The Presque Isle City Council on Wednesday rescinded its approval of a new airline recommendation process for the Presque Isle International Airport that experts say violated Maine’s open meeting law.
The council reversed its decision by a unanimous 7-0 vote in a special meeting, less than two weeks after the Bangor Daily News began asking questions about the policy’s legality.
“I can admit when I made a mistake, and I made a mistake on this,” Harold Hull, one of three councilors who originally voted to approve the policy, said. “I misunderstood some elements of the policy and I should have asked more questions and done more due diligence.”
City attorney Richard Currier recommended the council rescind the policy in an Aug. 11 memo, writing that meetings of the Presque Isle City Council are public proceedings under state statute. “As such, all deliberations and actions of the Council, including a recommendation for EAS to USDOT, must be held in open, public session,” he said.
The process, which the council originally approved on Aug. 6, required its members to enter a closed-door executive session to deliberate which Essential Air Service bid to recommend to the U.S. Department of Transportation for the Presque Isle International Airport. That discussion was previously held publicly.
It also mandated that councilors reach a “non-binding” consensus before exiting the executive session to publicly vote on the matter. But both provisions are illegal, experts in open meeting law who spoke to the BDN said.
“I don’t see any basis for holding an executive session to discuss a proposal to provide service to the airport,” Sigmund Schutz, a Portland lawyer who is also the attorney for the Bangor Daily News, said last week.
“That whole section that they’re going to be a straw vote and a consensus established is also illegal,” Schutz continued. “They cannot take any votes in executive session on any subject.”
Airport director Scott Wardwell brought the process before the council in an attempt to avoid a public backlash similar to what followed the council’s recommendation of JetBlue in 2024.
The decision, which reduced air travel from twice-daily round trip flights to Newark to a once-daily round trip flight to Boston, required a waiver from the DOT because it fell below the minimum number of weekly flights mandated under the Essential Air Service program.
It received significant criticism from the public and the airport’s previous air carrier, United Airlines, which had held the contract for six years. Legal counsel for United called the waiver “unreasonable.”
“It’s really counterproductive to all the money that we spend on marketing at the airport to whoever gets eventually chosen to really kind of in public point out maybe the weak points in that decision,” Wardwell told councilors on Aug. 6.
Wardwell compared the council to the board of directors at a private corporation when considering airline bids. He stressed the importance of presenting a unified position with its recommendation. But that’s not how Maine law views it.
“There may be competing policy reasons why someone might argue, ‘Gee, we ought to be able to discuss this, that or the other thing, without the public present,’” Schutz said. “But what the Maine law is saying is that the public’s right to know is paramount and the public’s right to understand what public officials are doing, why they’re making decisions, and to have the accountability and transparency that comes with that outweighs whatever the competing considerations are.”
The council originally approved the policy by a 3-2 vote, missing one councilor because of a family emergency and another because of a resignation.
It appointed life-long resident Tim Levesque to fill that vacancy Wednesday until an election in November. Appointing a new councilor was the reason the special meeting was initially called.
Levesque joined the council for the remainder of the meeting and voted in favor of rescinding the policy.
JetBlue’s two-year contract with the airport expires in 2026, the next time councilors will make a recommendation to the DOT.
