As the Nov. 8 mayoral election draws nearer, both candidates for mayor, Democrat Jim Violette and Republican Bruce Chuluda, answered questions from business owners last week at a lunchtime forum.
The two candidates appeared last Wednesday at the Westbrook-Warren Congregational Church for a forum sponsored by the Westbrook Community Chamber of Commerce. After each candidate had the chance to make an opening statement, they took questions submitted by the almost 30 people in the audience. The following is a selection of questions and answers from that session.
Q: It’s been suggested that Maine needs to consolidate local government and services, what are your thoughts on this?
Chuluda: I totally agree. I think that’s what we are trying to do here in the city of Westbrook. We have worked to consolidate. We’ve consolidated some of our departmental functions, we’ve worked to outsource in our assessing area, and we’ve worked with our School Department to do some of our IT, maintenance and custodial work. I think we’re moving in that direction. And I totally agree that’s one of the ways we can work to reduce costs and still provide services to our residents.
Violette: Streamlining and controlling costs is very important, but again you have to be very careful of how much strain you put on your department heads. Streamlining and merging are smart ideas, but if you’re going to put too much of a burden on department heads, and they aren’t able to do their job successfully, then maybe we need to take a step back. Right now things are working, but again we have to be careful about that because the strain you put on all the department heads can be very serious and cause them to leave or retire. We’ve got good people working with us. We’ve got to take care of them and make sure we provide them with what they need to make the job go smoothly.
Q: What would you do with the extra state funds for the School Department?
Violette: I want to talk about last year’s $1.2 million. There was a proclamation made by the City Council, I wasn’t there, I didn’t vote on it. But you know what? I would have voted with the other six councilors and said that we would have given it back. But we were thrown a curveball in the spring, and the curveball was that the state was going to double its homestead exemption to give more money back to homeowners. But instead of funding it at 100 percent, they funded it at 50 percent. So that means even if we got an extra $1.2 million from the schools, we lost $450,000 from the state in Homestead exemption funds. Where do we make that up? That’s a lot of money, so I can’t say here that I’m going to give $1 million back to the taxpayer, because if they go back to 25 percent on homestead, I’ve got to come up with another $200,000 to $300,000. Until we know what the state’s going to do, and what curveballs they are going to throw at us, to come out publicly and say what I’m going to give the taxpayers is jumping ahead of the horse just to make people happy. I’m not going to promise anything until I know where the state stands.
Chuluda: My tact would be to continue on the same lines that I did this year. I’m going to challenge the School Department just as I challenged the municipal side to be as frugal and efficient in the use of taxpayer dollars as possible. If there are opportunities to return either all or a portion of those funds back to the taxpayers by doing things in a more cost effective manner, then we owe it to the taxpayer to do that. That’s a challenge that I will throw down to the School Department in their budget as well as to the city departments. To just say you’ve got this big pot of money, go on and spend it, sure, we can all find a way to spend the money. We need to be smart about it. I’ll set some targets and some goals, if they come back as not being attainable, that’s fine. You have to start somewhere, and I don’t think you start at the high end, you start at the low end.
Q: What is the biggest issue facing Westbrook in the next two years, and what is your solution?
Violette: Economic development. That has to be our big issue. For the last two years, we have streamlined, we have cut departments, and we have merged departments. We need to ask more of our department heads, and they’re stretched to the limit. Only with true economic development and making things happen are we going to be able to bring in the tax revenue necessary so we can say we’re done streamlining, now let’s really manage it and do things appropriately and not have to worry about where we’re going to get the extra money to do things. We have to aggressively go after economic growth. We have to be smart about it, but we have to go after it.
Chuluda: I think (economic development is) certainly a major issue that faces the city. It is one that we need to definitely be smart about. I think it is happening, I disagree wholeheartedly that the pace of economic development in Westbrook has not been moving along at a satisfactory level. There are plenty of things that are going on, they just don’t always bear fruit or show up in an active fashion or in a time frame that some folks would like to see. But rest assured, things have happened. You’ve got (One Riverfront Plaza), you’ve got the old Sebago Shoe building that T & T took and redeveloped, that’s turned out to be a nice building, and also the former Stockhouse 5 building where Thatcher’s is now. You’ve got the Westbrook Heights development on Saco Street. There are things going on, it just takes time.
Q: What are your thoughts or ideas on what to do with Saccarappa Park, and what sort of time frame do you think it would take to develop that site?
Chuluda: I would like to set the record straight, the defoliating of Saccarappa Park, it was an afterthought. Everything downtown was predicated on the boardwalk and a kiosk being built and things being built on the boardwalk along the river, and that fell apart. We had to go to plan B, and plan B was: “Oh boy, what are we going to do? We’ve got this park over there, let’s try to sell that and put a building on it.” That’s not a bad idea, but now you’re taking a resource that has a lot of heritage, at least since the days of Urban Renewal, and there’s a lot of passion behind that and mixed emotions on whether or not we should take a resource like that and put a building on it and take away the ability for folks to enjoy the river and the falls over there. I want to see it developed. I think what the Downtown Economic Development Committee came up with, a plan to somehow split that out as 60/40, to try and build a building and still preserve some open space. That’s the way to go. And, yes, we haven’t had a lot of bites. We had one proposal that came in a couple of years ago, after this whole thing blew up with the boardwalk piece. There were just questions surrounding that proposal: price, whether or not that was the best thing to go in there, the way it was being proposed. That fell apart, we went out and put RFPs together, and we haven’t had a lot of response. I don’t know what that tells us. I don’t know if that tells us that downtown isn’t as desirable as we may think, for a whole bunch of reasons like parking or traffic issues. Those are the things that I think we need to think about as we look towards developing our downtown. So again, my goal is to work on getting Saccarappa Park developed, but doing it in the right fashion. Making sure whatever we take and put on that parcel of land is the best fit for downtown.
Violette: There should be a $5 million building sitting on that lot right now. The investors were 90 percent there on arranging their own parking, and they didn’t have to rely on the city. It would be generating $150,000 in tax revenue. It could have been another key, besides One Riverfront Plaza, in the redevelopment of our downtown. It didn’t happen. It needs to be developed. We always hear about parking problems. In Rookies, there is a picture from about 30 years ago showing bumper-to-bumper traffic on Main Street with parallel parking on both sides, now that’s a traffic problem. We haven’t had that since Urban Renewal. Let’s bring the businesses in, and if we create traffic problems, we’ll deal with it then. To talk about it now will scare everybody, let’s bring people in and then we’ll deal with it.
Q: How are you going to fund the downtown TIF?
Chuluda: We’re going to continue to strive to bring business into downtown. I take exception that we should be going and bringing businesses in without regard to traffic and parking issues and dealing with those as they crop up. I think that’s shortsighted and foolish on the part of the municipality and the electorate. To do that serves nobody’s purposes, it doesn’t serve the businesses’ purposes if they’re frustrated when they come down here, and it certainly doesn’t serve the taxpayers’ benefit. I think there’s a lot of development potential to raise second stories on some of the buildings we have here downtown, to build up instead of out. We’re going to continue the effort to try and bring something into Saccarappa Park. We’re also working hard with another business owner down at the other end of Main Street to try and bring that up to a better level, and work as a gateway on the Route 25 end of the city. We’ll continue to go out and reach out in all our economic development efforts to bring additional businesses into the downtown. But we’ll do that in a measured and deliberate fashion, giving due thought and consideration to all of the implications. I’m not going to go off all willy-nilly and just sell the city down the road to bring in economic development. I just don’t think that’s the right thing to do.
Violette: It’s smart growth. We have plenty of parking right now. If we bring in a business that wants to build a $5 million building and they’ve got 50 to 100 employees, there are places for them to park. After that, we do have problems and we have a committee that’s studying it, but we’ve been studying traffic problems for the last eight years. It seems like every time something tries to come in, we throw this big roadblock about traffic issues. Traffic is always a problem, but I’d rather have the problem. If we go out right now, I bet we could find 100 open spaces where people could park. I’d rather have the problem and deal with it in a smart manner. We could put a parking garage on the CVS lot. If that’s what we need to do, that’s what we need to do. I’m not saying I’d recommend it, but we need to bring businesses downtown.
Westbrook’s two mayoral candidates, City Council President Jim Violette (left) and Mayor Bruce Chuluda (right) took part in a question and answer session at a business lunch sponsored by the Westbrook Chamber of Commerce last Wednesday. The event was moderated by John Roberts, president of Disability RMS (center).Send questions/comments to the editors.
