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.
No recent Bangor City Council vote has drawn a crowd as large and unruly as those who came to watch the council censure one of its own on Aug. 25.
Six people spoke either in favor or against the proposed punishment for Councilor Joe Leonard, months after his public outburst against a former city staff member who later resigned. More watched, sometimes raising their voices as the meeting grew heated.
It reached a boiling point when Leonard defended himself and announced he was launching an ethics investigation into the other councilors.
“Councilor Leonard,” Cara Pelletier, council chair at the time, interjected. Pelletier banged her gavel, but Leonard kept talking. She demanded he be removed from the chamber.
Leonard’s removal was immediately met with boos from the audience. He laughed and waved as he stood and walked out of the room. It was the second time he had been censured on the council.
Two weeks later, Pelletier abruptly resigned from the council, citing personal attacks. And by the end of the month, the council sent three complaints about their own members to the ethics committee.
Councilors and residents alike are frustrated by the tone of recent council meetings and an uptick in what they see as petty bickering between councilors.
“I’ve heard folks describe it as a circus,” former City Councilor Laura Supica, who served from 2017 to 2020, said.
Meanwhile, nine candidates are running to fill three vacancies on the council in November, including one who has worn shirts with Adolf Hitler on them, one who has promoted conspiracy theories about 5G causing COVID-19, one convicted of manslaughter, one affiliated with the Communist Party of Maine and another engaged in a year-long battle with the city over his slate roof.
The Bangor Daily News spoke with past and present members of the City Council about its ongoing dysfunction and the upcoming election, including one councilor who feared that the turmoil kept more qualified candidates from running this year. But while some worry the divisive slate of candidates could derail the council further, others think the departure of longtime councilors could be an opportunity for the city to move forward.
Next month’s election is the first time in at least 10 years that no incumbent councilors are running for reelection.
The councilors leaving in November — Pelletier, Dan Tremble and Rick Fournier — had decades of combined experience and institutional knowledge of the council. Tremble has served on the council for 15 years. Pelletier and Fournier are the only councilors in the last 80 years to be elected chair two years in a row.
They will leave behind a council that in just a few months has spent nearly $100,000 in severance pay and investigation fees because of Leonard’s accusations against a former city employee. The council also opened ethics investigations into councilors’ use of text messaging to discuss how they would punish Leonard, as well as Councilor Wayne Mallar’s behavior at a Historic Preservation Commission meeting and Tremble’s circulation of an election petition for another councilor.
In the last three regularly scheduled City Council meetings alone, councilors have spent about 66 minutes out of 175 total minutes of meeting time debating censures and ethics orders.
It will also be the first time Bangor’s ethics board has met since February 2023, according to city spokesperson David Warren. The board has only met six times since 2019.
Leonard did not respond to a request for comment.
“I don’t think it’s atypical,” said Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, a public policy professor at Harvard University who leads the school’s Local Politics Lab, when asked about infighting in local governments.
“Many of the people who run for City Council, this is their first entry point into politics, so a lot of the professionalization that we might see in, say, a state legislature or in a mayoral office, often doesn’t happen,” he said. It’s common, he added, for interpersonal politics to be a distraction.
But former councilors told the BDN that while disagreements between councilors are nothing new, they now sometimes cross a line.
“I would not really say we all got along, but one thing I would say was that we respected everybody,” said former City Councilor Angela Okafor, noting that there was a wide range of political beliefs in the group of people she served with from 2019 to 2022.
Nearly everyone interviewed for this story linked the toxicity around the Bangor City Council to broader shifts in the American political climate.
“It’s a frustrating time,” Tremble said. “Nationally, people’s ability to dissent is being stifled, from universities to the media to businesses, law firms, every place across this country. So I think locally, the city halls are one of the last places where I think people really can go and vent and say what’s on their mind. But I think it needs to be done in a respectful way.”
Tremble lamented that the hostile climate “stopped some good people from running this year.” He said he encouraged some people to run this year who he thought would’ve been good candidates but ultimately didn’t want to be “part of the circus.”
Next month, Bangor voters will elect three newcomers to the council from the most crowded field in the last six years.
They include Daniel Carson, James Gallagher, Angela Walker, Justin Cartier, Reese Perkins, Steven Farren, Richard Ward, Susan Faloon and Colleen O’Neal, all of whom shared their views on issues like homelessness, housing, crime and the city’s spending in interviews with the BDN. Few have any municipal experience.
The incoming councilors will be tasked with implementing policies that address the city’s biggest needs on a council that has for years been criticized for moving too slowly.
Councilors have previously cited issues like staff shortages and frequent councilor turnover as factors that make it difficult for them to accomplish their goals.
“We would either take forever and never make a decision or it would just be a rubber stamp,” Supica said. “Just getting trash cans downtown was a pain.”
The council faced criticism in the last year for sitting on funding from opioid settlements and pandemic relief. Bangor began receiving money from litigation related to the opioid crisis in 2022 and only formed a committee to decide how to spend that money earlier this year.
City Manager Carollynn Lear said she doesn’t believe city business is being slowed, despite the inner turmoil.
“I suspect that internally here, with city staff and city leadership, we’re actually probably thinking about some of the more juicy council topics a lot less than what maybe the public suspects we are,” said Lear, who joined the city’s staff in June.
Many of the people interviewed for this story said they were hopeful that getting new voices on the council this cycle could help return the focus to accomplishing things that will make the city better.
At the same time, some residents worry that certain candidates will only make the council more divisive.
“I see some people running that tend to be extremists,” said Scott Pardy, who attends nearly every City Council meeting and serves on several city boards. “If they don’t get some people on there that are willing to compromise and willing to work together, nothing will change and very little will get done.”
De Benedictis-Kessner noted that local candidate training organizations can help improve those pools for city elections, and “when you get better City Council candidates, you get better decisions on the council.”
Some community members, like Supica, have suggested that changes to Bangor’s council structure, such as introducing a ward representation system and a mayor position, could be part of the solution to strengthening Bangor’s leadership.
Okafor hopes that “making room for new people” could help the city move forward in a more positive way.
“I respect experience, but sometimes experience is not always the answer.”