Standish Town Council fills vacancy, ending deadlock
The Standish Town Council on Tuesday unanimously appointed Jeff Lowe to fill its vacant seat, elected co-chairs and organized committees after being stuck in a 3-3 deadlock on those issues last month.
Councilors expressed enthusiasm about having found solutions to the issues that divided them at the previous meeting, where town staff and members of the public accused them of working along party lines and criticized for their lack of progress in accomplishing routine council tasks.
Lowe, a Standish resident of seven years who recently retired from a career in education, will now fill out the Town Council.
After a temporary appointments committee of three councilors — Brandon Watson, Benjamin Macri and Brian Libby — met to consider eight candidates before the July 14 meeting, the council voted 3-3 on appointing each of the names they brought forward, meaning the vacancy could not be filled. The seat opened in June after former councilor Christy Terry registered to vote in Windham when he moved to a senior care residence, disqualifying him from his council seat.
The appointments committee then met three more times in executive session to re-interview candidates and discuss who to appoint, this time inviting the whole council to meet the candidates ahead of voting.
Lowe said he told the council in his interview that he thought he was best for the role because of his background in education and investment business, and his goal of helping the council unify.
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“I want us to find those common ideas that benefit the people here in Standish,” Lowe said in an interview after the meeting.
Lowe was sworn in after the vote at the meeting.
“I’m just going to keep working very hard to justify that decision,” he said.
The council then voted to appoint Jennifer Thomas and Brandon Watson as co-council chairs after a deadlocked 3-3 split to appoint them at the previous meeting. The pair said that they had talked on the phone following the previous meeting’s conflict over who to appoint, came up with the idea of co-chairing and asked Town Manager Tashia Pinkham and the town attorney about the legality of the idea.
“We had a nice conversation trying to figure out how we can bring everybody together and work as a unit,” Watson said.
Acting as co-chairs until the next June election, Thomas and Watson will alternate who serves as chair and vice chair at each meeting. Lowe voted against the co-chair concept, explaining that he does not want the co-chair system to become a habit for the council in the future.
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Resident Carolyn Biegel expressed frustration that councilors discussed the matter privately instead of at a public meeting where residents could hear. Pinkham clarified that it is legal for one councilor to speak to one other councilor privately, and the phone call between Thomas and Watson was the only conversation in which the matter was privately discussed. The council discussed the concept publicly at the July 28 workshop.
“This was the team thinking outside the box and it was the best solution to get stuff moved forward,” said Councilor Lisa Struebing. “I thought it was a good plan and it worked.”
“It is a great way of power sharing, sharing responsibility for the next nine months,” Macri said.
The council also voted to establish committees, the smaller groups that research and discuss policy proposals. Assigning councilors to committees was a point of tension at the previous meeting, where Watson proposed excluding Struebing from all committees, including himself on five and made himself chair of two.
After councilors discussed the committees at the July 28 workshop, they successfully passed a draft Tuesday with evenly distributed roles.
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Tagged: local government, Standish town council
Madeleine is a community reporter for Gorham, Buxton and Standish. She started her journalism career in Vermont, where she reported for Seven Days and served as the editor-in-chief of Middlebury College's. More by Madeleine Kaptein
