Bangor City Council chairperson Cara Pelletier has three things she wants the city to prioritize in 2025.
Bangor city councilors unanimously decided to give Pelletier another year as chair of the group after she served her first year in the position in 2024. She was elected to the council in November 2022.
In her first few years on the council, Pelletier’s been proud of all the investments the city has made in improving residents’ quality of life. She named the city adding public bathrooms, bringing back a police officer position and contracting with Streetplus, a patrol group, as a few changes residents may have noticed downtown.
While Pelletier is pleased with these developments, she had hoped the city would have made more progress in addressing the city’s homeless population by now.
City leaders announced plans to close Bangor’s largest homeless encampment at the end of the year after moving everyone living there into some kind of housing or shelter. As of Nov. 13, the city had housed 12 of the roughly 70 people living there, according to Jena Jones, Bangor’s homelessness response manager.
“While we’re not as far along as I’d like to be, I think we’re moving in the right direction,” Pelletier said. “I think we need to continue to listen to the community, the people doing the work and evolve our approach to do the best we can by everyone involved.”
Councilors will meet in the coming weeks to decide on their collective goals for the coming year, but Pelletier said she has a few priorities she’d like the group to consider in 2025. Here are three areas where the council chair hopes to see improvement next year.
Covid relief funding
Bangor received more than $20 million in federal pandemic relief funding from the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, which Congress passed in March 2021. Councilors have until Dec. 31, 2024, to give the money away.
The city received 60 applications for money and councilors spent months making decisions on each request. By July 2024, the city had $2.56 million remaining.
While councilors have allocated the last few million, the city’s job isn’t over yet.
In the coming years, the council will need to monitor all the organizations that received funding to make sure they spend it before the Dec. 31, 2026, deadline, Pelletier said. Those recipients also need to follow rules the federal government set for what the money can be spent on.
Housing
In late 2023, Bangor city councilors vowed to make 2024 “the year of housing” by adding more units to combat a massive housing shortage across the state due to years of underproduction.
While Pelletier said she’s pleased with the progress the city made this year, she hopes it will maintain its focus on expanding and improving housing in 2025.
“I think our ‘year of housing,’ while it’s not every solution to every problem, represents a really solid start to where we need to be going as a city,” Pelletier said.
Namely, Pelletier said she’s encouraged to see progress being made to turn a piece of city-ownered, undeveloped land on Grandview Ave. into a large housing development. Most recently, the council last month authorized the city manager to negotiate an agreement with a Portland-based housing development company for the construction of up to 75 housing units on the land.
Pelletier is also pleased to see the city’s list of vacant and placarded properties is 20 percent shorter compared with a year ago. That could be due to the city increasing its fees on property owners who let their buildings sit empty for years, she said.
“One of the biggest challenges people have right now is finding housing,” Pelletier said. “We know housing is incredibly expensive to build and yet we have a number of houses sitting empty in the Bangor area that could be renovated and ready to use, or are ready to use now, they’re just vacant.”
Economic development
While home values in Bangor have risen drastically in recent years, commercial real estate values locally haven’t kept pace. That imbalance, Pelleiter said, results in residential property owners paying a lopsided share in property taxes.
To fix this, Pelletier said the city should push to incentivise commercial development. Doing so, she believes, will help bring property taxes into balance for taxpayers.
Pelletier’s ‘wild card’
Regardless of what Pelletier or the council decide to prioritize next year, the transition to a new presidential administration could change everything.
That’s because different presidents can have different priorities and change how much federal funding goes to states and communities for various resources, Pelletier said.
Public services that now rely on ample federal funding, such as the city’s public health department and public transportation, could see reductions in support, Pelletier said. This means the city may have to devote more money to those resources in order to keep them healthy and functioning.
If councilors see funding cuts Trump is rumored to make within the first 100 days in the White House, the city will need to pivot its spending to continue providing services residents rely on, Pelletier said. That would likely change the city’s budget.
“I’m trying to focus on what I can do, and what I can do is the job in front of me,” Pelletier said. “I’m going to do my very best to work with my peers in other levels of government to protect and sustain the city of Bangor while I’m in office.”
