BANGOR – Longtime political activist Arvilla Verceles was remembered Thursday as a fiery and opinionated woman and a champion for residents with handicaps who wasn’t afraid to take on city hall when it came to issues she cared about.

Verceles, 85, died Wednesday of natural causes in her sleep at her Jackson Street home.

Over the decades, Verceles became a fixture in the local political landscape. As recently as Monday night, she went to City Hall to testify during a public hearing about a plan to consolidate voting at the Bangor Civic Center.

“That’s pretty good – I just hope that when I’m that age I’m as active and interested as Arvilla was,” Harrison Clark, a Bangor resident involved in Republican politics at the city and county levels, said Thursday.

“Arvilla truly cared about issues in this city and in the state and was not afraid to work hard to get what she wanted,” said Bangor resident Gwethalyn Phillips, a longtime state party leader and member of the Democratic National Committee.

Verceles was active in many civic, political and service groups, ranging from the Red Cross and AARP to the Miss Bangor and Miss Maine scholarship pageants.

She was a frequent letter writer to the Bangor Daily News editorial pages, commenting on city issues and the actions of the City Council. She was a well-known City Hall watchdog.

Verceles was chairwoman of the Bangor Democratic Committee and, later, secretary for the city’s Republican committee, as well as a notary public and dedimus justice and active in St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Parish.

“I’ve known Arvilla since I’ve been in Bangor, and she had always been active in the community, particularly in elections, political parties and absentee voting. She paid a lot of attention to city affairs and certainly was an advocate for the handicapped,” City Manager Edward Barrett said Thursday.

One of Verceles’ sons needed a wheelchair to get around.

City Engineer Jim Ring recalled an encounter with Verceles that changed them both.

“She was quite tenacious when it came to something she wanted,” in this case, getting the city to do a better job addressing wheelchair access, Ring said.

Back in the 1980s, Verceles organized an awareness day for handicapped-accessibility issues, Ring said. She recruited three city staffers to spend part of the day in wheelchairs so they could experience for themselves the hurdles that wheelchair users encountered every day.

Ring, who had butted heads with Verceles, was given an unmotorized chair – “and a heck of a route that included every hill in the downtown,” he said.

Though it wasn’t easy, Ring said, he completed the route, to Verceles’ surprise.

“She later told me it was not by accident,” he recalled with a laugh.

“It was a bit of an eye opener for me, and I mean that with all sincerity,” Ring said Thursday. “Conversely, I think it may have given her a direct perceptive of the staff’s willingness to try to understand her point of view.”

In late 1996, Verceles was cleared of charges that she violated absentee ballot procedures. The charges stemmed from the November 1994 election, when a partially disabled woman complained that she did not fill out her own absentee ballot and that Verceles, who had delivered the ballot to her, had instructed her on which candidate to vote for.

In recent years, she led an effort to recall seven of Bangor’s nine city councilors because they had voted in favor of a $381,000 contribution toward improvements to Husson College’s John Winkin Baseball Complex. The attempt failed because Verceles and her taxpayers group failed to gather the petition signatures needed to put the recall on the city ballot.

She also was involved in last summer’s signature gathering effort that led to a citywide vote that kept the police station downtown.