A Windsor man running for the House seat in the new District 80 will have his eyes on welfare reform, maintaining Second Amendment rights, and protecting the environment if elected in November.
Ray Bates, chair of Windsor’s Republican committee, was unanimously selected as the Republican candidate for District 80 in July after an earlier candidate dropped out of the race.
Going door to door in the district, Bates said the main thing he hears from people is support for welfare reform.
“I hear quite a bit of that out there, and I agree with that philosophy that we need to reign in who we help, and help only the most needy and weed out those that don’t” need the help, Bates said.
“I understand there are people obviously that need help and then there are some people who perhaps don’t need as much as they’re getting,” and those are the people most folks Bates has spoken to are concerned about, he said.
Protecting Second Amendment rights is another hot topic among the people Bates has visited, and he describes himself as “a very strong advocate of the Second Amendment.”
“I would definitely not be voting in favor of anything that had any limitation to the rights of people to have arms,” Bates said.
A self-described sportsman, Bates received an A+ rating and an endorsement from the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine.
Though Bates said he is a supporter of Gov. Paul LePage and the two men share similar views on welfare reform and gun rights, “I am not a rubber stamp for Governor LePage,” Bates said.
“There are some things I might find myself on the other side of the coin on, but we’d have to wait and see. That would have to be something very specific before I’d say I can’t support the governor on this, or I can support him on that,” Bates said.
Bates hopes to understand proposals on any subject before taking a firm stance on them, and gave taxes as an example.
“There are those Republicans out there that have taken the pledge of no new taxes, and while I share that sentiment, I hate the word never, because never is a long time and circumstances change and conditions change, and you can never be sure that you won’t be in a position where … the choice is there is no choice,” Bates said.
“My feet are not hooked in cement on any issue. I want to make intelligent decisions if I’m a legislator, and I don’t want to be tied down” to a specific stance, he said.
The environment is an area close to Bates’ heart, though, and he said it hasn’t been a big topic during his visits around the district.
Bates strongly favors protecting the environment, but doing so while finding ways to allow for businesses and people to do what they need or want to do.
“I have a deep-rooted environmental approach to things because I grew up that way. My formative years, you might say, were in relation to the environment” in the 1970s, Bates said.
Bates, who works in water and waste-water treatment, said, “I actually started my life in waste-water treatment because I believed in finding a way to protect the environment, our rivers and streams and so forth, and that’s where I began. My mindset came from that.”
Bates, a Winthrop native, moved to Windsor in 1981 and lives there with his wife and two children.
He is a member of the Windsor Board of Selectmen, a position he has served in for eight years. He has also served six years as chair of the town’s budget committee and served on the town planning board in the 1980s.
