By Nate Jones
Staff Writer


Cumberland County Commissioners are promoting the creation of a Charter Commission as the first step in clarifying the role and requirements of county government officials.
“We want to be more accessible to the people. The closer to the people a government is, the more efficient it will be,” Cumberland County Commissioner Richard Feeney said.
The Charter Commission will propose a charter that could contain stipulations on how government is structured, functions, obtains finances and distributes accountability at the county level, Feeney said.
So far there are at least eight candidates for the commission, including Neil Jamison of Scarborough, former South Portland Mayor Claude Morgan and Cape Elizabeth Town Council Chairman Mary Ann Lynch said she had yet to determine if she would seek a spot on the commission.
“I believe the residents of Cumberland County will be served if we draft a responsible and dynamic charter,” Morgan said. “A responsible charter will help elected officials streamline government, identify new needs and services and bolster the important relationship between municipalities and the county.”
This is not the first time a Cumberland County Charter Commission has been formed. Adopting a charter was part of former Commissioner Peter Feeney’s (Richard Feeney’s son) platform in the 1990s. Continuing his son’s work, Richard Feeney spearheaded the formation of a Charter Commission that later brought a proposal to approximately 270,000 voters in a 2003 referendum.
Despite favorable votes in larger communities such as Falmouth, Portland, South Portland, Scarborough and Cape Elizabeth, the charter was rejected by nearly all of Cumberland County’s smaller communities and the proposal failed by 1,600 votes.
South Portland City Manager Jim Gailey said he believes one reason a county charter was supported by larger communities is they “tend to only rely on the jail and court system and nothing else” as opposed to smaller communities which depend on county resources for law enforcement, regional dispatching programs and prisoner transport or incarceration.
“The development of a charter for the county will not impact South Portland or its residents to any degree,” he said.
Standish Town Manager Gordon Billington said he would be in favor of the county’s effort to adopt a charter, having seen the benefits of Standish’s town charter, adopted in 1987.
“The Charter Commission is an independent entity, you never know what they’re going to come up with, but I would be in favor of the effort,” he said.
“Some people could see it as an expansion of existing government,” Richard Feeney said. “That’s really not the case at all; we’re coming at this from the bottom up.”
Cumberland County Administrator Peter Crichton said he believes adopting a county charter could enable county officials “to work smarter” by granting them the power to directly collect municipality taxes and form their own budget.
“Right now we don’t have any home-rule,” he said. “A charter gives us the opportunity to do some assessing within the County, and we could make things happen more quickly.”
Aroostook County Administrator Douglas Beaulieu – Aroostook being the first Maine County to adopt a charter in 1989 – said the change could have positive results for taxpayers.
“The county charter provides a measure of home-rule,” he said. “It has helped us define our county government, which has resulted in an ability to control spending we wouldn’t otherwise have. It’s worth its weight in gold.”
Richard Feeney said candidates for the commission will most likely be included in a November referendum.
Once formed, the commission could take more than a year to draft the charter proposal which could be on the ballot in 2010, he said.