Dual roles keep lawmaker busy

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AUGUSTA – Don’t call her Patricia.

And Patty? Forget about it.

For no-nonsense state Rep. Pat Blanchette, D-Bangor, only her mother used her full name “on the way to the woodshed.”

And one fellow lawmaker said he felt her icy glare when using the “cutesy” nickname to introduce her at a committee meeting,

While Blanchette, 58, might be considered a rookie in the airy halls of the State House, the former Bangor mayor and veteran city councilor is no stranger to the ups and downs of life in politics.

“If you come down to Augusta and you’ve got thin skin, you won’t last,” said Blanchette, who likened her own to “alligator hide.”

“Here, you deal with 151 egos, including mine, and some of them are super-sized,” she continued on a recent sunny afternoon on the State House lawn. “You have to have an ego to come here.”

Blanchette, easily elected in November to her first term in the Maine House of Representatives, has become an unlikely institution in Bangor politics, finishing her 12th year on the City Council, while serving her first in Augusta.

Taking a final puff of her cigarette during a break between sessions, the longtime grocery store clerk dismissed her reputation as an outspoken and sometimes brutally frank instigator as extraneous.

But she sure didn’t deny it.

And here in the state’s capital, her new colleagues are just getting used to the frank freshman lawmaker who has already made her presence felt in the Legislature’s Criminal Justice Committee.

“She takes no prisoners, and she’s full speed ahead,” said the committee’s House chairman, Rep. Edward Povich, D-Ellsworth. “I rely upon her and she pushes my buttons when they need to be pushed.

“I say that in a nice way,” Povich added quickly. He had the unfortunate experience of calling Blanchette “Patty” in jest at the session’s outset. “It’s not a done deal. You earn your respect from Pat. It’s not handed out willy-nilly.”

Respect hasn’t come easily for Blanchette, either.

One of 10 children born into a poor farming family in rural Holden, Blanchette didn’t appear the most likely candidate for elective office.

But after five unsuccessful campaigns for the City Council in the early 1980s, the gravelly voiced resident of a low-income neighborhood finally broke into the “good old boys club,” as she still calls it.

“It wasn’t if you wanted to serve or you had the capabilities,” Blanchette said of her fruitless runs for the Bangor council, then made up chiefly of political insiders and high-powered businessmen. “It was who knew who, and who had the most money.

“They weren’t ready for me,” said Blanchette, who before her 1987 election win ran into some stiff opposition while lobbying for improvements to Old Capehart, where she and her husband, Jim, lived at the time. “Thank God that Bangor has grown up and the mentality has changed.”

Ten years after her first foray into politics, Blanchette was selected to serve as the city’s second woman mayor, an honorary title for the City Council chairwoman.

It was a difficult time for the fragile council, weakened by internal bickering, and coping with the unexpected resignation of then-Mayor Marshall Frankel, one of the city’s most charismatic – and controversial – political figures.

“She did a great job keeping us on track during a tough time,” said City Councilor Joe Baldacci, who issued a warning for those who might think Blanchette’s style outweighs her substance.

“She’s colorful, but she has an enviable command of the issues,” said Baldacci, who’s known Blanchette for 20 years. “She’s just not one who goes in for niceties.”

Also not one for irrelevant speeches at public meetings, Blanchette at a recent televised City Council meeting held up a hastily made sign reading “The Gerry Palmer Show,” when she decided that her fellow city councilor was taking too long to deliver his closing remarks.

“Pat is Pat,” said Palmer with a laugh. Palmer was appointed Penobscot County treasurer upon Blanchette’s resignation from the post last year. “There’s nothing that Pat does that surprises me.”

Even radio shock jock Don Imus had all he could handle with the then-mayor who called the visiting celebrity “rude, crude and offensive,” and opposed putting a “Welcome, Imus” T-shirt on the city’s Paul Bunyan statue in honor of Imus’ 1997 visit for fear it would inflate his “already oversized ego.”

Imus was quick in his response – especially to Blanchette’s suggestion that he didn’t contribute enough to charity – calling the outspoken mayor “a big, fat, ugly, hairy moose,” “a frigid hag” and “an ignorant nitwit.”

Blanchette laughs about her verbal sparring with Imus now – but doesn’t regret a word – and hasn’t toned down the rhetoric since her arrival in Augusta.

In terms of pushing a legislative agenda, however, Blanchette has lain low in her first months in the State House, opting to co-sponsor just a few domestic violence initiatives while she tests the political waters.

“Would you give me the pleasure of getting my feet wet before I jump into the pond?” Blanchette said when asked of her decision to hold off on introducing legislation. “I’m probably up to my hips by now.”

Doing business in Bangor and Augusta are two different animals, said Blanchette, who doesn’t plan to return to the City Council when her term expires in November.

“It’s more hoops and more compromise,” said the self-described moderate of state politics, noting that her humble upbringing had helped prepare her well. “In a house with 10 brothers and sisters, you learn compromise.”

Her municipal background, too, has proven useful in Augusta, said Blanchette, whose loathing of unfunded or redundant state mandates is well documented in minutes of past City Council meetings.

During a recent floor debate on adding penalties to gasoline theft, Blanchette stood in silence waiting for her turn to address the House.

When reminded from the rostrum by House Speaker Michael Saxl, D-Portland, that she should call out if she wanted to speak, Blanchette proceeded to dismiss the new penalties as unnecessary and easily addressed at the local level.

“I’ll have to get used to that,” she said of the reminder from Saxl, whom she has known since he was a high school hockey player in Bangor. “It’s just that interrupting somebody is so rude.”

Despite all the procedural changes, Blanchette said she’s not likely any time soon to change the style that has served her well for more than a decade.

“If there’s something I’m not happy about, somebody’s going to hear about it,” she said. “That’s me.”