HAMPDEN, Maine — Though it initially appeared she might be a no-show, former Mayor Carol Duprey turned up at a meeting Tuesday night just as town councilors began discussing her forfeiture of her seat because she missed the maximum number of meetings allowed by the town charter.
Duprey, who entered the council chambers through a side door and immediately departed after delivering a brief prepared statement, left the council on a somewhat defiant note.
“I’m going to start by apologizing,” she said. “The voters placed their faith in me to fulfill the obligations of my office, and I let them down by not being able to finish out my term.”
According to Duprey, the main reason for not making four regular council meetings and two special council meetings during the previous 12 months was the growth of the day care business she runs with her husband, former state Rep. Brian Duprey, who lost his seat to resident Jim Davitt last fall.
When she first was elected, the company had 25 employees and three locations. It now has more than 50 employees and six locations, she said.
“So thank you to Hampden actually for voting for Jim Davitt instead of my husband, which helped our business and helped us to create jobs. It did hurt my ability to serve on the council, but I will not apologize for helping to get families to work,” she said.
“If I knew I’d missed five meetings, I would have made the commitment to make sure I was present at the rest of the meetings to finish my term. I only missed four regular meetings, but I did not realize that, including the special meetings, I had missed five meetings before the last meeting.
“We were trying to get a new business going and we had delay after delay and we had a deadline, so I do apologize,” she said, adding that one of the meetings was called during a planned family vacation.
“I have to say that I was deeply hurt, though, that the mayor and the town clerk knew I’d missed five meetings and didn’t tell me. In my opinion that’s wrong; it’s unethical,” she said.
The remaining six town councilors said they had no choice but to declare that she had removed herself from the council. The decision was unanimous.
Duprey was elected to her three-year at-large seat in November 2012 and served as mayor from January 2014 to January 2015. Her term was set to expire in November.
She was a proponent of a 2013 town charter amendment that triggered the automatic forfeiture of her seat, according to her council colleagues.
The charter change was aimed at addressing meeting absences that sometimes left the council without a quorum and as such unable to conduct business.
Councilor Bill Shakespeare said he regretted that Duprey blamed Mayor David Ryder and Town Clerk Denise Hodsdon for her departure from the council.
“When you take an oath, you decide to serve your term; and if you can’t serve your term, that’s when it’s time to leave,” he said. “But the rules are the rules. She’s basically the one who wanted to revise all the rules and make it so that we could miss six meetings and you were gone, no excuses. I hate to say it, but it came back to bite her. But it’s ironic that it did. She’s the one who missed them. We didn’t miss them.”
Duprey was absent for regular meetings on March 2, May 18, June 15 and Aug. 17 as well as special meetings on July 13 and July 27 conducted for the purpose of selecting and then appointing a new town manager, according to the Declaration of Forfeiture of Office town councilors took up Tuesday night.
“I had zero intention of running again,” Duprey said. “I still felt it was my duty to finish out my term. Just to let the taxpayers know, I did not get paid for meetings that I did not attend.”
An interim council member will not be appointed to Duprey’s seat because the town’s next regular election in November is less than six months away, Ryder said.
Duprey’s time on the council, especially her year as mayor, was marked by controversy. She was cleared of breaching the town’s code of ethics in 2014 after a political action committee she formed with her husband paid for negative robocalls against two council candidates. The council subsequently registered a 6-1 vote of no confidence in her ability to lead them — with Duprey casting the lone vote in support of her performance as mayor.
Despite being asked to step down from the post after the no-confidence vote, Duprey said she had done nothing wrong and served out her term as mayor. Her fellow councilors had no way of compelling her to step down.