Voters to weigh police station site Petitioners get enough signatures

BANGOR – Supporters of keeping the police station downtown have met their deadline for gathering the signatures needed to get the issue before voters.

As of late Tuesday, one day before their deadline, supporters had submitted 2,316 valid signatures from registered Bangor voters, City Clerk Gail Campbell confirmed.

The group is the first in Bangor in at least a decade to bring an issue to referendum through the petition process.

“I think it’s great,” state Rep. Patricia Blanchette, D-Bangor, one of the leaders of the effort, said Tuesday. “It’s just remarkable what so many people in Bangor have done. I’m very happy because it restored my faith in the process.”

Suzanne Kelly, a downtown businesswoman who also led the charge, said she never doubted the group would succeed.

“It was too important to let go by,” she said. “It’s not just about moving a building. It’s huge. It’s a really big thing.”

Kelly said the group’s next step would involve more study of the issues surrounding the location of the police station, work she said could have been done had the City Council been willing to delay a final decision.

To bring the issue to a citywide vote, the group needed to gather at least 2,274 signatures, or the equivalent of 20 percent of the votes cast in the last gubernatorial election.

“The group was very well organized, so I’ve got to give them a lot of credit for going out there,” Council Chairman Dan Tremble said Tuesday.

“They obviously had a strong desire” to bring the police station site to a public vote, he said.

He cautioned, however, that the group might have “hamstrung” its effort to keep the station downtown by specifying the location, 240 Main St., which until recently was the designated site despite such problems as limited space for growth and poor soil.

“If the desire is to keep the police station downtown, this isn’t the best option,” he said.

The city is working toward building a new police station because the one on Court Street is too small and in poor shape.

City councilors last fall chose a downtown parcel at 240 Main St. as the site for the new station, but in May decided instead to build the headquarters on a larger parcel on Maine Avenue, near Bangor International Airport.

The petition drive is aimed at preventing the station from being located near BIA.

Tremble said the referendum would delay the city’s progress in replacing its aging station.

Blanchette disagreed: “The city doesn’t even own the property yet. This gives everyone breathing room and everyone will be better off for it.”

The former city councilor said that she hoped “out of all of this that people understand that they do have a voice and that they can be heard.”