Five Candidates up for Two Waldoboro Select Board Seats

At annual town meeting Tuesday, June 10, Waldoboro voters will get to choose between five candidates for two three-year terms on the Waldoboro Board of Selectmen.

The board of selectmen race is the only contest in town this year.

Three candidates are running for budget committee: incumbents Ted Mohlie and Duncan Morrell are looking to keep their seats and William Bragg is running for the seat currently held by Ellen Winchenbach. All three are for three-year terms.

Incumbents Samuel Chapman and Fred Bess are running for three-year terms on the Waldoboro Utility District, but no papers were taken out for a two-year seat held by Carl Waterman, according to Town Clerk Linda Perry.

There are no candidates for two three-year seats on the RSU 40 Board of Directors that were vacated late last summer.

Waldoboro school board members Christopher Duffy and Darrell Goldrup resigned in August and September 2013, respectively.

Waldoboro’s annual town meeting will be held by referendum at the Waldoboro Municipal Building on Tuesday, June 10. Polls will be open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

For information on the proposed town budget, see the article in this issue.

Candidates for the Waldoboro Board of Selectmen, in alphabetical order:

Butler is the founder of The Jojoba Company, which deals in the extract from the desert Jojoba plant. He developed the company with his wife, Sally.

His professional career includes serving in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan, teaching English and German in Beirut, and working in the banking and oil industries in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

In his earlier term as selectman, Butler said he worked with the town’s planning board to develop the small wind energy ordinance, and worked with town departments on improving policy.

He is currently the chair of the Waldoboro Transfer Station Committee, and served previously on the town’s broadband Internet committee and on an ad hoc culinary arts committee.

Butler was spurred on to run for the board again after seeing what he described as “very little movement” by the board in the last year.

“The current board has no sense of vision about where we should be going or what we should be doing. There’s been no work on capital budgets, there’s been no setting of priorities. I feel these things need to be addressed,” Butler said. “We’re not going to change this thing unless both of the seats are occupied by Jann and me. I think you’ll see the same-old same-old if we don’t win.”

Butler said he and Minzy want to “strive for consensus” by bringing the different communities of the town together for the visioning process, and committing to a process of inclusiveness, accommodation, mutual respect, and a passion for getting to the facts.

“We share a sense, I think, that this community is stuck in the mud right now and needs to move forward. And it can’t because of the way things have been bifurcated,” he said.

Some of the issues may be resolved by improving communications at the board meetings, Butler said.

“When you have a meeting, you want to be open and listen to the opinions and suggestions of others. Neither Jann nor I sense that the present board has been open to that,” he said.

Butler plans to improve the business climate in Waldoboro by continuing to work on improving Internet access in town, as well as pushing for the development of a town charter.

A charter is needed so people know what the ground rules are in town, he said.

“If you move into a town as a business and don’t understand the ground rules, it’s risky, and as a business what you want to do is minimize risk,” Butler said.

“You can’t bring businesses to Waldoboro. That has to be done by the businesses themselves,” he said. “But, if you build it, they will come. I’ve always believed that.”

Butler also believes issues in economic sectors in town such as the village, the clamming industry, farming, and small businesses in general, should be handled by the groups directly involved, and the selectmen should be supportive and bring resources to bear where possible.

The selectmen need to give support to the town manager as well, Butler said.

“We lost a town manager, a good one, because of the way in which the select board managed him. It was micromanagement,” he said. “You can’t have town government when you’re involved in the minutiae instead of in the broad picture. And that’s what the select board should be doing, they should be setting the broad goals, long-term, short-term, medium-term. And then get people involved to work toward those goals.”

Involvement and volunteerism is another avenue Butler hopes to improve on.

“The strength of Waldoboro has always been its volunteers,” he said.

Collamore grew up in Bremen and went clamming and lobstering until the early 1980s when he went to work – temporarily, he thought – for Bath Iron Works.

Twenty-two years later, and after serving as president of the shipbuilder’s workforce, Collamore left BIW and went back to school part time to get a bachelor’s degree in public administration from the University of Maine.

Collamore was first elected to the select board in 1989 and has served around 13 years on the board in total, roughly seven of those years as chair. He first became interested in the job when his father served as a selectman in Bremen.

“When he was a selectman down there, he was selectman, he was dog catcher, road commissioner. You done it all,” he said. “I didn’t have previous experience as selectmen, but I did, listening to him go through all that.”

Of his resignation the last time he served on the board, Collamore said he resigned to deal with his parents’ health issues – though he said it was job-related concerns at the time.

“I didn’t really want to bring my mother and father’s personal things into all this,” Collamore said.

Collamore’s mother went into a coma and passed away, and his father had a stroke and was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, necessitating Collamore to care for him for a year and a half until he was at Woodland’s Senior Living in Rockland, Collamore said.

Collamore has also served as a trustee for the Waldoboro Public Library, on the town’s shellfish conservation committee for nine years, and on the Waldoboro Day committee since its reincarnation. He is currently the representative for Waldoboro and Bremen on the local Lobster Zone Council.

Collamore said he wants to serve on the select board again because “the community seems to be at odds about everything” and he would like to “bring everyone back together.”

“You need that trust and respect amongst everyone. I don’t know if we’ve lost that, or if it’s my misinterpretation, but everyone seems to be bitter, or whatever. I’d like to change that,” he said.

Collamore also wants to focus on economic development, particularly year-round employers, which he said he does not see happening currently.

“One thing I hear from a lot of people, is we’ve always had this issue of do we really want business or don’t we?” he said. “No one wants to pay any more taxes, but to reduce the tax rate or keep it where it is currently, I’d like to see some type of new business.”

Bolstering the town’s biggest industry, clamming, is another of his goals. Collamore said he gives a lot of credit to the shellfish conservation committees and Chair Abden Simmons, and he wants to put more into helping.

“We really need to work harder to get more of the river open for the diggers,” he said.

Collamore would like to improve communication throughout the town, and to restore the annual volunteer recognition program he started with Liam Ducharme, he said.

With a daughter, a son, and three grandchildren living in Waldoboro, Collamore said he is taking the long view of what is best for the town.

“I have to think long term, I’m not a short-term person,” he said.

Collamore did not express a preference for a candidate to win the other open seat. He said he has worked with 16 different selectmen already and “I can work with anyone. That’s really the bottom line with me.”

Cooley works as a patrol officer and the administrative assistant to the chief of police in Rockport, and has over 23 years experience working in county and municipal government.

He has worked previously as a lobster fisherman, merchant mariner, and in road and industrial construction, among other positions.

Cooley has served on the select board for the last four years, two of them as chair. He also served three years on the then-School Administrative District 40 Board of Directors.

Cooley’s biggest concern was the town’s undesignated fund balance, which had dropped from about $1.3 million to under $65,000 in three years, and it was his goal to rebuild it – an effort he said is now ahead of schedule.

“You can’t keep spending the undesignated fund to keep your taxes down. There is a day of reckoning and we saw it, and everything else suffers because of it. You’re cutting back on your spending, you’re cutting back on your capital budget – you can’t do that. You have to go along and keep things on an even keel,” Cooley said.

As of June 30, 2013, the town’s undesignated fund balance was $708,694, and as much as $100,000 could be added to that at the end of this fiscal year, according to Finance Director Eileen Dondlinger.

The last four years have been hard to keep the budget and property taxes down, Cooley said.

“We’re in a state where it’s bad, it’s grim, no matter which way you look. The good thing is we have achieved that goal and got some money set aside,” he said.

Once the undesignated fund balance is rebuilt, some of the funds can be used to get town roads back up to par and for figuring out what to do with solid waste once the contract with Penobscot Energy Recovery Company, where the town’s solid waste is currently taken to be burned for electricity generation, is up in 2018.

If elected, Cooley hopes keep Waldoboro attractive for businesses by limiting further regulation.

“I’d like to see some industrial [businesses], but at this point I’m willing to go along with anything. We’ve lost too many businesses over the years: the canning factory, the button factory, Sylvania, Lincoln Canoe,” Cooley said. “We need to revitalize the town and we need to get some businesses in here, attract some businesses in here that will get our people back to work.”

“You have to work with them, not against them. You can’t have so many ordinances and rules and regulations that you drive them away. If you have to give them a tax break to get them here for a few years, I wouldn’t be opposed to that. Whatever it takes to get them here – within reason, of course,” he said.

Too many ordinances can be restrictive, according to Cooley, and while the current situation in town does not appear to be an issue, proposed ordinances crop up every year, he said.

“You can’t police too heavy when it comes to landowners’ rights. I know I don’t like it,” he said. “I don’t want to pay taxes on a piece of property and then have somebody else tell me what I can and cannot do. That just doesn’t fly with me.”

Cooley said it doesn’t matter to him who wins the other selectman’s seat but added, “If I had my choice, I’d just as soon see Clinton Collamore. I’ve worked with him before on two different occasions. He’s willing to listen, and I think, being a native, being here all his life, that would be my choice.”

Dever moved to town as a child in 1955 and graduated from Medomak Valley High School before joining the Navy for four years.

He worked for over 30 years as a machinist at Bath Iron Works, serving part of the time as a shop steward in the union. He retired in 2012.

Dever says he is not trying to eliminate services in Waldoboro, but will be looking for ways to save money and keep taxes down if elected.

One of the areas he would like to see reduced is the budget for the Waldoboro Police Department.

“I was just a little PO’d about the way things went last year with the vote, the town meetings that we kept having, and kept having, and kept having,” Dever said, where the voters continued to vote down portions of the town budget, include the police department.

Dever said he understands the town needs police, but the cost is a lot for a town like Waldoboro.

“As my dad always used to say, you can’t legislate or write a law for morality and ethics,” he said. “People pretty much have to learn that stuff themselves, and police ourselves a little better rather than expecting eight or nine officers – that’s way too many for the size of the town.”

“I would like to see it come down a little bit, I doubt that it ever will,” he said.

As to the style of town meeting held, Dever said it is difficult to choose between the open style and referendum. When he started working at Bath Iron Works, the union would physically “split the hall” by going to opposite sides of the civic center for a yes or a no vote.

“People started feeling intimidated, that’s when they went to the ballot box. Hopefully people wouldn’t feel intimidated with an open town meeting, but a lot of people today prefer the sanctity of the voting booth. They feel that nobody’s looking over their shoulder,” Dever said.

Dever also aims to bring in new business to Waldoboro to help lessen the property tax burden. He admits to not having knowledge of how to improve the business climate, but he can work with the more experienced current selectmen to find methods that work.

One area of concern for Dever is ordinances putting up “roadblocks” for new businesses.

“Some of it is okay, but a lot of it might scare a lot of people off that want to do business,” Dever said.

Dever has little hope that much will change in town, however.

“I don’t think you’ll ever change anything in Waldoboro, they’re pretty much set in their ways,” he said. “Change is hard, people don’t want change. People want to have their little cottage businesses and stuff. People might have to live with a little less in the police budget and they might not be able to buy new dump trucks every year.”

“We all have to put our heads together and find ways to live within our means,” he said.

Dever declined to give an endorsement to any of the other select board candidates.

“At Bath I had to work with a lot of different people, and in the Navy I had to work with a lot of different people. You learn to be able to do that,” he said. “That’s part of getting along and making the family happy.”

Minzy grew up in an enlisted Navy family, crossing the country several times before she graduated from Brunswick High School.

She taught primary and middle school grades in Nobleboro for 25 years and in other towns as well, and continues to substitute teach in RSU 40. She worked nights for 15 years at Taction.

Minzy served for six years as a member of the Waldoboro Public Library Board of Trustees, five of those as president. She also served on the Central Maine Library District Executive Board, on a number of Department of Education committees, and in several roles with her church.

Minzy decided to run for the select board after attending and watching the board’s meetings over several years.

“Some of the things I watched disturbed me, the way some things were handled, and it didn’t seem like it was for the good of the town, and that bothered me. I said, well, I could complain, or I could do something about it. So, I decided to do something about it,” she said.

In the many boards and committees she has served on, Minzy said she has encountered members with agendas and people who are “very narrow,” but by using reasoning and respecting differences difficult boards can be turned around in time.

“Having dealt with young children, who all come from their own different homes with their own different set of rules, their own set of what’s right and what you can do – I’ve worked with lots of those and been able to build community,” Minzy said. “The biggest thing in education is building the community within the classroom so that you can work as a team.”

If elected, Minzy hopes to help Waldoboro find a vision for the future, picking up efforts from years back that she said have fizzled. Visioning would include looking at the Downtown Master Plan completed a few years ago and updating the town’s comprehensive plan, she said.

Minzy’s vision would include making downtown welcoming, even just by small steps like the village working group hanging and filling window boxes downtown recently.

“Make it welcoming for people to come spend money, businesses to want to be here, to do something with it,” Minzy said.

Minzy hopes getting people to have a stake in the community and care about it will bring about more action. “I’d like to see people use their energy for good, something that would help the town,” she said.

Fiscally, Minzy said she lives on a “shoestring” budget on a personal level and would operate the same way for the town.

“I do not waste money, I do not spend money if it’s not necessary. I don’t like to borrow money, but if my roof had a leak in it, by gum I’d borrow money. If I had to, to preserve something,” Minzy said. “Tax money belongs to the people. I would never spend someone else’s money in a frivolous manner.”

Minzy would be happy to see either Butler or Clint Collamore get the other seat on the board.

She and Butler “don’t always agree on everything, but we can discuss our points of view without any problem. I’ve been running with Bob and I’d be more than happy if Bob got on.”

Minzy described Collamore as a reasonable man who would be fine on the board.