To the Editor:
On Friday, March 20, we Alna residents will vote for town officers, including Second Selectman. I am running for Second Selectman because I want to keep taxes low, preserve Alna’s heritage, and put Alna online.
I grew up in Boothbay and Albion, hauling sails and washing decks for my family’s small charter business and haying fields and mucking out stalls on the family dairy farm.
I started my own business from my dorm room in college, initially creating websites for small businesses when few people knew about the Internet, and built it up to the point where I could move to and run it from Alna.
Alna faces many challenges. The state continues to withdraw financial support from towns while requiring towns to shoulder larger burdens. We have important decisions to make, such as whether to fund the Firehouse extension and remove the Head Tide Dam, each with passionate proponents and opponents.
According to the news, the economic doom and gloom will only worsen, straining town budgets as revenues fall further.
I am an optimist. We cannot directly control the requirements the state places upon Alna, or how little assistance the state provides us, or how the national economy twists and turns, but we certainly can work diligently to do ourselves no further harm and even perhaps a bit of good.
To do this, we need people we can trust in town government: people with business experience who understand how to do more with less. That’s why I’m running.
If you care about Alna, please vote for me Friday, March 20 at the Alna Town Firehouse between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m., and attend the town meeting March 21. We need to come together and we need solid leadership with integrity, the right experience, and a can-do attitude.
Tom Smith, Alna