YORK, Maine — Smile! Say cheese!
Those words have clicked with Town Manager Steve Burns in recent weeks, as he embarks on a new feature on the town website, “Selfies with Steve.”
So far, he’s taken selfies with Town Planner Dylan Smith and Planning Board Chair Amy Phalon by the bathhouse; with Parks and Recreation Director Mike Sullivan by the shipwreck on Short Sands Beach; and with Michelle Surdoval, director of York Community Service Association, at the food pantry.
Who knows where he’ll be next.
“I wanted to do something on the website, but I wasn’t sure what. And at the same time, selectmen were telling me to get out more and talk with the public and town staff,” he said — guidance that came from the board when he was negotiating the extension of his contract recently.
“So I was driving around and checking out a couple of things recently and it clicked that I could get out, take a selfie and show people things. It literally gelled I could kill a couple of birds with one stone,” he said.
The fun photos always show a grinning Burns, and the idea is that he could be found anywhere at any time with anyone around town. “Think of all the properties, all the things going on, the different topics and projects. It was relatively easy to generate a list,” he said.
With the photo is some information about the person with him and the location where it has been taken. He writes the short blurb, which he finds much easier than writing a column — another idea he had but that never captured his imagination.
The write-up accompanying his photo with Surdoval, for instance, mentions an upcoming seminar on hunger and housing in York that YCSA, York Housing and other organizations are putting on at the end of the month.
In the coming weeks, he’d like to take a selfie with Hartley Mason Reservation trustee chair Jeff McConnell at the York Harbor Park, with a link to an agreement that the selectmen signed recently with the trustees. “The ability is there to say, ‘Here is something happening that you might like to know about,’” he said.
“The fact that my ugly mug is in all the pictures is probably the downside of this,” he said.
He wants to archive all the photos on the new town website, “so maybe in two years we have 100 pictures there. It’s a nice way to provide information and it’s as quick a read as you’re going to get ever.”
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