Aaron Huotari’s first Maine Potato Blossom Festival was in the summer of 1997. He was fresh out of the Army and primed for a more than two-decade-long career in transportation and logistics.
“We set up over on the hill coming into town,” Huotari said. “I remember just being really blown away by the volume of people.”
His second will be next month. And this time he’ll be front and center.
Huotari, a western Maine native who spent the last five years as director of Bangor’s public works department, took over as Fort Fairfield’s town manager on June 16.
The next day, he stepped into a festival planning committee meeting to see how he could help.
“I spoke with the director yesterday, and I said, ‘I don’t care if I’m out there bussing tables and wiping down, whatever it takes to get me out there,” Huotari said.
Putting himself in front of the community is one of Huotari’s biggest priorities in his first days on the job. He’s Fort Fairfield’s fourth town manager in the last decade, but the first to come from outside Aroostook County. So increasing his visibility is a measure of establishing trust.
“I want the public in the next month or so to see that I’m open and interested in what they have to say,” Huotari said. “Because sometimes you get into a situation [where] they’re just not in the mood or in the right position to be sharing anything with me, but the next meeting or the next time they see me out and about, we might feel comfortable.”
In the lead up to assuming the position, Huotari attended two Town Council meetings and spent a day with interim manager Dan Foster in early June.
“The biggest thing I took away from him is that he felt this was one of the most rewarding jobs he ever had in terms of being able to serve the town of Fort Fairfield,” Huotari said. “It just really matched up with what I was looking for.”
Foster served as town manager from 1998 to 2013 and again in two separate interim stints in the last three years. He was in attendance as Huotari led his first Town Council meeting on June 18 and gave his successor the stamp of approval.
“He’s got a great community-oriented attitude, whether it’s towards the citizens [or] the employees,” Foster said. “I just think Aaron’s going to do a great job. I really do … I just think all around he shows an awful lot of maturity and a lot of grace in dealing with all the stuff that goes with it.”
Those are traits Huotari said were molded through his time in public works, where he oversaw seven divisions and more than 70 employees with a wide footprint of public impact.
“A lot of what we did was very visual, because of potholes and snowplowing,” Huotari said. “When somebody’s trash doesn’t get picked up, they get very emotional about it … I really worked with my crews down there [that] we don’t take complaints from the public. We receive feedback, and then we try to educate. So that’s the same thing I’ll try to do here.”
Fort Fairfield’s population came in at 3,321 during the 2023 American Community Survey, just over a tenth of Bangor’s population. It means Huotari is serving significantly fewer people than in his previous role, but presents its own set of challenges.
“In a city the size of Bangor, there’s 700-plus employees and a lot of the administrative work takes place at the finance department or in purchasing, or there’s these other departments that are taking care of a lot of that that I just didn’t see,” he said. Here, it’s a much smaller organization, and you’re dealing with all of that … I’ve still got a lot to learn. The nice thing is, I’ve got a ton of really good employees here.”
Despite not being from the area, Huotari has spent plenty of time in The County. His wife is from Presque Isle, and the pair have long planned to retire in the region. But that’s far in the future. At the present, Huotari said he’s focused on serving his new community and growing Fort Fairfield.
“And how do you do that?” Huotari said. “Do you try to get more people here so that industry will be interested in coming here because there’s a ready workforce, or do you try to get industry in and draw in people from other communities who come in here to work, and then go, ‘Oh. Wow. That’s a nice town.’ And then they want to move here.
“It’s the chicken and the egg. I love a challenge, so I’m looking forward to addressing that and then having some successes. And it’s nice to celebrate successes.”
