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A pastor running for Bangor City Council with years of experience working with homeless residents wants to get people off the streets and cut down on needle distribution in the city.
Terry Dinkins, 65, is the pastor of the Mansion Church on Center Street, the chaplain at the Penobscot County Jail and a branch manager for an armored car company.
Dinkins moved to Bangor when he was 10 and has lived in the area ever since, although he moved from Carmel into Bangor proper last July in part to run for council — which he thinks shows his commitment to the city.
He is unenrolled in a political party and has been a pastor since 2013. His church grew out of a bible study group he started about 15 years ago for people leaving the county jail, Dinkins said.
But he found that more homeless people started coming to the services, and he started doing outreach, giving out food, water and clothes to people on the streets, and inviting them to pray or come to the church. The Mansion Church started offering an overnight warming center in 2020, which now shelters about 350 people in a given winter, Dinkins said.
He sees that work with people experiencing homelessness and addiction as a key qualification he brings to the council, and he named reducing homelessness his top priority, with drugs and needles a close second.
“I do have compassion for the homeless, but yet I think we need accountability also with that,” Dinkins said. To do so, he’d want to focus on providing resources for people who are mentally ill, including by expanding the number of treatment beds at Dorothea Dix Psychiatric Center.
“If we can get them help, that would take a lot of people off our streets,” he said.
The aging state-run treatment facility is one of two psychiatric hospitals run by the Maine Department of Health and Human It houses about 60 to 70 patients, and the state eventually plans to rebuild it but doesn’t have the funds to do so in the near future, City Manager Carollynn Lear reported in a recent workshop. The council does not have any jurisdiction over the facility, although its legislative committee is investigating ways to encourage speedier progress.
Dinkins said that while he likes the general idea of the $11 million Yellen Pines permanent supportive housing development, which sparked controversy this summer, he wouldn’t have supported it “for that price tag.”
The pastor said he decided to run for city council after seeing issues like drugs, needles and mental illness “getting worse and worse” through the church’s warming center.
“I’ve always wanted to help people. I think that’s really important to help our fellow man,” Dinkins said. “But are we really helping these people by enabling them? I think we’re just prolonging their suffering.”
To that effect, Dinkins said he thinks the number of needles distributed in Bangor “needs to be cut down drastically.” While he would prefer to see syringe distribution halted altogether, he said he’s okay with restricting it to a one-for-one exchange.
“I think that would help our problem that we have with the needles on our streets and our parks,” he said, adding that he’s spoken with families who avoid certain parks because they’re worried their kids could come into contact with needles.
Dinkins also said he’d want to look into reducing property taxes, although he wasn’t sure where cuts could be made in the budget.
“I would do whatever I could to at least stop the taxes from going up, and then even maybe cutting taxes,” he said.
He believes his nearly 30 years of work for a company, which includes managing payroll and a budget, would inform his outlook on the city’s budget.
Dinkins noted that some Christians are wary of church leaders getting involved in politics, although most Christians he’s talked to have been supportive of his choice to run.
But in his view, “we need the church to have an influence in the town square,” he said.
“I think we need to help people. You know, isn’t that the Lord Jesus? He’s all about helping people and having compassion for people and feeding the hungry and bringing water to the thirsty,” Dinkins said. “And I think we need to do that in our community, and that if we need to try to change some policies and we can have some influence on that, I think we need to do it as Christians.”
Dinkins said he’s attended about three city council meetings in the last year and often watches them online. If elected, he said he’d plan to continue updating his campaign website to keep residents informed.
He also noted his following of more than 4,000 people on Facebook and said he’d like to see more transparent communication from councilors, perhaps by implementing an open mingling period before official city meetings where residents could speak more informally with councilors.