Bangor to reconsider consolidation of polls

BANGOR – Faced with an estimated $12,000 cost to make the city’s voting sites handicapped accessible, city officials agreed Wednesday that it might be worth revisiting a plan to consolidate the polling places.

City Manager Edward Barrett said, however, that the issue warranted input from the full City Council.

With only five of Bangor’s nine councilors on hand Wednesday, Barrett said he hoped to schedule a brief workshop before Monday night’s council meeting, which begins at 7:30 p.m.

Barrett said that if the council does have an interest in taking another look at consolidating polling places, it also might be prudent to pull together the 15 residents who sounded off on the issue during a public hearing in late February. That group, almost evenly split on the issue, could serve as a focus group.

The consolidation concept, first introduced earlier this year by City Clerk Patti Dubois, resurfaced during a meeting of the City Council’s finance committee.

An inspection last year of polling places by the Secretary of State’s Office turned up dozens of violations of the Americans with Disability Act in several of Bangor’s voting places, most of which are located in city public schools.

While the buildings housing the polling sites themselves are accessible, Dubois said Wednesday, the areas in which voting takes place are not, in some locations.

Dubois said that the deficiencies would cost about $12,000 to address, if the work was done by city public works employees.

But she also said the state had not imposed a deadline for doing so.

Given the cost, Dubois said, she was seeking some direction from elected officials to see if they wanted to continue with the current configuration of nine voting places, or if they were interested in “paring that number down and, if so, the process you’d like me to use.”

Bangor now has four voting wards, each split into two precincts, and a central polling site at City Hall. Setting up and breaking down booths and tables and handling other Election Day needs at nine different locations has been a logistical challenge, Dubois said earlier.

In an effort to minimize fuss, she proposed consolidating all voting at one site, the Bangor Civic Center.

Concerned that the consolidation plan was too extreme, however, councilors killed it in a 6-3 vote.

Dubois said the council could consider downsizing to four sites, or one in each of Bangor’s four House districts, or to two, one on the east side and one on the west side.