PORTLAND, Maine — When Patricia McAllister was hired as Portland’s newest attorney in 2010, she was sent to work in places that looked nothing like courtrooms or law offices.
“I’ve been in some of the most disgusting apartments in this city — places where, when you leave, you’re gagging,” she recalled. “I’ve been in physically very rough areas to be in, and I would sit there all day rather than go sit in a law office again. I have so many friends in private practice, and that’s not a knock on it, but it’s just not my thing.”
McAllister was hired by Portland as the city’s and, by extension, the state’s first so-called neighborhood prosecutor, a type of street-level attorney then-police Chief James Craig saw used with success at his previous job in Los Angeles.
But McAllister is leaving the innovative job to move to North Carolina, where her husband has a new job. Her last day working for Portland will be Sept. 19. She will be replaced by Richard Bianculli, a Rhode Island attorney with significant government experience.
“One of the real unique things about this job is the freedom you really have to be a problem-solver,” McAllister said of her role as the neighborhood prosecutor among the city’s attorneys. “A lot of times, it’s conducting mediations with feuding neighbors, providing training for police and police cadets, and being a bridge between many city departments to address quality-of-life issues.”
McAllister has been thrust into the public eye during the past year, working part time in the city corporation counsel office as well as in her traditional police department office.
On the city side, she led the Portland legal team as it braced against two high-profile lawsuits. One challenged a city ordinance banning panhandlers — and everyone else — from stopping in median strips. The other came from anti-abortion demonstrators suing to remove a 39-foot no-protest zone around the city’s only abortion clinic.
The city’s controversial median strip ordinance was declared unconstitutional by a federal judge, and a subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decision throwing out Massachusetts’ abortion clinic buffer zone effectively ended Portland’s buffer zone by extension.
Those cases came among a run of other high-profile court cases. Occupy Maine demonstrators fought the city’s efforts to remove their encampment from Lincoln Park. More recently, opponents of a plan to sell the publicly owned Congress Square to private hotel developers sued for the right to petition for an ordinance change.
“I will say, it’s been exhausting,” McAllister said. “I took on this dual role for a temporary period, and it happened to be this period in time where we were getting sued every 15 minutes. That’s not a typical year for the city to be facing a string of lawsuits like that.
“The loss in the median strip [case] was a really tough blow,” she continued. “I thought we did a great job building a case there, and losing it was a real disappointment. … Everyone was saying it was just because residents were calling and saying, ‘I don’t like the look of these people in the median strips.’ But that can’t be further from the truth. Officers were saying, ‘I’m responding to so many close calls here. This can’t be right.’”
Despite those bruising defeats, McAllister said, “My own legal expertise has grown leaps and bounds because of these things.”
‘Heartbroken’
The former Sebago codes enforcement officer and U.S. Coast Guard officer said she’s “heartbroken to leave this job.”
“But it’s best for my family. My grown daughters are down south, so we’ll be closer to them and to our parents,” she said.
The neighborhood prosecutor position originally was proposed as a part-time, grant-funded job, McAllister recalled, but the city “found it to be valuable enough … that within the first year it was consumed by the city budget and made full time.”
Her charge was to go out into the community and solve problems, preferably before they grew into problems that needed police or court interventions.
“It was difficult, but it was also remarkably fun,” McAllister said, adding the job provided her the freedom to work out informal solutions to disputes among neighbors. Private practice attorneys, she said, are constrained by the obligation to adopt the argument of whichever party hired them.
“It’s the independence, being required to use my own judgment every day in so many different circumstances,” she said. “In private practice, I’d of course have to be worried about who I’m going to bill for this or how much I’m going to bill for this. It’s a fact of life in private practice that I don’t have to deal with in this position.”
She spearheaded efforts early in her tenure to update the city’s disorderly house ordinance, driving down the threshold for city intervention on nuisance properties from eight police responses within 30 days to between three and five responses, depending on the size of the property.
“I did a lot of study on that, and I went to the City Council and said, ‘Can you imagine being the neighbor living next to the place that’s getting seven?’” she recalled.
McAllister said she also pushed for an update of the city’s graffiti ordinances and will recommend that her successor connect with business leaders early in his tenure to remind them to clean up graffiti quickly.
She said she also will urge Bianculli to launch neighborhood accountability boards, localized panels that could help hash out solutions to street-level disputes or for low-level ordinance violations, such as littering or dog leash requirements, before they escalate into legal cases.
“We could divert that stuff to a community board, so there’s more of a discussion, and people who do that stuff hear from their community members how it’s affecting them,” she said. “I’d love to get that stuff out of the court system and only go to court as a last resort, when we have to collect fines or something.
“It also gives [violators] a voice, too,” McAllister continued. “A lot of times, they come to me in court and say, ‘Here’s why I don’t agree with this rule.’ And I say, ‘Well, you may have a point there, but this judge can’t do anything about the ordinance on the books. You need to take that up with the city.’ A neighborhood accountability board could be a way to start those conversations.”
