Penobscot Bay Pilot has posed questions to each candidate running for the Camden Select Board, providing the opportunity for the public to better understand their position on issues important to the town and region

Please provide a concise (paragraph) biography of yourself. 

I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where my father was going to law school. We returned to Long Island shortly thereafter, where the remaining three of my five siblings were born. I was held captive in suburbia until I had a chance to spend my senior year of High School in Kotzebue Alaska, 50 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Even though I was a National Merit Finalist in the big high school on Long Island, being in a town of 1,800 with 11 other classmates was more to my liking. Upon my return to the lower 48 I enrolled at Colby College to be near Penobscot Bay and an island that my father bought into in 1972. Colby liked me enough to hire me and I was impetuous enough to leave after six months when I was offered a position at the Maine Photographic Workshops. I’ve been based in Rockport since that day in 1977. 

Necessary departures to make a living have included stints in Boston and Portland running Custom Color Labs, and then starting my multi-media business in Portland before returning to Rockport. For about 15 years most of my clients were out of the state or out of the country and I was lucky enough to travel all over the world to shoot my productions. More recently my projects are smaller and more domestic. I am a proud father to three terrific individuals who are mostly up and out, inhabiting various parts of the globe at various times.

What are the 3 most pressing issues facing Rockport today, and how would you like to see them resolved? 

The first issue is an intangible, but vitally important: the sense of community. For me, the people are the raison d’etre of being here. There are lots of very good people who, each in their own way, and with their own values, love Rockport. That sense of community has been frayed a bit with the passionate discussions about the Library, but trying to slowly and gently communicate our way to a more peaceful demeanor is high on my list. 

Maintaining our physical and social beauty is also important. This town has all kinds of physical attributes that match the diversity of people. We go from rough-and-tumble to highly polished, with a place for each gradation between. The physical aspects that the town is directly responsible for, should be maintained by us all. What is good for Glen Cove is good for the Harbor Village is good for Simonton Corners. We’re all Rockport. It is quite a balancing act to create a capital plan that recognizes our assets and maintains them without driving people out because of taxes. But we can’t ignore any part of town and not give it its due. 

The important thing to realize is that the Select Board is, and should be, a group of diverse thinkers and leaders. Because we each have our different values, we each step up to the plate at various times and take on the heavy lifting in those areas of our interest and our expertise.

How will you protect the Rockport taxpayer as you shape and govern a municipal budget, and juggle various interests that request municipal funding throughout the year? 

I have spent the last twenty years donating my expertise in video technology to continually bring more and more access to the citizens of Rockport. Every Select Board meeting, every ZBA and PBA meeting is available on your computer in high definition and excellent sound. But to date, the Budget committee has declined every offer to be televised. They do a tremendous amount of work in a form that is more easily followed than the Select Board’s necessarily faster foundation work. The Select board works with the Town Manager to create the preliminary budget providing the basis for any subsequent changes. To get the budget to a point where there is something to react to, the town staff invests literally thousands of hours. This is part of the sausage making and the Select Board is used to the smells in the kitchen. But the best place for input is after you have something to react to. That is the Budget committee’s most important role, to act as the voice piece of the community. It’s a friendly, discussion-oriented committee, and yet they’re practically invisible from our media assets. A good stout conversation, fed by media access to the meetings, would allow much more citizen input to the budget process.

Does Rockport need a new town library, and if so, where should it be built?

Rockport should have a permanent library at 1 Limerock St. RES is a great site, but it needs good planning to map out the future of this key location. To hurriedly plunk a library on that site without figuring out what should be next to it, above it, around it, etc. would be a travesty. A single building in the middle of the plot with a huge parking lot is urban sprawl at its worst. Utilizing the existing site on Limerock, with particular attention paid to good safe parking for a reasonable amount of cars will fulfill the needs of the majority of library users. This is an opportunity to create a 100 year design effort that will accommodate our best understanding of good programming in the present, and be flexible enough to be able to change with the future.

Should Rockport invest in a municipally-owned fiber network so that all residents have access to high-speed internet?

Absolutely. But we have a huge amount of public education to conduct before many people will truly appreciate our opportunity, still, to help ourselves and also put Rockport on the map nationally. The easiest aspect is the cost and saturation: I believe we can show that over 90% of the homes in Rockport would save money immediately from their current internet/TV/telephone expenditures. And I would not support it for one minute if we didn’t roll out the same high speed service to every single building in the entire town. Regardless of how cool, how important, how potentially life saving (literally, for aging in home clients) it might be, the most important aspect is that a municipally owned infrastructure of fiber optics removes the profit driven decisions to only serve the densely populated portions of town. This could easily be the most fair tax-revenue based expenditure we make, from a distribution perspective.

The attempt to introduce these ideas at last year’s annual Town Meeting was premature and conducted without the necessary public understanding. Mea Culpa. We have a very dedicated and able Technology committee that continues to forge ahead in the ever-changing environment of publicly owned internet services. I applaud their work and look forward to becoming a national model for small town ownership.

How do you see Rockport positioned in the larger regional Midcoast economy?

I believe that Rockport is the lager region and that region is us. I think that the five towns together, and even the whole area from Belfast to Rockland, are all part of the same symbiotic economy. People are drawn to the entire area as a whole, and then they’re able to find their niche based on their particular values. We need Appleton, Camden, Hope, Lincolnville, Union, etc., as much as they need us. Do we not all have friends in these communities? Do our children not play with kids from all over? Do we not shop, dine, work, and be entertained in all of these communities? This area is one of the best places to live in the entire country. We are able to attract very interesting people who do very interesting things. Is it bad that a new family moves to Hope rather than Rockport? No. It’s new blood for the area and that helps all of us.

Is Rockport's zoning adequate enough to sustain economic vitality and quality of life?

After spending 15 years on the Rockport Zoning Board I feel very confident in saying that our system has good bones. It has the structure to both entertain and reject change as appropriate. We are neither a stale snapshot in time, nor are we wantonly destroying our past. There is always room for better education for the board members (ZBA,PBA) and fresh blood to the Ordinance Review Committee, but by and large we’re doing OK.

What municipal committee would you like to be a liaison to, and why?

I have been lucky to advise and liaise with the Opera House Committee, ZBA, PBA, Harbor committee, and the Public safety committee. Yeah, I don’t have a real life…

How do you envision the future of solid waste processing for the four towns; i.e., recycling, waste stream reduction?

The best thing about small communities is that a small group of people can potentially make such a difference. The worst thing about small communities is that a small group of people can potentially make such a difference. Rockport was united in their efforts to recognize a new industry standard, a brilliant approach to handling recyclables with the FibeRight plant, but we got out voted by a different point of view. Personally I rather enjoy the meditative aspects of sorting my recyclables, but joining a waste solution that includes really efficient single stream recycling pays heed to the realities of people’s willingness to sort prior to recycling. Kudos to Alison and the whole gang who wrote and distributed a very successful waste survey. I think we’re well on our way to improving recycling where we can.

 I would urge a serious re-examination of FibeRight when our ecomaine contract is up.

Camden and Rockport now share a police chief and an assessor. Are there other cost-sharing arrangements that Rockport could do, with Camden or other towns, to spread the staffing responsibilities; e.g., share a planner? Public works director?

Small towns have to remember that they are like an extended family. Sometimes the siblings have to wait their turn. We have for years been open to sharing some of our services with Camden, but we had to wait for the right time. Chief Kelly’s retirement allowed for our Town Manager to propose a new option to Camden’s Town manager. The structure and the willingness was there. But as much as we try to create/discuss the position and not the person, we also have to recognize that personalities and individual talents play a part in any efforts towards more consolidation. The police chief worked out very well because of individual talent and attitude. 

Certain departments, like the Public Works department, have by far the longest serving town employees of any department. It’s hard work, with obscenely long hours, especially with a week of snow storms, and it wouldn’t happen without fierce team work and allegiance to the Department head. The PWD may have the single largest budget line at Town Meeting, but what goes unrecognized is that we have been blessed with amazing leadership in that department. The money we save from the flexibility that the Public Works team exhibits every day, is huge. You can’t blithely replace that structure with a two-town management situation. 

We also have a very robust mutual aid relationship with all the towns around, and the individual chiefs have a long history of knowing their own crews and their style of working together. I believe that there is very little financial gain to be had by putting the fire departments together and it would be disrespecting the very different management styles that each department has had for so long. 

However, there may be some additional possibilities with the planner position, or administrative team members.