PORTLAND, Maine — Portland Mayor Michael Brennan officially announced his bid for re-election Wednesday outside the visitors center of Ocean Gateway on the Portland waterfront.
Elected in November 2011, Brennan was the first popularly elected mayor of the state’s largest city in nearly nine decades.
On Wednesday, Brennan spoke of his commitment to offering new Mainers or immigrants the same opportunity found by his grandmother, who immigrated to Portland from Ireland in 1909 and sent her four children to college.
“Now in the city of Portland, we have not only people in the city, but we have people from all over the state, all over the country and all over the world that are coming to the city of Portland seeking the same opportunity that my grandmother did,” Brennan said. “As mayor, I’m committed to working with everybody in the city of Portland to make sure that that opportunity and those dreams become true.”
That focus highlights Brennan’s and other Portland elected officials’ ongoing conflict with Republican Gov. Paul LePage over public assistance to undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers and others new Mainers who have settled in Portland. The city has joined Westbrook and the Maine Municipal Association in suing the LePage administration over a plan to deny state funding to communities that provide General Assistance to undocumented aliens.
Brennan, a Democrat who represented a section of the city in the Maine Legislature and ran unsuccessfully in his party’s primary for U.S. House District 1 in 2008, said he hoped to continue increasing the quality of and opportunity for education and the importance of encouraging equitable development, creating “jobs of the future” and establishing the city and port of Portland as an “international presence economically.”
“I believe a vision for the city of Portland is a collective vision, one that we all share, and it’s based on our values,” he said. “What do we believe we are as a city? What do we want to be as a city? … I believe that our city [should] be a compassionate city, that we make sure that as we move forwards as a city, nobody is left behind.”
Portland has experienced an exodus of high-level staff during Brennan’s tenure as mayor. City Manager Mark Rees, acting City Manager Sheila Hill-Christian, Health and Human Services Director Doug Gardner, and Finance Director Ellen Sanborn and Planning Department Director Alex Jaegerman are among the top administrators who have departed.
Portland uses ranked choice voting to elect its mayor. This year’s election will be the second time such a system has been used to elect the mayor of Maine’s largest city.
Under the ranked choice voting system, voters can rank their choices from first all the way down to however many choices are available. If any candidate receives more than 50 percent of the first-place votes, he or she wins the election.
If nobody gets more than 50 percent, the last-place finisher in the field is dropped and the second-place finisher on that candidate’s ballots is given first-place tallies. The votes are then counted again, and if the newly reapportioned votes aren’t enough to elevate any of the remaining candidates beyond 50 percent, the process is repeated.
Candidates in the mayoral race do not have to declare a party affiliation.
Nomination papers for elected office are not available until June 30. As of 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, no one had registered with the city to raise campaign funds prior to June 30, according to the Portland City Clerk’s office.