Millinocket and East Millinocket will share a fire chief starting in September in the latest example of increasing cooperation between the former mill towns.
The two towns will share East Millinocket’s longtime Chief Kevin McAdam for at least nine months. The move is temporary for now, but the neighboring towns will weigh whether to make the arrangement more permanent by next June.
Both towns have been rebounding from the devastating 2008 and 2014 closures of the twin mills that put them on the map. School consolidation is on the table in the region, and officials in both towns said sharing a chief could be a step toward merging the departments later on.
“This is kind of just a stepping stone in my eyes to an even bigger plan to regionalize the services,” former Millinocket Town Council Chair Matthew Bragdon, who resigned from the council this month to attend college, said of the move.
McAdam will replace Chief Jonathan Cote, who resigned in May after he was placed under investigation by the town. Officials have been tight-lipped about what Cote was investigated for. The resignation was well timed for the towns’ ongoing conversations about sharing services. East Millinocket will pay Millinocket $33,750 for the arrangement.
“It just happened to be that we didn’t have a fire chief,” Bragdon said. “The discussion came up about trying this out, and I thought it was a great idea.”
The two towns are extreme examples of the demographic shifts hitting much of rural Maine. As the state’s population ages and inflation continues to drive up costs, many municipalities are facing tough conversations about what services they can independently maintain.
Last year, superintendents in Millinocket, East Millinocket and nearby Medway agreed to begin meeting to discuss whether their school districts should merge as student populations drop, conversations that are ongoing. Community ties to the school districts have loosened in recent years. The towns set aside their once-intense rivalry to merge football teams in 2017.
Firefighters in the two towns have been side by side for years as part of mutual aid agreements, which McAdam says have been “working better and better all the time.”
The shifting demographics have already pushed the departments closer together. McAdam, who has been with East Millinocket’s department for 36 years and worked in Millinocket in the past, said limited staff has stretched the departments.
“Nobody wants to do this job anymore, so we’re all doing the same work, if not more, with fewer people,” he said. “So we strengthened our relationship between the two departments over the last few years, and we work great together now.”
Daniel O’Connor is a Report for America corps member who covers rural government as part of the partnership between the Bangor Daily News and The Maine Monitor, with additional support from BDN and Monitor readers.