The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Joshua Failé, a resident of Bangor, is an economist and data analyst for nonprofit organizations.
At a recent meeting of Bangor’s Board of Ethics, Bangor City Councilor Wayne Mallar was caught on a live microphone referring to multilingual students in Bangor’s schools as “illegals,” dismissing their legal right to an education, and objecting to the school department spending money on English language instruction. He has since repeated and expanded on these remarks in statements to the Bangor Daily News, falsely claiming immigrants do not pay taxes and arguing that the city spends “too much time on the homeless and the illegals and disregarding the citizenry,” as though members of our community who are homeless or who are immigrants are not residents of this city and thus not deserving of its protection.
I believe these comments deserve more than a news cycle’s worth of attention. They reveal something fundamental about how Councilor Mallar views the people he was elected to serve.
Let’s be clear: immigrants are not “illegals.” They are people. They are our neighbors, coworkers, classmates, and friends. Their children sit in Bangor classrooms, and under both the Maine Human Rights Act and federal civil rights law, they are entitled to a meaningful education, including English language instruction. The Maine Department of Education is explicit: failing to provide language services may constitute discrimination.
This is not a matter of budgetary preference. It is the law. When an elected official objects to the school department meeting its legal obligations to children, the issue is not fiscal conservatism. It looks to me like it is bigotry dressed up as budget management.
The context of Councilor Mallar’s comments makes them even worse. He made these remarks at City Hall during a hearing before the Board of Ethics, a meeting convened specifically to determine whether he had violated Bangor’s code of ethics by attempting to use his position as city councilor to improperly influence Historic Preservation Commission proceedings. He had been warned, along with everyone else in the room, that the microphones were live. And yet, surrounded by the very mechanisms of ethical accountability, he felt emboldened enough to disparage some of the most vulnerable members of our community.
The board subsequently found that he had, in fact, violated the city’s ethics code. That he chose this moment, of all moments, to make these remarks is not merely tone deaf. It looks to me like a demonstration of contempt for the standards of conduct this city expects of its elected officials.
Councilor Mallar is free to hold whatever views he chooses. That is his right as an American citizen. But serving on the Bangor City Council is not a right, it is a public trust. It carries with it an obligation to represent, support, and protect all residents of this city, not just those an individual councilor personally defines as “worthy.”
When an elected official openly dehumanizes members of the community he was elected to serve, doubles down on those remarks in the press, and demonstrates a pattern of ethical violations, the question is no longer whether his views are distasteful. The question to me is whether the Bangor City Council can credibly claim to represent all of Bangor’s residents while one of its members openly regards some of them as undeserving of basic public services — or even consideration as fellow human beings.
I believe it is imperative, for the wellbeing of this city and for the confidence residents place in their government, that Councilor Mallar resign. Should he decline to do so, I urge the city council to pursue every available mechanism for his removal. I believe such bigotry — and such brazen and repeated disregard for the obligations, responsibilities, and integrity of public office — has no place in civil society, much less in city government.
Bangor deserves a council that serves all of its people. Every single one.
