Bangor’s city manager has weathered an eventful first year.
Carollynn Lear stepped into the role last June as the city struggled to address overlapping crises of homelessness, an HIV outbreak and an affordable housing shortage. Homelessness in particular has dominated much of the city council’s time this year while it’s struggled to drive meaningful change.
One year in, Lear said she’s hopeful that a new committee charged with devising a long-term homelessness strategy will help generate progress. That’s essential, she said, to make time for other important issues from economic development to infrastructure improvements that city leaders have been putting off.
“Although it’s an extremely important issue, it’s not the only extremely important issue. But it has felt, over the course of my first year, that it is the only issue that we’ve had space to talk about, and it’s pushing out other really important conversations,” Lear said.
Lear thinks the newly formed homelessness advisory committee, which met for the first time last week, will eliminate the need for the issue to be “an ongoing day-to-day discussion with council.”
“I see my role as doing everything I can to make sure that that committee is as successful as they can be in fulfilling their mission to deliver the city a strategic plan,” Lear said, noting that typically, Bangor’s City Council determines policies and it’s her job to implement them.
That committee must present a plan within a year of its first meeting. In the meantime, the city will continue its strategy of preventing large homeless encampments from forming, according to Lear, which will involve “more frequent and ongoing enforcement” of anti-camping and sidewalk-related ordinances.
Economic development is one of those issues Lear believes should get more air time with elected officials.
She named the city’s aging infrastructure, particularly wastewater infrastructure, as a “huge limitation” for building housing that the city desperately needs. State data that was recently released showed that Bangor awarded building permits for just 32 new housing units last year, far fewer than Maine’s other major cities.
Expanding economic development initiatives could also help ease the tax burden, Lear said, noting, “the beauty of expanding your tax base is that you can reduce the tax burden without reducing services.”
Lear also named strengthening communication with the public as an area for improvement in her second year.
“That was a goal of mine on day one, but I have not made the progress that I had hoped to in that space,” she said. She added that residents are “hungry for more information,” particularly around what the city is doing to address homelessness, and that city officials could be more proactive in telling residents what’s going on behind the scenes.
“I think the public, when they don’t receive full information, has a tendency to fill in the gaps or draw conclusions that may or may not be accurate,” she said.
The city is also the epicenter of an HIV outbreak with 44 recorded cases, primarily in people who are homeless or who inject drugs.
It’s been difficult for the city’s public health department to address the outbreak, Lear said, as it’s mostly grant-funded. Until the city dedicated opioid settlement funds toward hiring HIV case managers in August, nearly two years after the outbreak began, “they were sort of scraping together funding” for HIV programs, Lear said. The public health director is working with the state to get more resources in Penobscot County, she added.
In terms of Lear’s biggest accomplishments this year, she joked that many of them are “probably pretty boring.” The city budget was the first that came to her mind.
She acknowledged that this year’s budget process skewed heavily toward investing in city services, adding, “I think the reason why council landed there was because they had recognized that over the course of the most recent history, investment in the provision of services had been somewhat neglected.”
That budget included a slate of new funding for positions from homeless response coordinator to vehicle mechanic. Lear told the Bangor Daily News last year that being able to justify new programs by showing return on investment was a key skill she’d bring to the city from her previous work for the New Hampshire Department of Revenue Administration.
Those investments will improve services and prevent costlier problems in the long term, Lear said
Coming into the role last year, Lear named filling vacant positions, including two department head roles, as a top priority. She filled the finance and public works director positions in her first six months on the job.
Staffing is a “never-ending goal,” Lear said, noting that the fire chief position is now vacant. She said the city plans to start with an internal search for that role.