CAMDEN — Acting on Lincolnville's lead, the Camden Select Board has sent a formal invitation to the Rockport Select Board to convene a joint meeting and discuss common interests and goals. 

A date has yet to be set, but Rockport has indicated the town's willingness to meet. Camden's Sept. 29 invitation, "was triggered by our desire to meet together and explore options given the success of the police coverage collaboration," said Rockport Select Board Chair Denise Munger, Oct. 8.

The two towns have met in the past, but not recently.

 In 2013, they convened to talk about common issues. They had not met since 2004, but found plenty to talk about: politics and pathways, legislative policies, sales tax, federal and state revenue sharing, greenbelts, the governor's budget, local ambulance service, an LNG tank proposed for Searsport, and sharing street sweepers and graders. They talked about celebrating a Camden-Rockport founders day, the challenges of managing volunteer municipal committees, and the significance of Camden's downtown in anchoring a community, as well as the diversity of Rockport's five villages. They talked and joked. They passsd chocolate and cough drops around, and in the end, they agreed to keep the conversations going.

In 2014, the two Select Boards, as well as the Camden and Rockport Planning Boards, convened another joint meeting, that time to talk about a cumbersome shared intersection and brainstormed creative road engineering.

In 2015, the Select Boards met again, discussed similar issues, and added topics, such as coordination of both towns' capital improvement plans regarding fire apparatus, and collaboration among police departments. 

They met again in 2018 to talk about a Raise the Floor legislative initiative to better equalize how the state’s then $1.2 billion education dollars were distributed to Maine municipalities that received minimal financial help from the state. At the same workshop, they again broached collaboration and even sharing personnel. 

Since then, the Select Boards have not held joint conversational meetings. A Covid pandemic, and then a rocky and litigious dialog over the joint sewer agreement filled whatever closed door meetings they did convene.

But, Lincolnville steered a fresh course last month when it first invited Northport, Islesboro and then Camden select boards to meet individually at the Lincolnville Town Office for conversations about common interests. When Camden's Select Board traveled to Lincolnville, they talked congenially about their shared watershed, Mid-Coast Solid Waste transfer station, mutual aid and EMS services.

At that meeting, Lincolnville Select Board Chair Steve Hand had said: "Thank you for sitting down. It has been four-plus years [since Camden and Lincolnville held a joint select board meeting]. As Chrisso said,we need to do it more often.... We have been trying to meet more often with our other neighboring communities. I'd definitely like to continue that going forward. All the discussions are not fun, and that is fine. We are all big boys and girls, and we can get through those discussions, do better things for our towns and work together."

Camden Select Board members thanked Hand for the invitation, and Chair Chris Nolan said: "This is something that certainly I'd like to do with the Town of Rockport pretty soon, to be able to have a similar meeting.... This is something to do at least annually."

In the Sept. 29 invitation letter to the Rockport Select Board, Camden's Designated Town Manager Jodi Hanson wrote: "I envision this joint meeting to be a place to discuss ways we can continue to nurture what Camden and Rockport currently have for mutual agreements, but also to perhaps look to the future and how the two towns can support each other as we move into the next decade."

She suggested for topics: wastewater, public works, assessing and police, and said, "we welcome any additional topics that Rockport Select Board finds important to discuss."