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 who grew up in Maine’s conservative political sphere wants the city to take a tough love approach to those struggling with substance use and homelessness.
Katherine Devine, 21, has lived in the Bangor area for about three years and moved downtown six months ago, she said.
Devine works as a nanny and is currently expecting her first child — a milestone that she said influenced her decision to run for Bangor’s council because she wants to “make it a safer place for not only my son, but every kid here.”
Although she’s one of the youngest candidates in the race, Devine has been involved in conservative political activism for years.
“I’ve got some political experience and I think that would be best used to kind of calm things down and gain back the city’s trust in its officials,” Devine said, adding that she grew up near Augusta and has testified about multiple bills and worked on political campaigns, including with the Maine Girl Dads group, which pushed for a statewide referendum that would’ve barred transgender students from sports teams aligned with their gender identities.
“We’ve been in and out of the State House, me and my family, since I was a young kid,” Devine said. She noted that those experiences have taught her to handle disagreements well and to value compromise.
Some may recognize the candidate from headlines last year, when her professor at Eastern Maine Community College refused to grade Devine’s opinion paper about gun rights because she found it to be too offensive. (She’s since gotten married, but coverage at the time referred to Devine by her maiden name, Katherine Parker.)
Devine said the experience taught her not to back down when told that her opinion didn’t matter. “If I had just sat there and taken it, then who knows how many other students would have gone through that same thing,” she said.
Devine declined to share her political party affiliation, although she told a Maine-based podcaster last month that she was a Republican. She told the Bangor Daily News, “I do lean more towards personal liberties and accountability.”
She named “taking another look at how we’re handling the drug and homelessness epidemic” as her top priority.
“I think that we’ve lost sight of what it means to actually love and care for people, which contrary to how the council’s handling it now, it’s not giving a handout,” she said.
In her view, programs like syringe exchanges are handouts that should be further restricted because they encourage people to continue using drugs. “I’d like to see some personal accountability and helping these people not just continue in their bad habits but getting them out of that situation entirely,” she said.
She also said she is completely opposed to the Yellen Pines housing development for chronically homeless people because she doesn’t believe it will really help people, especially without sobriety or employment requirements.
Devine would like to see the city redirect some of its resources toward improving mental health facilities, she said.
Some of Devine’s views on substance use programs were influenced by her own experience going through the Blessed Hope sober living program, which is run by Calvary Chapel Bangor.
“I use that a lot in the policies that I see to push through because I know that if I had just been given more marijuana, I would never have quit,” she said.
Devine said she is very involved with her church and she volunteers with the local humane society. She spends a lot of time downtown and would welcome constituents to chat with her in person or communicate via social media if she becomes a councilor, she said.
She also said she’s attended one council meeting this year in person and watched between 10 and 15 of them online. She noted that while she likely would miss a few meetings in her first weeks postpartum, she doesn’t expect being a new parent to interfere with her council participation beyond that.
While Devine acknowledged a few people have had questions about her age, she thinks her position as a young renter and soon-to-be parent would add a healthy new perspective to the council.
She’s the second-youngest of 12 candidates running for three council seats this year, just behind 20-year-old Dawson Nevells.
“Most of the people who are older kind of have their lives already established and already have figured out the system in a way that suits them,” Devine said of the current councilors. “I’m just a regular citizen who’s young, trying to stay in Bangor, trying to raise a kid here and just start a normal life.”