The five candidates seeking three seats on the Bangor City Council in the November election named housing, homelessness and economic growth as the city’s most pressing issues, continuing a trend of those topics dominating past council races.
Councilors Rick Fournier and Dan Tremble are seeking reelection to their seats. The third councilor whose term ends this fall, Angela Okafor, is not seeking reelection.
Donald McCann, Rebecca Schwartz Mette and Cara Pelletier will also appear on the ballot. The top three vote getters will serve a three-year term.
In-person voting will be held at the Cross Insurance Center near downtown Bangor from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Nov. 8. Absentee voters can request a ballot until Nov. 3.
Candidates appear below in the order they appear on the ballot.
Cara Pelletier
Pelletier, a senior director for diversity at a human resources technology firm, said her top priorities were to address homelessness and addiction by encouraging the development of more transitional housing and partnering with social service agencies to see what people suffering from substance use disorder most needed. Improving the accessibility and maintenance of city sidewalks is also a priority, she said.
“I believe firmly that the people who are closest to the challenge are the people who are closest to the solution,” she said.
If elected, Pelletier said she would work to find ways to offer incentives and subsidies for developers to build more low- and moderate-income housing, like financing accessory dwelling units, and to find solutions to house people with checkered histories whom landlords may not want to rent to because of a criminal record or poor credit history.
Investment in infrastructure like city paving and sewer system improvements would also be a top priority. Pelletier said she observed children walking in the street during the winter to avoid icy and impassable sidewalks, which also presented a problem for residents who rely on wheelchairs and other mobility aids. She also noted that some of Bangor’s sewers were more than 100 years old.
“Just keeping in mind that infrastructure and those things that we don’t think about can really impact our quality of life, if we’re not on top of making sure that they’re being maintained and replaced, is something that’s important to me,” Pelletier said, pointing to water crises in Jackson, Mississippi, and Flint, Michigan. “Nobody wants Bangor to ever be in that position.”
Donald McCann
McCann, who runs the Maine Liberty Alliance advocacy group, said his top priority would be to instill public confidence in the Bangor City Council.
“You can have the utmost confidence and trust that after I’ve thoroughly looked into all the research and information about any issue, I would take the correct action to make Bangor better,” he said.
McCann also cited high taxes and a lack of “welcoming” amenities, like bike lanes and public transit, as priorities to address, as communities surrounding Bangor have grown while the city has suffered population loss.
Lowering property taxes would incentivize people to “build and improve upon” the land they already own, spurring further housing development, he said.
While he agreed that a lack of available housing was another top priority, Bangor needed to take a “smart, adaptable and incremental” approach to addressing the lack of inventory by examining the city’s zoning ordinances and ensuring all available land was being used before encouraging new development.
“If we do the math on each new development that we build on the outskirts of town, the city becomes liable for the upkeep and maintenance, and we just can’t keep that pattern up,” McCann said. “We need to stay focused on what we already have and not build anything new, per se.”
Rebecca Schwartz Mette
Schwartz Mette, a University of Maine psychology professor and mental health researcher, said her first priority would be encouraging economic growth and developing Bangor’s workforce, especially by emphasizing the city’s cultural amenities and proximity to universities and hospital networks to reverse the city’s population decline.
She sees economic growth and workforce development as intertwined, because the city needs businesses to help it thrive, and those businesses need workers, particularly young people.
“We have to continue to support small business development within our urban core but also attract new businesses to show that the bigger metropolitan area is a desirable economic hub, not just a service center,” Schwartz Mette said, pointing to downtown Bangor’s revitalization as an example.
In addition, the City Council should act as a “guiding force” to coordinate area social service agencies and organizations addressing homelessness so they work together on solutions like amending city policies that hamstring development and developing programs to help homeowners with rising housing costs, Schwartz Mette said.
“We know that housing affordability and availability is tied to the economic viability of a community,” she said. “I think local government, in particular, can and should work on making the housing development process more efficient.”
Rick Fournier
Fournier, the current council chair and a retired commercial lender who has served on the council since 2019, said he would continue leading the city to partner with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the state to build more affordable housing in Bangor.
The council met with HUD officials on Tuesday, a day after the Bangor Daily News published an article about the city’s lack of a strategy to curb rising homelessness.
Though the meeting didn’t end with any specific next steps, Fournier said he was hopeful plans to build more affordable housing, with state and federal help, would materialize in the near future, especially after the planning board approved two 60-unit subdivisions that night.
He also touted the City Council’s role in brokering an agreement that returns 36 percent of property taxes to an organization that bought the historic schoolhouse building on Harlow Street last year with plans to add affordable units and rehab others. Fournier also highlighted the council’s recent action to make more help available through a program that helps low-income homeowners pay down payments and closing costs when they buy a home in Bangor.
“It should all help, it just takes time,” Fournier said. “You can’t build overnight.”
Fournier also said he would continue to advocate for the city to spend some of its $20.4 million in congressional American Rescue Plan Act funding to hire a housing specialist to help residents find housing by liaising with rental agencies, service organizations and other city offices.
Dan Tremble
Tremble, who owns Fairmount Market in Bangor and served on the council from 1999 to 2005 before he was elected again in 2016, said the growing homeless population was a “humanitarian crisis” that warranted immediate attention.
He said he’d encourage the city’s burgeoning partnership with HUD and advocate for state authorities to continue discussing the issue with Bangor, as the number of people seeking housing and services had become too large for any one municipality to address on its own.
“I don’t have an easy solution to tell you, but I think as long as we stay focused on it, and keep talking about it, I think we’ll get enough people involved and we’ll come up with some solution,” he said.
The housing crisis is too insurmountable for one city to tackle, Tremble said, but he hoped whoever succeeded outgoing community and economic development director Tanya Emery would have ideas for spurring new jobs and housing development.
“We need more housing for everybody. For that we need more workforce housing,” he said. “We need more entry-level housing, more transitional housing for people that are homeless and need to get into [permanent] housing. So we just need more housing all around.”
