The Bangor Daily News is profiling all 12 Bangor City Council candidates ahead of the election this fall. Read more coverage of Bangor’s local election here.
A Bangor City Council candidate wants to use his business and nonprofit experience to restore a sense of civility to the council.
Joe Pratt, 63, oversees the wealth management group at Bar Harbor Bank and Trust and serves on the boards of the Bangor Public Library, the Maine Planned Giving Council and the Bangor Mechanic Association, which functions to support the public library.
Pratt said his top priority on the council would be “restoring a sense of civility and decorum in the way the council functions,” and he believes his years of experience with boards and nonprofits will help him achieve that goal.
“In all of those 30 plus years, I think I’ve been able to add some maturity, some responsibility, some thoughtfulness, bringing opposing sides together. They’re not going to agree 100% but if you can focus on the areas where you do agree, you can still make progress,” he said.
In Pratt’s view, having attended about six or seven council meetings this year, the council has not been functioning efficiently and needs to do a better job communicating, listening and collaborating.
“If you can get to that point where the nine people charged with making very important decisions are at least functioning in a reasonable way, I think we’ll get more reasonable solutions to some of the problems that everybody is aware of,” such as homelessness, taxes and attracting businesses and young families, he said.
Pratt, a Republican, has spent most of his life in Bangor, having already lived here for more than a decade before he returned in 1992 after serving in the military. He started to consider running for council after he organized a group of residents to oppose a change that would’ve reclassified Ohio Street from a minor to a major arterial road. Council ultimately voted down the change.
“On the one hand, I was happy with the result of our effort. It took a year but went our way. But I also walked away thinking that this body isn’t functioning the way it should,” Pratt said, adding that he thought the council should’ve been more proactive in seeking feedback from the public about the proposal.
Pratt said he appreciates that some councilors use Facebook to communicate with their constituents. He thinks the city should institutionalize those efforts by using the city website or social media to provide information so the burden doesn’t land on individual councilors.
His own rising property taxes were another reason he decided to run. He said as a councilor, he’d want to find ways to broaden the tax base “so that all of that tax burden isn’t concentrated just on the property owners,” adding that the council could consider residency taxes, excise taxes, or local sales taxes that could ease the property tax burden.
On homelessness, another top issue for residents, Pratt said he thinks the city’s leaders should talk to their peers in cities that have had some success reducing homelessness, such as Houston, Denver or Baltimore.
“Maybe it’s scalable down to the size of Bangor,” he said. He also noted his opposition to the controversial Yellen Pines homeless housing development, saying he believes that instead of building a new facility, the city should focus on funding the existing organizations in Bangor that are already doing work to address homelessness.
Pratt also said he wants to see more accountability measures around needle exchange programs, although he wouldn’t have supported City Councilor Carolyn Fish’s proposed temporary ban on new syringe programs and methadone clinics.
Instead, he suggested those programs should be asked to “demonstrate to the community that there are some positive results.” He said he’d like to see the city more closely track metrics like HIV spread, overdoses and needle litter found around the city to get a better sense of the impact of syringe service programs.