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.
One Bangor City Council candidate sees drugs as the primary problem in the city and wants to eliminate affordable housing, syringe exchange programs and the public health department.
Michael Furrow, 67, has lived in Bangor for nearly 30 years. He’s retired from the military and from a job at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Furrow’s top priority is addressing drug use and he believes substances are the root of many other issues in the city. “Drugs are causing homelessness, they’re causing robberies and, of course, drug addiction,” he said.
He also wants to stop the construction of low-income housing and said at a candidate forum event last week that he thinks affordable homes are “bringing in the wrong type of people.”
Furrow does not believe that there is a housing shortage in Bangor, nor does he believe the results of the BangorHousing Study, he said. The study, commissioned by the city and carried out by an outside consultant, found that Bangor is short 700 affordable units.
The candidate thinks the City Council needs more people who think outside the box, and is running because “when good men do nothing, bad things happen.”
Furrow is involved with the Penobscot County Conservation Association and the Disabled American Veterans, and he’s an archery range instructor, he said.
The candidate declined to share his political party, saying the party system is “just designed to divide us,” although many of his policy positions are some of the most conservative in the council race.
He told the Bangor Daily News he wants to cease operating a city public health department and “let the state run it.”
Furrow sees Dorothea Dix Psychiatric Center as a key part of the city’s homelessness response and wants judges to send people there for involuntary treatment.
The aging state-run treatment facility is one of two psychiatric hospitals run by the Maine Department of Health and Human Services. 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.
In order to expand the facility, Furrow wants to see the state funding allocated to permanent supportive housing projects like Bangor’s Yellen Pines redirected to mental hospitals.
Furrow doesn’t think the syringe exchange programs in the city are working and thinks banning those programs would help address the ongoing Penobscot County HIV outbreak and coinciding surge of hepatitis C.
HIV is often transmitted by sharing needles, and programs that give out sterile ones are proven to reduce HIV and hepatitis C transmission rates by around 50%, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Furrow also would like to require local syringe service programs to label each needle they pass out and fine agencies if someone litters their syringes on the ground.
Similarly, he wants to fine grocery stores if someone abandons their shopping carts.
The candidate said he’s completely opposed to Yellen Pines because he believes housing first programs don’t work. Furrow said he expects that none of the people who live there will recover from addiction because the housing placements don’t mandate treatment, and that he believes the facility will be a “pipeline from Portland” wherein homeless people in Portland will be sent to Bangor and housed there.
Furrow’s doubts about social services extend beyond just public programs; he said he wants to get rid of some of the nonprofits in the city and believes some of the money from their budgets should be put toward the Dorothea Dix facility. This likely would not be possible or legal because nonprofits are private organizations.
“There’s a lot of them. They have so many overlapping services. Don’t need it,” he said of Bangor’s nonprofits.
Instead of funding most social programs, Furrow wants the city to focus on bringing in more jobs because a lack of them makes it hard for young people to stay here and leads to brain drain.
He thinks that homelessness and public drug use discourage businesses from moving to Bangor because they see that “Bangor’s a mess,” he said. Addressing drug-related issues, he said, would encourage people to stay.
“Bangor has to be a family-friendly, family-oriented city,” he said.
At the candidate forum last week, he raised an idea for combating drug use in the city: sending drug dogs into every homeless encampment, hourly. Sheriff Troy Morton, who was in the audience, said that would not be possible.
Furrow also wants to offer tax breaks to businesses, in order to create jobs, tax revenue and economic development.
One social program he does support is heating assistance for elderly residents.
“They’re spending so much money on the homeless, i.e. the drug problem,” Furrow said of the council. “What about the elderly?”
He noted the affordability concerns shared by many older residents, especially given rising heating oil costs. He’d like the city to provide heating assistance to those constituents and address their property tax affordability concerns.
Like some of the more liberal candidates running this year, Furrow is staunchly opposed to artificial intelligence data centers and automatic license plate readers, such as Flock cameras.
He’d like to ban those cameras and said he’d make the temporary data center ban that is already in place permanent, noting that electric and water bills often go up when a data center is built nearby.
In terms of the way the council conducts its business, Furrow noted widespread concerns about bickering among councilors and said he thinks too many sitting councilors are political activists.
“You cannot have political activism on a city council. City council is a business. It has to be run like a business. We have to bring businesses here. We have to bring industry here. We can’t be worrying about ICE,” he said, alluding to a monthslong debate earlier this year regarding how the city should regulate cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
Furrow said he’s attended almost all of the council meetings this year.