LaMarche set for marathon Ferris ride

BANGOR – Pat LaMarche, former radio personality and Green Party politico and current Bangor Daily News columnist, will spend almost four consecutive days on a Ferris wheel during the Bangor State Fair as a fundraiser for the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter.

LaMarche knows something about homelessness. The author of “Left Out In America: The State of Homelessness in the United States,” she gathered material for her book while spending 14 nights in different homeless shelters during her 2004 campaign as the national Green Party’s nominee for vice president.

She also knows something about long Ferris wheel rides.

In 1996, while serving as executive director of the eastern Maine branch of the Children’s Miracle Network, she stepped in for then Z107.3 disc jockey Bob Twillinger. Twillinger, who was a radio colleague, had planned to try to set a world record for the most time spent on a Ferris wheel as part of a CMN fundraiser.

He was diagnosed with testicular cancer a few months before the fair, however, and was undergoing chemotherapy during that year’s fair. So LaMarche filled in and raised $14,000 for CMN during her 107.3-hour-long Ferris wheel ride.

This time around – and around and around – her cause is the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter.

“This was Pat’s idea,” Dennis Marble, the shelter’s director, said Wednesday.

In conjunction with Kiss 94.5 FM, which will do live reports and updates during the event, LaMarche will begin a 94.5-hour long ride, that will begin when she climbs aboard at 10 a.m. Monday, July 30, and ends early Friday morning. The fair starts Friday, July 27.

The shelter, located in a 140-year-old brick building on Main Street, has been designated the Maine beneficiary of a United Parcel Service challenge and fundraiser for the United Way of New England.

The shelter will compete against four nonprofit organizations from other New England states to see which can raise the most money with their own fundraising events. UPS has guaranteed to give the winner enough money above what it raised to reach a total of $25,000. For instance, if the winning charity raises $15,000, UPS will kick in another $10,000 to come up with the $25,000 total, Marble said.

The remaining four organization will get to keep what they’ve raised, “so there are really no losers,” Marble said.

Asked what the shelter could do with $25,000, Marble paused and said, “Oh, Lord. We’ve got all kinds of choices.”

Among the facility’s pressing needs, he said, are repairs to two bathrooms and the construction of a new one and exterior work, including repointing the bricks. He estimated the work that needed to be done will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Because of shifts in state and federal policy, facilities that house the homeless now receive less than 30 percent of their actual costs for providing services, Marble said.

“Every year, we keep trying to break even, but operating costs are really squeezing us,” he said.

“Our annual operating budget last year was $480,000, but we ended up with a loss of $11,000. We had been projected to lose more than $21,000, but citizens really stepped up because our demand is up,” Marble said.

LaMarche said donations of all amounts are needed. Those who give checks or money orders should make them out to United Way of New England-UPS and write Bangor Area Homeless Shelter in the memo line.