More than halfway through the year, Bangor’s City Council is failing to make meaningful advances in the areas it promised to prioritize while multiple crises rage, a Bangor Daily News review found.
Instead, the council is being distracted by time-consuming legal and ethical reviews and rowdy public exchanges with residents, underlined by a chaotic meeting last week when discussion over a proposal to limit cooperation with federal immigration agencies devolved into shouting and ended in a councilor walking out of the meeting.
“While we argue about the process and personalities, the city is not getting measurably better,” resident Joe Bowman said at last week’s council meeting.
The BDN reviewed the minutes of every meeting from this council year, which began in November. It found that of the 18 decisions that required substantial discussion over the past eight months, only five related directly to the council’s stated priorities of reducing homelessness and building housing.
That disparity shows how the council has struggled to fix the most visible problems affecting Bangor and the people who live here. And even when it does make decisions, they can take months to achieve with few immediate changes to the city.
The council has just eight meetings left before the election in November, when three seats could turn over.
Bangor runs on decisions that are made by its council and carried out by its city manager. At the start of the year, the council named three priorities for the city this year, which were all related to homelessness and housing. The city has struggled for years to commit to a strategy to improve either.
To address those goals, the council has created two committees: an advisory committee on homelessness and a standing committee on housing. It also allocated emergency funds to warming centers in the winter, passed a budget that includes appropriations for several positions focused on homelessness and housing and approved an ordinance banning the storage of personal belongings on sidewalks — a measure that dispersed a group of people camping on the sidewalk near Bangor Public Library without addressing the bigger-picture question of where those people should go.
The council amended its policies around meeting procedures three times this year, addressed two proposed referrals to the ethics board and voted on two ordinances addressing the city’s relationship with federal immigration enforcers.
Other decisions banned data center construction in the city for the next six months, struck down a proposed bond for a new parks and recreation facility, distributed grants using opioid settlement funding, created a legislative committee, changed the restrictions on short-term rentals in tiny home and mobile home parks, and raised Community Connector bus fares.
Discussions around creating a homelessness task force and a comprehensive homelessness plan began in November when new councilors were sworn in. Eight months later, the committee finally has its first meeting date: July 14 at 5:15 p.m.
Councilors have celebrated the new committee as a key step, saying they need people in the community with expertise in homelessness to evaluate all the ideas and determine the best path forward.
“It has a potential for there to be some lasting change that comes out of this,” Councilor Susan Faloon said, noting that no previous council has ever formed a homelessness committee. But she also acknowledged how long it took to get going, adding: “Honestly, I didn’t expect all of this to take so long either. So I really do understand the frustration.”
In the meantime, the council spent two and a half hours, not including public comment or legal reviews conducted in executive sessions, in meetings and workshops over five months going back and forth on the two immigration ordinances, one of which failed in its final vote. That vote was postponed seven times.
“I honestly can’t believe how much time that the council has spent on this thing, and I only ask that you spend an equal amount of time on the on the current crises that we’re having, the humanitarian crisis that we’re having in Bangor,” resident Scott Pardy, who runs a network of sober homes in the area, told councilors at a meeting in March.
Referrals to the ethics board have also dragged on over months, including one that was sent to the board back in September regarding councilor Wayne Mallar’s actions at a historic preservation committee meeting.
The board found that the councilor violated the ethics code at that meeting, and the board approved an official advisory opinion for the council on April 16, but the council has yet to discuss the findings or potential punishments. It has been postponed twice because Mallar could not attend workshops in person while dealing with health issues. Most recently, councilors last week moved to request the full records of the board’s investigation and postponed further deliberations until the next workshop.
This follows a flurry of ethics referrals at the end of last summer. Bangor’s city solicitor recused himself “to avoid any conflicts of interest when it came to representing the interests of the City Council and also those of the Board of Ethics,” according to city spokesperson David Warren.
As of June 23, the city has spent about $13,240 on an outside lawyer to advise the ethics board, Warren said.
Disagreements between councilors came to a head last week when Carolyn Fish left a meeting and failed to vote on the city budget after Joe Leonard blasted Immigration and Customs Enforcement and President Donald Trump, calling him a “rapist, pedophile, fascist president.”
Some councilors have cautioned that the process of making change through local government is always slow, and that they believe the council is making progress.
“This is how government is designed; it’s designed to be inefficient,” Faloon said. “We don’t want to make decisions that are hasty and are not well thought out and don’t follow the appropriate process, and that’s at all levels of government.”
She added that more proactive communication from the council to the public could help assuage concerns that it’s doing nothing about important issues.
Councilors also highlighted how chaotic public comment periods have derailed meetings.
“What I feel is that a lot of people are watching City Council meetings just for public comment. And they’re not watching committee meetings. They’re not watching the actual ordinances, resolves and orders,” Councilor Susan Deane said. “I think it’s become kind of a show, and I would really very much like it to go back to when we used to have a little more decorum in the council chambers.”
Faloon thinks the council should work on operating more efficiently, nodding toward last week’s meeting, which lasted nearly three hours.
“Just having kind of the free-for-all like it was Monday just, it didn’t move anything forward in a positive way, in my opinion,” she said. “Like yeah, we got our votes taken, but do we need to be there until almost 10 o’clock at night? No.”