Mary Trescot (Photo courtesy Al Trescot)
Lincoln County Commissioner Mary Trescot is seeking a second term.
Trescot chairs the Lincoln County Board of Commissioners. She represents District 3, which includes the towns of Alna, Damariscotta, Dresden, Jefferson, Newcastle, Somerville, and Whitefield, as well as the unorganized territory of Hibbert’s Gore.
Trescot, D-Damariscotta, also chairs the Lincoln and Sagadahoc Multicounty Jail Authority Board of Directors, which oversees Two Bridges Regional Jail in Wiscasset.
She cites reforms to the county’s finance department as an important accomplishment of the board during her first term.
“We changed auditors this year. That helped us a lot,” Trescot said. “We found out there were a lot of things we weren’t doing quite right, so we made a lot of changes in that finance department.”
Trescot and her fellow commissioners have been working to rebuild the county’s surplus.
Every year, the county takes out a multimillion-dollar tax anticipation note – a line of credit that allows the county to pay its bills until it sends municipalities their tax bills and begins to receive payments.
Trescot – who describes herself as a fiscal conservative and a social liberal – eventually hopes the county will build enough of a surplus to reduce the amount the county borrows or eliminate the need for borrowing altogether.
“We’re trying to bring that number down so we don’t have to pay that interest,” she said.
The Lincoln County News has reported at length on the fiscal issues at Two Bridges and in Maine’s corrections system as a whole, and Trescot hopes to continue her work with the commissioners and the jail authority to find a solution.
“We have a hope that the four counties in our prosecutorial district … are going to come together and we’ll be able to run a jail off the (property tax) caps that we have now,” Trescot said. “We already have a contract with Waldo County and we’re working with Knox, and they’re showing an interest in becoming part of the foursome.”
Knox, Lincoln, Sagadahoc, and Waldo counties make up Maine Prosecutorial District 6.
In the meantime, Trescot hopes to bring volunteers into the jail to assist with administrative tasks – like answering the phone – as a way to ease the burden on jail staff after budget-driven layoffs.
Trescot is an advocate for the county’s recycling program and its new composting program. She thinks the county can do even more to encourage recycling and composting, which save towns money on waste disposal.
Trescot also wants to make county government more transparent. She would like to work with Lincoln County Television to record and air the board’s meetings.
In addition to Trescot’s role as chairwoman of the commissioners and the jail authority, she chairs the Central Lincoln County Ambulance Service Inc. Board of Directors, sits on the Damariscotta Budget Committee and the Lincoln Cemetery Association board, and volunteers with Boy Scout Troop 213 in Damariscotta.
She was a Damariscotta selectman in the 1980s and a member of the Damariscotta Cemetery Committee for several consecutive three-year terms ending in 2012.
In her professional life, Trescot was a Damariscotta police officer, a Lincoln County sheriff’s deputy for 22 years, and the executive director of the nonprofit Youth Promise.
As a sheriff’s deputy, she administered the county’s D.A.R.E. program and Youth Aid Bureau and investigated crimes against children. She helped found Youth Promise, which worked with juveniles in the criminal justice system and other youth.
Now semi-retired, Trescot has a part-time job delivering flowers for the Louis Doe Home Center in Newcastle. “I’m not good at sitting down and doing nothing,” she said.
Trescot lives in Damariscotta with her husband, Al Trescot, and their Tibetan terrier, Louis. She has two daughters, a stepson and a stepdaughter, and three grandchildren.
