Firefighter, businessman, and quiet community servant, William “Bill” Brewer is all smiles after an interview in Newcastle. (Sherwood Olin photo)
The William “Bill” Brewer the general public is mostly familiar with looks like a man with a great deal on his mind and little time for foolishness. Looks in this case are slightly deceiving. Brewer is indeed a serious man who likes to get things down, but his stoic visage disguises a refined sense of humor and a keen eye for detail.
Long before he graduated from Lincoln Academy in 1964, Brewer had discovered he had a knack for hard work and a talent for record keeping, a skill that translated well into the accounting profession. After five years of college, he emerged with a Bachelor of Science in accounting degree from Bentley University in Boston in 1969.
By then, Brewer had had enough of the big city and couldn’t wait to relocate to fr iendlier environs. During college he had made ends meet at various times by driving a Checkered Cab and working with the floor crew at the Boston Garden, changing the floor over nightly between the Celtics famed parquet basketball court and the Bruins home ice underneath.
“I attended quite a few Bruins games,” Brewer said.
While he had interviewed with a couple big accounting firms right out of college, it was a personal connection that helped Brewer obtain his first position. Brewer’s father Horace knew Reny founder R.H. “Bob” Reny very well and Reny connected the Brewers with Bath accountant Willard Sprague. Sprague hired the younger Brewer to be the third person in Sprague’s Bath office.
The real world experience Bill Brewer gained there helped out when it came to taking the certified public accountant exam later. Coming down to the last of the test’s five sections, the one focused on legal issues, Brewer surprised himself rolling through the expected four-hour test in under an hour and half. Brewer said he checked and rechecked his answers, but he needn’t have worried.
“Come to find out, one of our clients had a fire loss, and most of the questions on the law section had to do with (Uniform Commercial Code Article 1), and we’d gone through that whole routine due to the guy having a fire loss,” Brewer said. “Who was going to pay? Which pieces of property or equipment had insurance and was the equipment covered? All that stuff. So I aced it and came out an official CPA. That was rewarding.”
Today, with more than 50 years experience under his belt, Brewer said is not sure he could pass the licensing test.
“I couldn’t pass the test today,” he said. “They have updated the standards. They expect us to meet the same standards as the auditors at General Motors, which is just crazy.”
In 1972, Brewer became a partner in the firm and in 1975 he took over the practice entirely when Sprague’s wife insisted on retiring to her home in Virginia Beach, Va. At the time William H. Brewer and Co. had five employees. Today, Brewer employs a team of 14, including his son, Fred Brewer, and daughter, Bobbi Brewer.
While he is still a regular presence at his Bath office, Bill Brewer has gotten to the point in his career now where there is little pressure for him to come in to the office if there isn’t a pressing need.
It is possible to do a great deal of accounting work remotely, and the firm coped as everyone did during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, but Brewer is a firm believer that the best way to get an audit done in a timely fashion to get an auditor on site, in front of the customer.
It is simply easier for an overworked staff person to put an email or text request at the bottom of any list of priorities, Brewer said.
“We’ve had a lot of meetings this year, staff meetings, and we’re not going to do email anymore to clients,” Brewer said. “We’re going to go to them and get the information so that we can get the job out in a timely fashion … They try to kick you out if you’re there and get rid of you, versus if you’re doing a remote email and texting, they have an excuse on why they didn’t give you the information in a timely basis. Something else came up and they didn’t get to it right?”
Today William H. Brewer and Co. serves a number of municipalities along with a few nonprofits and individual clients. Echoing an industry problem across the nation, Brewer said accounting services in the state of Maine suffer a manpower problem.
According to Brewer, there are fewer firms and fewer new accountants entering the profession than there were a few years ago. Even the ranks of individual tax preparers have been thinned by natural attrition, he said.
Not only are there fewer trained professionals available to do the work, more information than ever is required, Brewer said. For the clients and the accountants, streamlining the volume and type of information an audit requires could go a long way to speeding up the process.
“You know, we deal (with) a lot of municipalities,” he said. “If you look at their financial statements, probably the first five exhibits (are) meaningless to the board of selectmen, because it doesn’t deal with day-to-day operations and they all know and look at the day-to-day operations.”
Brewer said his office fields multiple calls every week from nonprofits and municipalities looking for auditors. One town that recently called has not had an audit done for six years. In that case, Brewer said he declined the business. In order to do the current year, every single outstanding audit needs to be done first, in chronological order Brewer said.
“This is no exaggeration,” he said. “I think probably this year we are averaging anywhere from one to three phone calls a week from someplace in the state of Maine wanting to know if we were available to do them.”
Brewer said he is aware of on accountant in Bath who tried to sell his practice without success. Another Bath area CPA has stopped taking new clients at all and ditched some others he already had.
“We’re not picking them up, so I don’t know where they’re going to go,” Brewer said.
Still there are signs of hope, Brewer said. Speaking with associates who own a CPA firm in Houlton, Brewer reported his contacts are over the moon with the facts there are 10 students currently in the accounting program at the University of Maine Presque Isle.
When he is not working, Brewer serves on the Great Salt Bay Sanitary District Board of Trustees, a seat he has held since about 1978. He is a past president and treasurer for the Damariscotta Newcastle Lions Club and he is the treasurer for the Lincoln County Historical Association. He is also currently the longest tenured member of the Massasoit Engine Co., which serves as the Damariscotta Fire Department, having signed on in 1969.
During his tenure, Brewer worked his way up through the ranks serving as fire chief from 1990-2001. During that time, the town installed a water main down Main Street, supporting the expansion of what was then Miles Memorial Hospital and lowering the town’s insurance rating. Brewer also oversaw the relocation of the fire department from its previous home adjacent to the former town office on Church Street to its current stand alone facility on Biscay Road.
While he remains active locally Brewer said he has little desire to leave his home state. Everything he has left to do on his life’s “bucket list” can be done right here in Maine, he said, adding most of his goals involve spending time with his family and grandchildren. A number of years ago, Brewer and number of Damariscotta businessmen jointly purchased a seasonal camp in what is the now the Ebeemee Township.
Falling in love the area, Bill and Deane Brewer bought a camp nearby and they like to get away to it whenever they can. Over the years they have expanded the building’s footprint and added creature comforts like electricity, heat, and running water. In the last two years, Brewer and family have managed to ride 700-800 miles per year on their four-wheelers, including an epic ride to catch the solar eclipse in April 2024.
While the eclipse was definitely a bucket list item, any other life goals he has remaining can almost certainly be found in the state of Maine, Brewer said.
“I’ve been to England,” he said. “I was only 11 years old when I went but I had no desire to go back. I’ve been to Disney, Florida, Cape Canaveral, no desire to go back. I have no desire to go back to Boston. My sister in San Francisco had a place in Hawaii. Deane and Bobbi went out. I don’t want to go, really. Just send me up in the woods. Just let me sit on the porch, look out the windows, watch the golden eagle fly by … Do you see things like that down here? People don’t even know what a golden eagle looks like.”
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