BENEDICTA – After hearing mostly positive responses from the community on Thursday evening, Aroostook County commissioners will decide in October whether to contract Benedicta’s election services to the nearby town of Sherman.

County Administrator Doug Beaulieu said Friday that about seven people showed up at the meeting to express their opinion on the matter, and were mostly in favor of the move.

“No one really voiced any opposition to it,” he noted. “I think that the predominant theme was that people understood.”

Approximately 160 voters live in the unorganized territory, and use the Benedicta Elementary School as a polling station. The town of Sherman is roughly 10 miles away.

Beaulieu said that issues emerged after the Secretary of State imposed a slate of new election requirements, which the administrator said makes it more difficult to maintain election services in remote areas such as Benedicta.

“Our unorganized territories are not set up like we are in our towns and cities,” he explained. “In most cases, there are no town offices and they use a school or other venue as a polling site … With the new state requirements, we really need to have a central voting center where we can put a computer to use as a voter database, and be assured that we have the manpower to maintain it and perform election services. The site also has to be ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] compliant.”

All of these conditions, he said Friday, “lend themselves well for Benedicta to contract with a municipality such as Sherman, which is better equipped to deal with the requirements.”

If the switch occurs, Benedicta would not be the only Aroostook County town to have such an arrangement. The County also contracts with St. Agatha for Cross Lake and Sinclair services, and voters in Madawaska Lake head to Stockholm to vote in elections.

The next step, according to the administrator, will be for the commissioners to take into account what they heard on Thursday evening.

“We are going to digest this and look at it some more,” he said Friday. “We will have our commissioners meeting in Houlton on October 5, and I will make a final recommendation at that time.”