Bangor Term Limits

In addition to statewide questions on the ballot Tuesday, Bangor voters will be asked two others: whether to extend the number of consecutive terms from two to three that a city councilor may serve and whether to impose similar limits on the Bangor school board. The notable oddity of a city trying to reduce the impact of term limits on one municipal board while imposing them on another should give voters a sense of the problem before them. They should vote Yes on Question 1 to extend the limits on the city council only because they do not have the option of removing the limits entirely, and No on Question 2, which would limit the terms of school board members.

There is no or virtually no money, little prestige and no obvious perks to these political offices. People run for them because they want to serve their city, feel they can do it better than those currently in office, want the power to make direct changes in the way a municipality is run or hope to use it to run for other office. Term limits change none of these except to ensure that the council or, potentially, the school committee has less cumulative experience than a similar board without term limits.

For evidence of the influence of term limits, the Maine Legislature is an excellent example: Lawmakers rise to and out of leadership positions too quickly to gain real skills at directing the unruly, headstrong members of the House and Senate; too many new lawmakers don’t understand the legislative process and spend too much time on procedure; defeated ideas come up again and again as those new lawmakers lack the history of the bills. Experienced lawmakers complain regularly about how much time is wasted by an idea that was supposed to bring new life to lawmaking. Some of those same problems attend municipal boards, which is one reason for extending the number of terms allowed to be served.

For voters to support limits for the school committee, they would need more than the fact that term limits are a popular reaction to politics. They would need evidence that limits can be beneficial – data from school committees elsewhere that changing from unlimited to limited terms has brought better governance on the committee and increased learning among students within that district. It would have to see that students are better served when committee members are restricted in their years of service.

Absent that evidence, all voters have is guesses that moving the one or two long-serving people off the committee would strengthen it. It would be a risky hunch because the committee already has a history of blending both the experience of longtime members and the new ideas of those who spend one or two terms on the board. And it may seem that the couple of experienced board members are taking seats that other citizens are eager to sit in, but the low number of candidates for the board – there are three candidates for two seats this year – suggests otherwise.

Term limits are a knee-jerk fix to a specific problem at a specific time, but become a permanent burden afterward. Bangor would be better off without them.