The BDN is profiling Bangor City Council candidates ahead of the election later this year. Read more coverage of the Bangor City Council here, and send questions or ideas for follow-ups to arupertus@bangordailynews.com.
A Bangor City Council candidate with a left-wing labor organizing background wants the city’s government to build more affordable housing and increase shelter space for homeless people.
“I am running for City Council because Bangor is a remarkable city and it is a working class city,” Daniel Carson said, but “high costs, particularly in housing, are pushing people to the brink.”
Carson’s platform, which emphasizes investing in public services, contrasts with some others in the nine-candidate pool who have said they want City Council to cut back on spending and city-funded services. Bangor’s homelessness crisis, and the city’s role in ending it, has become a key issue for residents in recent years.
Carson lives downtown and moved to Bangor six years ago, he said. Before relocating to Maine and becoming a labor and community organizer, he worked as a bank manager, which he said would help him with the budgeting work that is central to the role of a city councilor.
A registered Democrat, Carson has also served in leadership roles for the Communist Party of Maine, which is not an official political party in the state. He previously told the Bangor Daily News that the affiliation “means [that] I am a person who believes that working class people should be in the driver’s seat of this country.”
He named housing as his top priority if he’s elected to the council, saying the city should both work directly to build affordable housing and consider changing zoning rules and other ordinances to make it easier for private developers to build in Bangor.
“The city should put effort toward actually constructing the 700 units that we know that we need,” Carson said, referencing the housing study that found Bangor has a shortage of about 700 affordable housing units. He added that he thinks putting a housing bond to voters is the best way to do this.
On the issue of homelessness, Carson said the city should be allocating more funding to shelter space and other services for the city’s most vulnerable residents.
“It’s important to recognize that we just have a lack of shelter space in the city,” he said, adding that he believes increasing shelter capacity to get people off the streets would also help alleviate concerns from residents who are worried about public safety downtown.
“This is almost like it’s a part of the crisis that’s spilling over, right? And it’s due to the fact that we have a demonstrable lack of infrastructure to make sure that people are sheltered and off the streets,” he said.
Carson also said he wants the City Council and the state government to work together on funding an overnight warming center this winter given the news that only one of three warming centers in Bangor will open this year.
Part of the city’s role in combating homelessness and related issues like the opioid epidemic and Penobscot County’s HIV outbreak, he said, should be to support community organizations that are already working on these issues.
“The way that we get this city moving for working people is to invest in our people, to invest in the services that we have,” he said.
While Carson said he doesn’t see cutting back on spending as the solution to Bangor’s problems, he also said he is concerned about the effects high property taxes are having on the city’s working class and people who are on fixed incomes.
“Property taxes are an antiquated and regressive form of taxation,” he said, adding that he thinks Bangor should partner with a new state task force investigating property tax relief and put pressure on the state government to come up with solutions for Mainers who are burdened by high property taxes.
Carson said he sees minimizing turnover by raising pay for city staff as a key part of reducing inefficiencies in the city’s budget.
“What [underpaying staff] creates is positions that are completely uncompetitive with not just private markets, but public markets in the area, and people leave,” he said. “You bring people in, you train them, you help them to develop knowledge and expertise, and they’re gone. And that is an expense. It burdens other workers.”
He mentioned the city’s Community Connector bus drivers as one area where the city could do this, which he hoped would help Bangor restore and expand weekend bus service.