Lincoln County administrators welcomed some 300 attendees to the 2012 Convention of Maine Counties, held at Spruce Point Resort, in Boothbay Harbor, Sept. 5-7.
Lincoln County last hosted the convention in 2000. This year, the task of organizing the counties’ annual convention fell to Lincoln County Administrator John O’Connell and Deputy Administrator Debbie Tibbetts. Tibbetts and O’Connell started the planning process almost a year ago.
“We were working last November, and I remember thinking in January [2012] that we are so far behind.” O’Connell said post-convention.
“There’s an expectation that a county will host it in turn, though there’s no specific order and I think it is going to Franklin County, to the Sugarloaf area [next time]; it’ll probably be Somerset and Franklin combined. It’s a lot of work,” O’Connell said.
Because the convention is held annually, O’Connell worked to include all county departments with two full-day sessions for “communications people, training for Maine Sheriff’s Association…we’re pretty much getting everybody into the same area at the same time. There are a lot of things going on and, as counties, we have to pay attention to the big picture.”
There were multiple workshops held simultaneously and conventioneers had to pick and choose what to attend.
Some topics of discussions and workshops over the course of three days included HIPPA Privacy Standards and Healthcare Protection; information about the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) and the Responsibilities of Maine County Commissioners; the Freedom of Access Act; MMA Worker’s Compensation; Bath Salts and Synthetic Drugs; and, Addressing Today’s Challenges in County Government, and Getting Ahead of Trends in the Judicial System with Cisco TelePresence.
Lincoln County Commissioner Sheridan Bond attended the Bath Salts and Synthetic Drugs seminar, lead by Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Mark Bridgham and LCSO Detective and Maine Drug Enforcement Agency agent Jason Pease.
Bond said the officers gave startling information about the history of “bath salts” and that Maine should be praised for working swiftly to make the substance illegal.
According to Bond, Maine has an edge over other states in the fight against synthetic drugs, because in Maine, the base substances and compounds themselves have been made illegal, whereas in other states, chemists can reformulate synthetic drugs easily, creating essentially another “legal” drug.
Bond praised the presenting officers and found the workshop informative and interesting.
O’Connell said he is very happy with the positive feedback he’s received from different county administrators. “They know how much work goes into it [planning the convention],” he said.
Juxtaposed with serious and timely workshops, O’Connell and Tibbetts also worked in relaxation and activities for the conventioneers.
There were plenty of outdoor activities, including golf, boat rides and convenient accessibility to Boothbay Harbor attractions
The opening night reception dinner on Sept. 5 featured the humor of comedian Tim Sample, a one-time Boothbay Harbor resident. When the featured speaker for the Sept. 6 luncheon, Kate Braestrup, fell ill and unable to attend, O’Connell scrambled to fill the slot with other speakers, including Lincoln County’s Labor Relations/Human Resources Consultant Annalee Rosenblatt.
O’Connell said his greatest concern was the weather.
He remembers hosting the event in 2000 and “we had a big hurricane [Hurricane Gordon] working to our south that gave us some warm weather, but some uneasy moments. This time around, it was very much in our favor, it [the weather] just kept improving,” he said.
Of speaker F. Lee Bailey, the final evening of the convention (see related story this issue of The Lincoln County News), O’Connell said, he generally agreed with Bailey’s observations, but noted there’s a big difference between those incarcerated in jails and state inmates.
“We don’t want to see them [inmates] institutionalized,” O’Connell said, but he will always remain concerned about the practice of mixing state prisoners with a jail population, whose crimes are most often less severe.
O’Connell admitted interest though, in Bailey’s recommendation of using polygraphs as deterrents to re-offending, but wondered how inmates with historically little money could afford the tests.
Following Bailey’s dinner presentation, the final treat was after-dinner dancing to the music of Uptown Express.
Talking about the successful event on Sept. 11 and calling himself fully recovered from the nearly year-long effort, O’Connell said, dryly, “You kinda get (a) survivor ribbon…I felt like the mother of the bride…”
