Three candidates have qualified for the ballot in the race for two three-year Caribou City Council seats this November.
The race is an at-large election, meaning the two candidates with the most votes earn seats on the council.
Incumbent Dan Bagley, who was first elected in 2022, is running for reelection. Ben Tucker, who lost his first bid to join the council in 2024, is again vying for a seat. And Lori Knight Phair, the principal of nearby Connor Consolidated School, will appear on the ballot for the first time.
Councilor Joan Theriault, the council’s longest serving member who was first elected in 2012, is not seeking reelection. Her term expires at the end of this year.
The candidates
Bagley is an Air Force veteran and currently owns an engineering consulting firm that supports “several Air Force, NATO, and National Security projects,” he said. Before being elected to the City Council, he served on the planning board for four years. He grew up in central Aroostook County and returned after living elsewhere to move to Caribou a decade ago.
Among his biggest priorities in reelection are “ensuring critical investments” in the city while “exercising fiscal restraint.” That extends to the city’s new police station, where a $10 million price tag has drawn ire from some councilors and community members.
“Caribou is definitely ‘on the move,’ and I’ve been privileged to be part of that transformation over recent years,” Bagley said, lauding a number of the city’s public services and departments. “But to be honest, we face some serious challenges, including the out-migration of businesses and residents, an increasing homeless population, a growing drug crisis and a critical housing shortage.”
Promoting business and residential development is among Bagley’s other priorities, as is curbing blight and nuisance properties by establishing a municipal land bank program.
“Over the past three years, we’ve experienced ever-growing costs in the face of no significant commercial or residential development,” he said. “The result is a greater and greater burden on our taxpayers, many of whom are retired and/or on fixed incomes and simply can’t afford to pay more and more taxes.”
Bagley and Tucker jointly filed a complaint against the city in late August seeking to overturn a July amendment the council made to the city’s cannabis ordinance. The pair allege the amendment violates Maine law and the city charter because it was not reviewed by the Caribou planning board prior to its approval.
Tucker is a registered Libertarian who describes himself as “very fiscally conservative.” He brought in 21% of the vote — 1,036 votes total — in a three-person council race last November that elected Councilor Paul Watson and reelected former Mayor Jody Smith.
A Maine native who grew up in Portland before moving out of state, Tucker relocated to Caribou in 2021, where he works remotely as an engineer in the telecommunications industry. He was, as he put it, “very unknown” in the last election — a notion he’s trying to change.
“I still took 1,000 votes as pretty much a nobody, so I took that as a good sign that a lot of people liked what I had to say,” Tucker said. “I think my biggest lesson was just get out there more, be louder. I know I can’t make everybody happy, but it seems like a lot of my perspective is resonating and I need to get that out there.”
Much of Tucker’s platform centers around fiscal conservatism. He’s been vocal in his opposition to the price tag for the city’s new police station and the potential blowback on taxpayers. He filed a Freedom of Access Act request for a trove of information related to it in August.
“It’s easy to take something out of context and say, ‘Oh, I oppose the police,’” Tucker said. “I don’t. I want them to have their new building. But a building the size of Waterville for Caribou?
I think we need to rein that in and I’m very scared that this will land on the taxpayers.”
In the same vein, Tucker cited making Caribou more business friendly as a priority, including looking at rezoning areas of the city to help businesses. He wants to return more “professional decorum” to the council, which he said has become a “social club.”
But he also doesn’t want to be seen as an outsider coming in to reshape the city.
“I know that with that there’s fears of — and this happens all over Maine — where people move to a small town and they start running for office looking to change the soul of the city that they moved to and that’s not what I’m looking to do at all. I moved here and I settled my family down here for a reason. I’m running to preserve.”
In July, Knight Phair was named the principal of Connor Consolidated School, an elementary school in the unorganized territory of Connor, the municipality directly north of Caribou.
Raised in Caribou, she holds a master’s degree in education from the University of Maine and said she’s worked in schools her entire career.
It’s Knight Phair’s first attempt at joining the City Council, but not her first venture into local politics. She fell just 74 votes short of a seat on the RSU 39 school board in 2024 — 995 votes to victor David Keaton’s 1,069.
She said that the loss taught her to not take things personally and that Keaton’s experience on the board made him “probably the best person to take that position.”
The race, Knight Phair said, showed her that voters are thinking with “business sense,” which is important as she campaigns for a higher office.
“I believe in common sense politics,” she said. “I know not everybody’s always happy with decisions that people make, but when you try to think about what’s best for all … I think that’s important.”
Knight Phair said she’s running to give back to her community, and cited taking care of rundown properties, ensuring government transparency and combatting the city’s substance abuse struggles as her biggest priorities.
“I feel like we’re losing a whole generation to drugs,” she said. “I don’t know if there’s anything that we can do at the city level to help with that, but I feel like there must be something.”
RSU 39 School Board elections
In another election, four candidates are running for one position on the RSU 39 School Board.
Betheny Anderson, Jacob Beaupre, Amanda Jandreau and Christina Peterson all qualified for the ballot.
Anderson previously served on the board, but lost a reelection bid to Keaton in 2024. She has not publicly announced her candidacy, but has been vocal online in recent months about her disappointment at residents voting down the first two fiscal year 2026 budgets the district brought to voters.
Beaupre, who owns a construction company and is volunteer captain with the Caribou Fire Department, outlined his experiences in the district in a post announcing his candidacy and said he was running for a seat because, “God put me on this earth to accomplish many great tasks, and taking care of our children and our future is one of them.”
Jandreau is a structural engineer and served as chair of the Planning Board for three years until she resigned in August. In a post about her campaign, Jandreau said she had two children attending schools in the district and cited her ability to “manage budgets, navigate complex systems, and find innovative paths forward.”
“I’ve seen firsthand what our schools need to thrive, and I’m ready to help make that happen,” Jandreau said.
Peterson works for a global media company. In a post detailing her candidacy, she said that she has several children in the district and is invested in ensuring all students “have the opportunity to thrive.”
“I am committed to fostering growth and success in core academics, arts, athletics, and special education, ensuring all students’ needs and passions are supported,” Peterson said.
It’s an atypical time for the district, which finally approved a budget for this fiscal year on Sept. 9 after a months-long ordeal that included two failed budget validation referendums. It had never previously had a budget rejected at referendum.
Jefferson Cary Memorial Hospital Fund Board
In a third race, Roger Soucy is running unopposed for a three-year seat on the Jefferson Cary Memorial Hospital Fund.
