Bar Harbor poised to call town meeting on Iraq

BAR HARBOR – The Town Council will be asked next week to authorize a special town meeting so residents can debate and vote on a resolution condemning a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, officials confirmed Tuesday.

A spokesman for the Maine Municipal Association said he’s unaware of any Maine community calling a special town meeting about a potential war with Iraq, although many towns are likely to take up the issue during regular town meetings in March.

“Clearly [a resolution] doesn’t have the force of law, but it gets across the sentiment of the town,” MMA spokesman Michael Starn said Tuesday.

Peace activists plan to make a presentation to the Bangor City Council’s Governmental Affairs Committee at 5 p.m. today.

The group hopes to convince the committee to recommend that the council pass a resolution calling for continued diplomacy and inspections rather than war in Iraq.

Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for MDI United for Peace, the anti-war group that has failed twice to get the Bar Harbor Town Council to act on its resolution, praised town officials for helping to keep the issue alive.

“I don’t think a member of our group would have gone that far or had the means to get that information” on how to call a special town meeting, said Amanda Kendall, one of the group’s leaders.

Bar Harbor’s annual town meeting will not be held until early May, which would be too late for the community to weigh in on a possible war, the protesters said, because the Bush administration doesn’t want to fight a war in the desert heat of the Middle East. That means if the United States and its allies eventually decide to strike Iraq, they would do it in the coming weeks – not months.

Under a little-used procedure in the town charter, town officials think they can call a special town meeting in the next several weeks, as long as secret balloting would not be required.

As envisioned by the protesters and town leaders, the resolution would be debated on the floor of the town meeting without specially printed ballots.

“The council has the discretion of waiting for the next [town] meeting or calling it sooner, provided they operate within the boundaries of state law and the town charter,” Town Clerk Patricia Gray said.

The Town Council declined to vote on the group’s resolution in meetings Jan. 21 and Feb. 4, in part because they were unsure that the war protesters were truly representative of the community. Several councilors said the people they’ve heard from in town are divided on whether to support a resolution. A special town meeting could answer the question.

Although past Bar Harbor councils have passed resolutions on national or international issues, the current council balked at the opportunity, arguing that the issue was not a local one.

Only a handful of peace group members attended the first meeting on the resolution, when the council did not allow public comment. An estimated 130 Bar Harbor residents showed up for the second meeting and were allowed to speak, although the council vote was the same in the end.

“It would be my guess” that the council will authorize the special meeting, council Chairman Kenneth Smith said Tuesday.