Winn’s busiest intersection features a shuttered convenience store, a takeout restaurant that has changed hands three times in the past five years and a post office that shares a building with several vacant apartments.
Residents of the Penobscot County town used to work for businesses in Lincoln or Millinocket, but mill closures there left jobs scarce.
Fewer than 400 people remain in Winn.
“There’s no interest in this town anymore,” Winn Selectman Robert Berry said.
The town first considered deorganizing — the process in which a municipality dissolves as an independent town and becomes part of Maine’s unorganized territory — in 2023, when no one ran for select board and the town office was unstaffed, which would have left the town unable to fulfill state requirements like audits and maintenance, Berry said.
Three people eventually stepped forward to be on the select board and three others filled out the office staff.
“We were fortunate to actually find good people to train for the office work. I mean, we were very lucky, or we would have been deorganized,” Berry said.
The town is now thinking about disbanding again after its tax rate recently surged to about $8 more than the county average.
Winn is one of several communities across the state that is considering dissolving their town governments and joining Maine’s unorganized territory instead. These conversations come at a time when towns are struggling to find candidates to fill key municipal positions and as their budgets swell to a point that is unsustainable for their residents.
“A lot of those mid-level towns like Winn are starting to have those conversations,” Harold Jones, fiscal administrator for the Unorganized Territory, said. “A lot of them are more looking for answers on how this is going to work and and doing their due diligence as a community to go see what is going to be the best for them, and that’s tough when they start talking about that.”
Maxfield, a town of 89 people in Penobscot County, is also in early talks to deorganize. Jones said a third town is as well, but he wouldn’t say what town it is or what county it is in.
Through 19 years as the Penobscot County Unorganized Territory Director, George Buswell said he’s seen towns deorganize because no one runs for local seats or volunteers for boards or committees more than any other reason.
Finding suitable people for those roles has been a problem in the “smallest towns” every year Buswell has held his job, but he said the problem has only grown.
Community backlash to elected officials’ decisions has also repelled others from seeking those positions, Buswell said, adding “nobody wants to bring that agony on.”
More recently, growing budgets have pushed towns to approach the county for more information on disbanding, Buswell said.
“Every single town is struggling with their budgets right now. Roads are expensive to maintain, the school budgets for every town are extremely high, the county tax everybody pays has gone up a little bit,” Buswell said. “I mean, it’s a little bit of everything and the towns just have to keep raising their taxes and they don’t want to raise their taxes on their residents.”
Deorganizing generally lowers tax rates for residents because the burden is spread across all of the unorganized territory, which accounts for more than half of the state’s land and has about 9,000 year-round residents. It could also improve road and utility conditions, if the state maintains them instead of a local government.
However, deorganizing also means the municipality relinquishes any ability to self govern. Selectboards or councils would cease to exist and the county commissioners and local unorganized territory director would act as the community’s representatives.
Any local members of a school committee would no longer hold a seat, and if they did they would not be able to vote or influence decisions, Buswell said.
Drew was the last community to disband in Penobscot County, Buswell said. The process was completed in 2023.
Drew, with a population of 26, now holds no say over its local maintenance, utilities or contracts for services like trash service or plowing in the winter months. The town was able to retain a seat on its local RSU board, but the member doesn’t get a vote in decisions.
If a community decides to deorganize, it must follow a 12-step process that takes about two years to complete.
It starts with a petition that requires 50% of the number of registered voters of the previous gubernatorial election and ends with a vote to formally deorganize that needs approval from two thirds of voters, Jones said.
Steps in between include leaving the local school district, dissolving local government and paying any bills.
If voters reject any step along the way, the process ends and can’t be restarted for three years.
Drew first considered disbanding in 2004, but it failed at the poll by a single vote at the last stage in the process.
More recently, Webster Plantation, a community of 68 citizens in Penobscot County, had its final vote on deorganizing rejected in November after completing all 12 steps. Residents must wait at least three years to revisit the idea.
Winn is poised to bring the idea of disbanding to the town and get feedback from residents at an upcoming meeting, Berry said.
Winn’s tax rate has skyrocketed because of the school budget, he said. The town is part of MSAD 30, which covers both Winn and Lee, and saw $2 added to its mill rate because of increases in the school budget.
The town’s tax rate is $23 this year, which means a resident with a house worth $200,000 would pay $4,600 in property taxes.
The average tax rate in Penobscot County before adding county and school budgets was $15.09 in 2022.
And despite having a population that’s hovered around 400 people for the past 25 years — considerably larger than most towns that consider disbanding — Winn can’t find anyone to help run the town.
“We don’t even have a committee for anything. We’ve got three selectmen and three people working in the office. That is it. There’s not even anybody here to have a planning board.”
The town needs to seriously consider its future, Berry said.
“I don’t know how long we can maintain this,” he said.
