STANDISH – The Standish Town Council rejected an effort to scrap a special town meeting referendum scheduled for Sept. 9, in a 5-2 vote on Tuesday night.
At the meeting, Councilor Wayne Newbegin introduced a motion to reconsider the special town meeting on the basis that it violated two sections of the town’s charter. Many of the proposed bonds included in the three referendum questions on the Sept. 9 ballot were submitted to voters as part of a single, “bundled” referendum question at the June 10 election. The three questions would ask residents to approve spending $1.2 million, including interest, for athletic fields, public safety equipment, a new plow truck and road improvements.
Since the June 10 question failed, Newbegin said, those bonds should not be re-submitted to voters for a year, in accordance with section 805 of the charter, which reads, “The same referendum subject shall not be resubmitted to voters for consideration within a one-year period.”
“We should be waiting a year,” Newbegin said.
But town officials said that the move was legal. According to the town’s attorney, Ken Cole III of Jensen Baird Gardner & Henry in Portland, the September ballot “is clearly not the same subject since it allows the voters to pick and choose rather than vote for a collection of capital items.”
Cole added that when the town advanced to the next calendar fiscal year on July 1, it “entered a new municipal year.”
The town also sought out a legal opinion from Richard Flewelling, the assistant director of the Legal Services Department at the Maine Municipal Association.
“As I understand it, a single referendum question (a capital appropriation) was rejected by the voters in June 2014,” Flewelling wrote. “The council has now proposed a series of referendum questions that are constituent parts of the previous combined question, such that the voters may pick and choose among the several options. Town Attorney Kenneth Cole has opined that this is not the same subject as voted on in June and is therefore not prohibited by section 805. In a word, I concur.”
Dan Kasprzyk, a member of the School Administrative District 6 Board of Directors who works with Newbegin on the Standish Watchdog Group, said the group had received opinions from two lawyers indicating that the September referendum would violate the charter.
“We basically took it to two different attorneys and the response we got back from both of them is no, they cannot,” Kasprzyk said. “Our attorneys are of the opinion that you cannot bring that back for a period of one year.”
Kasprzyk declined to make the legal opinions public.
“It’s a private document that we have with the Standish Watchdog Group,” he said.
At the meeting, Councilor Phil Pomerleau expressed exasperation with the effort to block the September referendum vote.
“I was made aware that Dan Kasprzyk had two legal opinions saying that what you’re saying, Wayne, is correct, but I guess he does not wish to share them with us,” Pomerleau said. “I’m very concerned that we’re trying to split the town up here by people going out and getting legal opinions but then they don’t want to share them with the town, but they are telling the town manager they have them in their hand.”
Town Manager Gordon Billington said that Kasprzyk could seek other avenues to scrap the September referendum.
“As I told Mr. Kasprzyk, if he really wants to block the council he can seek a declaratory judgment from any court of jurisdiction,” Billington said.
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