Timothy Lajoie and Marc Roy are running for Lewiston City Council Ward 2 on Nov. 3, 2015. Learn about more candidates and issues in our Election 2015 guide.
Timothy J. Lajoie
Email address:
tjlajoie@aol.com
Facebook:
www.facebook.com/Tim-Lajoie-for-Lewiston-City-Council-Ward-2-246216768894207
Other social media?
Hub Pages blog: http://tjlajoie.hubpages.com/
Occupation or primary source of income:
Thomas College, adjunct instructor of criminal justice and public speaking; corporal, Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Department
Education:
Certificate of graduate study, criminal justice; M.A. in management and leadership studies; M.A. in theological studies
Family information:
Father of two grown children, who also reside in Lewiston; married 28 years to my college sweetheart; one grandson
Public offices sought or held:
Ran for election to Androscoggin County sheriff, 2014; Maine House of Representatives, 2012.
Why are you running for office? Why should voters select you for this job?
Lewiston has been my home for nearly 50 years. I have raised my children here and hope they will raise their children here.
I believe some of the government initiatives — both at the local and state level — have discouraged and stifled the strong values that once bound this community together.
I live and was raised in Ward 2. I know the residents and we share the same values: faith, family, and honest hard work. These are the foundation of any working class community. It’s time to return to those, and that’s what I hope to help Lewiston to do.
With a limited budget and knowing what you know now, what would be your top spending priority among these three services: road repair, education or public safety? Why?
Priorities vary year to year so I don’t want to provide an answer that restricts making adjustments year to year. Today, I believe education and public safety should demand most of our attention. Safe communities and good schools attract new residents and private investment. We want to attract people to Lewiston who want to work in good jobs, live in good neighborhoods, and send their children to good schools.
What do you like about the city budget passed this year, and what don’t you like? Was it too high, too low, just right?
As a personal philosophy I always think government spends too much money.
I will be a budget-conscious councilor to make sure we are being responsible with the money given to us. We have to remember, as elected representatives, that whatever money we seek to spend comes out of the pocket of someone else.
However, Lewiston did not borrow as much money as in the past, which is a good thing. In the future it leaves more money in the pockets of our citizens, to spend as they see fit.
We need to do more to lower the mil rate to encourage new businesses to settle in Lewiston, hopefully by avoiding taking on the expenses of programs the city cannot afford.
What about land banking? Should the city be allowed to set aside parcels for specific kinds of development, say to promote retail or housing around the river front?
The city should not be spending taxpayer money on vacant lots.
Development is best left to the private sector and property should be sold at fair market value, not given away in the hope that it can be developed into a “revenue generating” property.
If properties have no commercial value initially, as evaluated by the private sector, perhaps the city can offer incentives that would make a private investor take a measured risk on developing a less valuable piece of property into one that generates revenue.
What would you do to improve Lewiston’s downtown housing stock? Should the city even be involved in downtown housing? Why do you think that?
Encourage private investment.
Subsidized housing is a part of every community, but providing it should not be part of a strategy to attract people to the community who do not wish to contribute. Government entitlement money is not the way to encourage economic growth. Private investment will return when the economy improves.
Government involvement, whether subsidizing housing or business, only inhibits quality improvement.
Marc R. Roy
Email address:
marcroycampaign@gmail.com
Other social media?
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcrroycpa
Occupation or primary source of income:
Certified public accountant
Education:
Master’s degree, accounting and financial management
Family information:
I’m married and have two children.
Public offices sought or held:
I’ve never held or sought public office before.
Why are you running for office? Why should voters select you for this job?
I’m running for office simply because I like being involved in this community and enjoy lending my time and expertise where I think it will help. Particularly, I want to lend a hand to this community in continuing its revival.
I was born and raised in Lewiston and when I was growing up there seemed to be an overbearing sense of gloom in the city. By the time I had reached adulthood, I had decided that Lewiston was not a place I wanted to live in. So I left in 1998 and lived and worked in a number of places around the country and even overseas.
When I finally returned, after 12 years, I noticed a marked difference in the attitude and energy of people in Lewiston — it was like night and day. It’s an attitude and energy that is exciting and motivating and is focused on making this city great again. It’s an attitude and energy that doesn’t lament the losses of the past but, rather, interweaves aspects of our history and culture with the realities of 21st century economics and demographics, all with the goal of forging a new, modern community.
The visionary and hard-working citizens who have begun this transformation have done a great job, and I want to jump in there and work with them to keep moving forward.
I’m running for office to help ensure that the city continues to aggressively implement the positive changes envisioned in the Riverfront Island Master Plan.
I’m running for office to help adopt and execute the city’s comprehensive plan, which incorporates a number of exciting yet realistic ideas on how to continue the city’s transformation.
I’m running for office to make use of my accounting and advisory expertise to assist the city in the transparent, responsible and efficient use of its resources as it strives to achieve its transformational goals.
Perhaps most importantly, I’m running for office to champion the city and to positively reshape not only how others see us, but how we see ourselves.
With a limited budget and knowing what you know now, what would be your top spending priority among these three services: road repair, education or public safety? Why?
All three are important. To be a city that attracts families, businesses and visitors, we need good schools, a safe environment and a network of roads that enables us to move about our community without difficulty.
Although there’s always room for improvement, we’re currently meeting the needs of essential programs and services for the education of our children, and our police department has employed effective strategies (even with its limited resources) that have reduced our crime rate by 24 percent in the last year alone.
Our streets and roads, on the other hand, have not been well maintained. Road repair, therefore, would be my top priority.
We all know the headaches of having to dodge potholes, and we all dread the higher than normal costs of realignments and other car repairs that result from not managing to dodge all of those potholes.
But deferring proper road maintenance has an even greater negative impact on the community itself because it affects how people feel about the city. Bad roads make the city feel run down and poorly maintained, and that discourages businesses, visitors and residents alike.
If we’re serious about revitalizing the city, road repair must be a top priority.
What do you like about the city budget passed this year, and what don’t you like? Was it too high, too low, just right?
Creating a viable budget under current economic conditions is a difficult task, and the options are not likely to please most people.
A large tax increase was passed this year, and that hurts a lot of people who are already struggling to make ends meet.
This budget decision was the result of having held down increases as much as possible in recent years because of the recession and the economy’s slow recovery.
Unfortunately, this year’s increase was necessary to ensure that the city could continue to meet its obligations and the demands for its services. In the last six years, the city has severely limited its operating budget increases by laying off staff, keeping open positions unfilled, and aggressively refinancing debts at lower interest rates. It has also deferred much-needed capital improvements and other investments, and dipped into our fund balance.
Although this approach saved residents from being hit with large tax increases when times were hardest, it has left the city at a point where many departments are understaffed, infrastructure and equipment are getting close to the end of their useful lives, and the unassigned fund balance, which is used to cover unexpected costs, is close to its authorized minimum.
What I like about the budget is that it attends to these concerns while seeking to employ taxpayer resources as responsibly as possible. What I don’t like about the budget is that the tax increase was as large as it was. In an ideal world, if a city must increase taxes, it’s better to increase them slowly over time to avoid such large jumps.
Not having been tasked with making those past decisions, it would be easy for me to argue that perhaps we would have been better off not holding down the operating budget so much in recent years. Perhaps it would have been better to have passed slightly higher tax increases in those years so that we could have avoided a big jump this year. It might be even easier to argue that any and all tax increases are bad, no matter what the situation. But these are not easy decisions for a City Council to make. Because these decisions have a serious impact on people’s lives, they are not something to be taken lightly or to be based on a pre-determined world view.
Increasing taxes is hard on us all, but the benefit is that we’re investing in our community and delivering much-needed services. Cutting taxes is easier on our personal finances, but tax cuts can reduce or eliminate the services we’ve come to rely on and undermine the community we live in. Serious decision-makers consider competing needs honestly and attempt to find the best path forward.
Ultimately, the budget was a compromise, but one that I believe will work to the benefit of the city. I feel the City Council and the city’s staff have done a good job with what they had to work with, and if I’m elected, I’ll join the ranks of those who take these weighty decisions seriously.
What about land banking? Should the city be allowed to set aside parcels for specific kinds of development, say to promote retail or housing around the river front?
Yes, I believe it should. In order to implement plans like the Riverfront Master Plan, the city must have the power to acquire parcels of land for specific purposes.
What would you do to improve Lewiston’s downtown housing stock? Should the city even be involved in downtown housing? Why do you think that?
Yes, the city should be involved in downtown housing and in trying to improve the current state of the downtown housing stock.
In order for the city to carry out its revitalization plans, it must be empowered to act and needs to be able to get rid of properties not worth saving and to support new housing developments wherever possible.
To get rid of the bad housing stock and improve the housing situation, the city should continue funding demolitions and consider adding additional code enforcement staff. To encourage improvements, the city should take a block-by-block approach — that is, it should focus on one block at a time and work to find potential owners, lenders and grantors to transform each block into a beautiful, livable area.
These actions will ultimately benefit the community as a whole.
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