the Bucksport Road and invested $5 million into a water system that has 1,200 users. The remainder of Ellsworth residents pay for that system through their real estate taxes. Our real estate tax base in Ellsworth cannot do the things that we want to do in this small city.”

Facing potential increases in appropriations for the water company, the Ellsworth City Library, the Down East YMCA, waste disposal, recycling and sewer system, Dow would like the city to work hard to find alternative sources of revenue.

He is unswerving in his belief that developers attracted to Ellsworth should assist in funding those increasing city expenses.

“An organization that comes into town for the purpose of constructing a major development should pay their way,” he said. “The taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for that development. They shouldn’t have to pay to put in their sewer lines or their water lines. They shouldn’t be using our fire department or our highway department without paying for it. I’m really against those kind of municipally-funded incentives for growth. I think developers should be paying a significant fee to come in here and initiate those kind of projects.”

Lawrence F. King, one of Ellsworth’s most active volunteers, has chosen to seek a seat on the Ellsworth City Council to help plan for the city’s future.

“I’m concerned because I feel that if we’re not careful and if we fail to learn from the mistakes made in North Conway (New Hampshire) and other similar communities, we’re going to run into a similar situation,” he said. “We will have failed to control the growth of Ellsworth and it’s going to impact us beyond what we can even imagine.”

King was born in Bar Harbor and graduated from Bar Harbor High School in 1965. A graduate of Southern Maine Technical College in Portland, he moved to Nashua, N.H., in the employ of Ingersoll-Rand before returning to Ellsworth in 1973.

A co-owner of Associated Builders Inc. and co-owner and president of the LANA Corp., a land development company, King is a past member of the Zoning Board of Appeals and is serving as vice chairman of the Ellsworth Planning Board. A member of the Ellsworth Historic Preservation Commission and its current chairman, he also is chairman of the Ellsworth Comprehensive Planning Committee and a member of the Ellsworth Rotary Club.

King serves on the board of directors for the Playground Committee and is treasurer of the executive board of directors of the Grand Auditorium and chairman of its building committee.

The builder and developer didn’t mince words when characterizing the prevailing vision of some local officials. He was unhappy with the council’s decision to eliminate the city planner position from its budget. King said past city councils and many residents failed to appreciate the need for planning ahead. He said he wasn’t surprised that some members of the council had complained about not knowing what’s going on in the city.

“They don’t know what’s going on because they’re not involving themselves, and that’s the only issue,” he said. “Some councilors think there’s a need for a part-time city planner, but I think it’s ironic that we eliminated a city planner’s job that carried an annual expense to the city of around $27,000 only to hire the Hancock County Planning Commission at a cost of $42,000 to put our comprehensive plan together within weeks of the planner’s departure. That’s not what I’d call a cost-saving measure at all.”

King believes that maintenance and reconstruction of Ellsworth’s highways and streets are going to continue to pose problems for the city. He urged the development of a plan to address the situation while adding that the planning board had accomplished a great deal in developing street design standards that will assist the city in the future.

“These standards will set the tone for new street construction which should eliminate a lot of what has happened in the past — the rebuilding of streets within two or three years after accepting them,” King said. “I know Phil Shea (a sitting member of the council) has stated that we should get a concerned group of citizens together to start a panel to try and analyze the present conditions of the streets and prioritize them. I think this could probably be done in-house with Myron Grant, the head of the Department of Public Works. But I thought it was ironic, because we had several people who were willing to serve on the committee and nothing ever happened — the committee was never formed. It would be interesting to see what streets they would have prioritized.”

A former school superintendent and outgoing president of the Ellsworth School Board is not without an opinion on the state of local government.

Dale D. Higgins is seeking a three-year term on the Ellsworth City Council because he believes that he can make a positive difference on the seven-member panel. Higgins says the Ellsworth City Council has been undergoing a period of transition for the last decade in which it is alternately conservative or liberal.

Different councils, he said, frequently would vest a great deal of authority in the city manager or — if desired — as little influence as possible.

He pointed to the so-called “Gilsdorf era,” a reference to Ellsworth’s most recently departed city manager, as a prime example of too much reliance on the manager by the council.

“Spending in the city and even today was literally controlled by the city manager and one council member,” he said. “I think those kinds of things have to change. But it was an understandable reaction to what had happened 10 years earlier.”

Higgins favors greater long-range planning by the city administrators.

“For some period of time we have been caught up in crisis management,” he said. “When you act with the crisis in your face, your action is not necessarily rational.”

Higgins said he would work toward opening up the City Council meetings. He said that the public now is allowed to address the council only from within the context of a tightly controlled agenda. Acknowledging that loosely structured meetings can run far into the night, Higgins said that open forum sessions would serve a greater public service to taxpayers.

“The public must have much more access to council deliberations,” he said. “The public is essentially stifled at council meetings. Town meeting government does present the purest form of democracy. It is cumbersome, even archaic, but everyone gets their licks in. It makes officials very uncomfortable. It can be exhausting, but the process is important. Right now, a member of the public cannot go to a council workshop and ask a question; it is disallowed. I see nothing wrong with having a public discussion period where any member of the public can bring up anything they want. That doesn’t mean the council has to act upon it, but the public must be informed.”

Among the priorities that Higgins would establish as city councilor in the next three years are programs for young people and handling the solid waste dilemma while keeping trying to keep tax increases gradual. He said some city officials trapped themselves into thinking there were going to be all kinds of new value from shopping centers that were never constructed in Ellsworth.

“A year ago at this time, I watched the council adopt a budget with a 42 percent increase and I went to each council member and asked them about it and there wasn’t one of them that knew it,” he said. “They disputed that and said the city manager said it was only 14 percent. They didn’t want talk about it because they had scraped the barrel dry. Now that it’s at the level that it is, we ought to try and live pretty close to it for a while.”

Higgins said he was unhappy that the City Council seems to be bent on interfering with Ellsworth City Library board of trustees’ decisions related to the library’s operation.

“I think it should be handled just like the deliberations between the school committee and the council,” he said. “I’m not, however, convinced that when the public approved the library addition, they were also hoping that the council wouldn’t give them any books to put in it. I think the public kind of expected there would be a book or two in it — in fact, if elected, I want to be on that book committee.”

Asked what personal qualities he would bring to the council, Higgins managed a grin.

“I’m probably a better piano player than any of them,” he said.