Glenn Angell brings the benefits of 38-year career dealing with land use issues to the service of his adopted hometown of Whitefield. Angell, a state licensed soil evaluator, is currently the chair of the Whitefield Planning Board. (Sherwood Olin photo)
Whitefield Planning Board Chair Glenn Angell is what happens when the wisecracking kid from high school matures and brings the same irreverent sense of humor to the serious business at hand.
“I used to love to go to work on a rainy day and be extra, extra cheerful,” Angell said. “’Good morning, isn’t a great day?’ It would drive everybody crazy, but it was great fun.”
Not surprisingly, Angell comes by his sense of humor honestly. When the Connecticut native decided to move to Maine to attend college, he facetiously told his father he was moving to “pay them back” in return for all the Mainers who moved to Connecticut looking for work.
“He said, ‘Son, I appreciate that and if there is anybody that can accomplish that any better than you, I don’t know who it is,’” Angell said.
Don’t be fooled by the humor, however. Angell takes the board’s business and his responsibility to the community very seriously. So seriously in fact the he resisted getting involved in town affairs during most of his 38-year career working for the state of Maine. He was 58 and nearing retirement when he allowed himself to be recruited to the planning board in 2012.
Angell is now is his 11th year of active service and now serving his first term as board chair, aside from a four month fill-in service a few years ago.
He brings to the task a wealth of expertise specific to the board’s needs. Before he retired in 2018, Angell, a licensed soil evaluator, worked for the state in various roles related to land use, conservation, and regulation. Angell said his career experiences gave him a special appreciation for his adopted home.
“I have traveled all over the state,” he said. “I have seen all sorts of interesting things in state of Maine. It is a gorgeous state. It’s a wonderful state, and the sad thing is most people never begin to see the neat corners of it and the neat corners in their own backyard.”
Angell first came to Maine in the early 1970s to attend the University of Maine at Orono. He earned a bachelor’s degree in wildlife management, graduating in 1976. Along the way he learned he despised classification courses, with the sole exception of soil studies.
“I was fascinated with soils and soil profiles, and what have you,” he said. “So when I graduated, the spring semester of my senior year in ‘76, the instructor said, ‘you know they are starting a new program in the state to license people to design septic systems and one of the key parts of it is doing soil analysis, You ought to take the test.’”
“I didn’t know anything about septic systems,” Angell said, shrugging, “You flush the toilet and it goes away.”
That summer, Angell took the field test, followed by the written test in November. When the first batch of site evaluator licenses came out in February 1977, Angell’s was among them.
Angell started working for the state in 1980, taking a position with the Land Use Regulation Commission, where he focused developing regulations for Maine’s unorganized territories.
“I got started with planning and zoning real, real early,” he said. “Cut my teeth doing research stuff and writing permits and what have you.”
Later he moved on to work for the Downeast Conservation Development District as a utilization forester. There his role was to help businesses in Washington County promote and grow forest products outside the paper industry.
By 1988 Angell was working with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. At that point the personal computer revolution was on. As Angell learned the technology for his own job, he gradually took on the role of what is now called an information technology specialist.
“Next thing I knew, I was working for the bureau of remediation as a PC coordinator, kind of helping the department move into the computer age,” he said. “I spent the next 20 years on computers and data systems and what have you.
“Those were the years I spent enjoying doing site evaluations, designing septic systems because I wasn’t stuck in the office all the time. Get back out in the field. Get my hands dirty. As I termed it, it was a way to keep my sanity. I kept a pulse in the real world,” Angell said.
According to Angell, cocooned in the regulatory office in Augusta, it is easy to get a warped view of society.
“You’re constantly dealing with trying to get people to follow the rules and they are always doing something wrong,” he said. “The advantage as a site evaluator I was always trying to solve the problem, to come up with solution.”
In 2012, a state site evaluator position opened up in the Maine Department of Health and Human Services and it was ideal for Angell. He could have retired at age 60 in 2014, but he ended staying an additional four years because, he said, he was having so much fun.
“I shifted to that job in June (2012),” he said. “That August, I got a phone call from somebody, they said a member of the planning board has left town so he had to resign, ‘would you step in and take over?’ … I thought aw, why the heck not. I dodged this bullet for 58 years. It’s time to pay back.”
Angell, a self-described introvert, said he enjoys serving his town, and he feels an obligation as community member to do so, but when told he looks like he enjoys the process, Angell said he wouldn’t necessarily call the work “fun.”
“To say we enjoy it, the hard part of sitting on a board like that, especially a local board, is you are dealing with people who are mad about something,” he said. “It is a never-ending battle. People are always mad at you.”
Currently the hot button issue in Whitefield is a proposed repurposing of what was a nursing home for the elderly into a private, residential substance abuse treatment facility for the formerly incarcerated. A number of the facility’s neighbors in Coopers Mills have expressed strong opposition to the project, and have prevailed upon the town’s select board to help develop a moratorium ordinance that could forestall its development.
Angell said he is more concerned with the potential ordinance changes than specific proposal at issue. If the facility’s opponents really get involved in the process, they will learn a lot about land use issues and regulations.
“What most people don’t get about most land use ordinances, the biggest thing they are designed for is to cause you to slow down to think through what you’re doing, and think through the ramifications,” he said. “That facility may go through and be there but I expect that before we’re done, the town’s ordinances are better for it, and that is my goal. I don’t focus on that facility. I think about how can I make things better?”
The more people who get involved and learn about the issues, the better the outcome will be for the town, he said.
Angell described an epiphany he had while working a three-member team during his days at DHHS. The trio was responsible for reviewing documents that came down from the federal regulators and Angell realized each member of the team approached the reviews with a different perspective.
“It’s those varied perspectives that lead us to have a better overall decision,” he said. “That’s why you have boards. That’s why you have five members on the select board. That’s why you have five members on the planning board. It is those multiple views of the world that enrich the process. We all have responsibility to put that in so that we truly have a better community.”
Aside from his public service, Angell prefers to keep a low profile. His favorites activities are bridge, which he plays twice a week, and reading. He attends Mass three times a week.
“It is an important part of my life,” he said. “When I went, there was another guy who went, a widower. He was alone. He went out to breakfast every morning. I started going out to breakfast with him one day a week. He is now in the Maine Veterans’ Home. He had a major health incident and had to go in. I pick him up once a week take him to Mass and out to breakfast afterwards, just to keep going. That’s our friendship, we keep going. I like doing things like that.”
He lives on North Hunts Meadow Road with his wife, Rose Angell. The couple will celebrate 45 years of marriage in August.
The couple has a son, Nick, who lives near Madison, Wis., and daughter Beth, who lives outside Indianapolis, Ind. Their two children have blessed Glenn and Rose Angell with six grandchildren, with a seventh due in August.
“My goal in life is when I die and they put the headstone up, it’s says ‘here lies Glenn Angell. He was a character’” Angell said. “So when you reached out, it’s official, I’ve done it! I’m a character!”
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