HERMON, Maine — Some long-simmering tensions stemming from the November election boiled over at the council meeting on Dec. 18.
One major focus of the night was revisiting lingering issues from the proposed $6.5 million recreation center, which the town voted down by 1,422 to 912 on Nov. 4.
Hermon resident Dan Petersen passed around a 20-page review of the funding and tax impact statements for the proposed community center.
“I was concerned when I went and did the numbers,” said Petersen, who has a background in project development for large software companies. “There’s serious problems with the information delivered to the people. It was not accurate. It was not thoroughly reviewed.”
He told the council and the residents in attendance that if the process isn’t fixed, the town faces similar problems in the future.
“In order to make an educated decision, the public has to have good numbers,” he said.
Petersen suggested that Hermon officials had overestimated the proposed center’s potential income generation capacity, and underestimated its actual tax impact by a significant margin.
Resident Ernie Fields told Petersen that the town already had dealt with the issue of the recreation center.
“We voted it down. Let’s bury it,” he said.
But some councilors believed that Petersen’s skill with financial processes and fiscal troubleshooting could serve the town well in the future.
“I think the process you’re describing could be very beneficial when we’re talking about the rescue service,” Councilor Alden Brown told Petersen.
Councilors also spent more than an hour at the meeting in a workshop to determine why the roughly 750 Hermon residents who voted absentee were not given the opportunity to weigh in on the recreation center. Only those who voted in person on Election Day had that opportunity, because of the town bond attorney’s reading of state statutes and the town charter.
“There were some suggestions that I might care one way or another how the vote turned out,” said town attorney Ed Bearor. “I certainly didn’t.”
Bearor talked about how the council could avoid having such a situation in the future.
But councilors did not come to a consensus to look at revising the town’s charter, and so no changes were made that night.
In other business, residents voted to spend up to $327,000 from its reserves to buy a brand-new Ferrara firetruck and the council heard from the chairman of the Hermon Rescue Services Committee.
Steve Thomas told the council that Hermon’s volunteer rescue squad responded to 353 emergency calls during 2007 and already has responded to 400 calls in 2008.
“Full-time rescue service is needed,” he said, outlining several different proposals that would make that happen.
The growing community of about 5,500 now spends about $35,000 a year on its volunteer rescue squad.
After significant debate as to the costs and benefits of the proposals, the council decided to vote on whether to form its own committee on the subject at the Jan. 8 regular meeting.