MILLINOCKET, Maine — Two residents, including a former state senate president, seek to fill a Town Council seat vacated during last month’s controversy over the town’s temporary silencing of its fire horn, officials said Friday.
Tracy Leet and Charles Pray, a Democratic Senate president from 1984 to 1992, have taken out election papers to finish the three-year term of Richard Theriault, Town Clerk Roxanne Johnson said Friday.
To get their names placed on the Nov. 3 election ballot, Leet and Pray have until Oct. 13 to return the papers with at least 25 signatures endorsing their candidacies, Johnson said.
Theriault, whose term expires in November 2016, resigned Aug. 27 in protest of residents’ ire at Town Manager John Davis’ decision to turn off on Aug. 12 the fire horn, which had sounded daily at 8 a.m and 9 p.m. daily since the 1950s.
In protest, about 40 cars per night honked their horns as they drove through downtown repeatedly from Aug. 17 to Aug. 26. The group also held barbecues at a downtown business lot. Theriault wrote in his resignation letter that he refused “to waste another 17 months on such trivial issues, when there are real problems to be solved.”
“When I ran for the council, I had the idea that maybe I could help lead the Town of Millinocket out of its quagmire,” wrote Theriault. “It is apparent, though, that since the two most important issues to the community of Millinocket are the use of firecrackers and blowing a horn at the fire station, that there is no leaving the quagmire for Millinocket.”
Councilors voted 5-1 during a meeting on Aug. 27 to restart the horn that night. The meeting drew about 135 people. Members of the social media group that formed in response to the shutoff has since renamed itself and is working to keep operational the town library, said Tricia Cyr, one of the group’s founders.
No upcoming events have yet been planned, she said Friday.
Councilors said they were forced by the town’s dire economic situation to significantly reduce library funding. Since the town’s paper mill closed in 2008, the town has lost about half its population, had an unemployment rate at least double the state average, and suffered declines in state aid that have all helped to cut the town’s budget about in half over the last several.
Last month the town reported issuing 252 tax liens filed as part of efforts to collect more than $300,000 in overdue property taxes. That’s a significant number considering that Millinocket had 4,466 residents and 2,155 homes in 2014, according to suburbanstats.org, which uses Census data to track residential and population trends in the U.S.
Davis said earlier this week that he received one complaint about the horn’s noise before ordering its shut-off but had heard about a half-dozen complaints during his time as council chairman. Davis was chairman from November 2004 to November 2005 and was re-elected to the council in November 2009, serving as chair until October 2013. That’s when he left the council to become Frenchville’s town manager, returning as town manager in April at about $59,000 annually.
Davis said he didn’t expect the shutoff to become so controversial. Councilors said Davis erred in shutting off the horn but that the decision was his to make. Councilor Anita Mueller said Davis or Chairman Richard Angotti Jr. should have honored requests from several councilors to turn the horn back on before the Aug. 27 meeting.
“Turning it back would have been the responsible thing to do,” Mueller said. “The chairman should have called a special council meeting to address the issue. The situation could have been defused had the community felt as though decisions were not being made arbitrarily.”
Angotti could not be reached for comment. Davis said he balked at the request in favor of following procedure, which would require full council deliberations of the issue before residents in a meeting.
“I make a lot of day-to-day decision,” Davis said. “If they don’t like it, [councilors] can over-rule them and I have no problem with that.”
Resident Jesse Dumais has returned a council nomination form with 65 signatures, while Eric Buckingham returned a form with 26. The three-year terms of Councilors Jimmy Busque and Bryant Davis, John Davis’ cousin, are up in November, Johnson said. Election papers for those seats are due Sept. 18.