LEWISTON — Ron Potvin, a longtime elected official serving Auburn, announced Thursday he is running for mayor in Lewiston on a largely anti-merger platform.
Potvin said this week that his campaign will coincide with that of the Coalition Opposed to Lewiston-Auburn Consolidation, but if elected, he would focus on the city’s poverty, drug use and economic isolation.
Potvin, a corrections officer for the Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Office, is the third candidate to announce his intention to run for mayor. He follows announcements from 2015 candidate Ben Chin and former City Councilor Mark Cayer.
Mayor Robert Macdonald will reach the term limit of three two-year terms at the end of this year.
During his time in Auburn, first on the City Council and most recently on the School Committee, Potvin built a reputation as a strong fiscal conservative, often pushing hard against budget increases.
He believes his knowledge and constituencies in both cities can help further collaboration, despite his strong feelings against the proposed merger. He called the pending vote on the merger “probably the No. 1 vote these two cities will ever make.”
He said the merger discussion drove him to run for mayor, along with other pressing issues such as substance use and housing.
“I said, ‘There’s no way I can sit on the sideline,'” he said during an interview Thursday. “I needed to take a greater role in opposing this.”
When he was an Auburn councilor, he served on a committee that looked at sharing more services, but he saw “big gaps” in how it could work. With the newest proposal, he said he feels even more strongly in opposition because it is a full-scale merger that will have “unintended consequences.”
The Lewiston-Auburn Joint Charter Commission, which has spent the past two years creating a new charter, recently released a study detailing the possible financial benefits of a merger. Among the results was that the merger would save between $2.3 million and $4 million a year.
Given the timing of the merger vote, which is expected to be held the same day as the mayoral election, there’s a chance Potvin could become the mayor that oversees the start of a merger transition.
When asked about that possibility, he said he’d do his best to “lessen the impact” of such a merger. His chief concern with the proposal is the resulting revaluation that would occur in both cities, which he argues would create a big shift in property tax costs.
He said his first foray into local politics in the mid-2000s was caused by a revaluation in Auburn that had a dramatic impact on taxpayers. He was one of a group of concerned residents who successfully ran for office to make changes, he said.
“Lewiston will get hit the same way Auburn did in 2005,” he said. “Why would we put our cities through this if we don’t have to?”
He argued that a merger wouldn’t solve the area’s problems of economic isolation and declining population. Instead, he said, Lewiston should play up its role as an extension of Greater Portland and provide better connectivity between the Twin Cities and places such as Freeport, Brunswick and farther into southern Maine.
“We need to tie in and embrace the Portland metropolitan area,” he said. “My goal would be to re-calibrate the vision of Lewiston to not be a stand-alone city but an attractive, successful suburb.”
He called it a “suburban philosophy.”
Growing up in the Boston area, he said he watched the outlying mill towns redefine themselves and begin connecting with Boston. He said Lewiston could create more quality housing to compete with the high costs and demand in southern Maine.
He also has some specific — and perhaps unconventional — ideas to address long-running city issues such as housing and poverty.
If elected, he said he would work to establish a jobs program between the city and the L-A Metro Chamber of Commerce to better articulate the hiring needs of the business community, along with training programs.
During his career as a corrections officer, he said he’s also consistently seen the cycle of crime and drug activity in the region.
“We have to break that, because it could get worse,” he said. “We need to address it head-on.”
His solution, he said, is to create a joint long-term rehabilitation program between the city and its health care organizations. At the same time, he’d like to look at an overhaul of the downtown residential areas that he called “the largest urban renewal project in the state of Maine.”
Potvin puts particular emphasis on these ideas, saying he’d also look at a new street system and new zoning.
“That’s where the drug and crime activity is festering,” he said, adding that recent city efforts to demolish condemned buildings is a start, but “doesn’t go far enough.”
In 2013, Potvin was elected to the Auburn School Committee, but his stay was short-lived.
He ultimately resigned in 2014 because of health reasons. Surgery on one of his lungs required a lengthy rehabilitation process, which put him out of work for a time and forced him to move from Auburn. He now lives with family in Lewiston.
However, Potvin said, he’s healthy and has a fresh perspective after recently traveling across the country.
“Bottom line: It’s a different vision from what Lewiston is used to,” he said.
Ron Potvin