BANGOR – City government is not foreign to Navy Capt. Bob McLaughlin.

When he was a child, his father served as Southwest Harbor’s city manager for several years.

Now, years later, McLaughlin’s involvement in city government is, in fact, foreign.

McLaughlin, 50, deployed to Iraq in June with an embedded provincial reconstruction team, where he serves as the governance and public works adviser for the city of Fallujah. He works directly with Iraqis to help rebuild the city’s business sector and promote economic development.

On Tuesday, he attended a council meeting during which the panel discussed improving the quality of life for the residents of Fallujah – initiatives that include improving water and sewer systems, trash removal and the availability of electricity, McLaughlin said in a satellite interview. The council’s drive to improve city infrastructure destroyed by war and violence is encouraging, McLaughlin said, as is the group’s increased focus on rebuilding rather than simply security.

“It has been an interesting change,” McLaughlin said about the council meetings. “They have literally gone from three-hour meetings where 70 percent of the time Americans were doing the talking [about security issues], whereas today they were just discussing quality of life and we spoke for maybe five minutes.”

The Southwest Harbor native graduated from Mount Desert Island High School and received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maine at Orono, where he played on the men’s basketball team. After college he worked at the Bangor Auditorium for two years, during which time he played for the Bangor Lumberjacks when they were a professional team with the Continental Basketball Association, he said.

In 1981 he joined the Navy, and since then the pilot has racked up many commendations, service medals and merit awards. Before he volunteered for this tour of duty to Iraq, he worked out of the Pentagon, and he will return there once his current yearlong deployment is complete.

McLaughlin said he no longer wears heavy body armor while attending the city council meetings, and he often has luncheons with the mayor and chief of police to discuss security and rebuilding. Losing the body armor is a large step in the right direction, he said, especially since the first four council chairmen were assassinated.

In the historically violent city just 43 miles west of Baghdad, even the recent assassination of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto did not seem to have a large effect on the population, McLaughlin said.

“Their country has had a violent past. They haven’t reacted to world events as we might have heard in the U.S.,” he said. “Those kinds of events haven’t affected them quite like you would imagine.”

The city government is not only rebuilding its infrastructure. Fallujah’s mayor was late to Tuesday’s council meeting because he welcomed 60 Shiite families back to the predominantly Sunni city, McLaughlin said.

American troops are working to restore the city’s infrastructure to pre-war levels, while trying to entice international businesspeople to invest in Fallujah. McLaughlin hopes outside investors will help restore electricity to the city by charging user fees rather than the limited free service provided under Saddam Hussein. The oil reserve is another possibility for external development, he said.

“Those normal, economic incentives for growth that we take for granted in the U.S. are taking hold pretty quickly here,” he said. “I found that Iraqis, like others worldwide, have the incentive to work and do well and want the economic prosperity to take back their country.”

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