Candidates set in Cape election

CAPE ELIZABETH — The battle lines have been drawn in the race to fill the House District 121 seat in Cape Elizabeth, vacated when its former occupant, Cynthia Dill, won election to the state Senate May 10.

Democrats caucused on July 7, choosing Kim Monaghan-Derrig as their standard bearer. Republicans chose their candidate, Nancy E. Thompson, on June 17, just one day after Gov. Paul LePage ruled the special election would occur Aug. 16.

Nancy E. Thompson

Thompson, 52, of Pine Ridge Road, is a former paralegal currently working as an insurance agent for Living Wealth Partners in Portland. She is a 25-year Cape resident and, although she has held no prior elective office, she has served her community as a director of the Cape Elizabeth Education Foundation, the Portland-based Center for Grieving Children and the Maine Youth Suicide Prevention Program Advisory Council. She also has taught catechism classes for the past 12 years at St. Bartholomew Catholic Church.

“I am so grateful to have lived in such a wonderful, tight-knit community,” she said Friday. “I’ve raised five children here. They all went through the school system and I feel it’s time to give back to the people of the Cape, for all they’ve done for me and my family.”

Thompson’s opponent, Monaghan-Derrig, 52, of Russet Lane, sits on the Cape Elizabeth school board, having won election to her first term this past November.

Currently pursuing a master’s degree in public policy and management at the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine, Thompson also holds a marketing job with Segway Tours of Portland. Previously, she was director of convention sales for the Convention and Visitors Bureau of Greater Portland and both an office manager and legislative aide to former Democratic Congressman Thomas Andrews.

Kim Monaghan-Derrig

Monaghan-Derrig, who has lived in Cape Elizabeth from age 5, also volunteers at St. Bartholomew, as well as in the local schools and with Citizen Advocates for Public Education.

“I chose to run because I’m very passionate about public service,” she said Monday. “I have worked in some capacity in the public sector field, either as a job, or in school, or on the school board. I’ve lived in Cape my whole life and feel I can bring common sense values and a shared vision for Maine to Augusta.”

While the two major parties now have their ballot spots spoken for, the one other state-sanctioned political party, the Green Independents, will sit this one out.

“We haven’t had any major outreach to find somebody,” Party Chairman Nate Shea said Friday. “That doesn’t mean we aren’t looking for a candidate, we just have other priorities.”

According to a June 16 release issued by Secretary of State Charlie Summers, once they’ve held a caucus, the Greens had until 4 p.m. on Monday, July 11, to file a certification of nomination with his office.

July 11 also was the petitioning deadline for so-called “independent” candidates. Anyone interested in being on the ballot who is not enrolled in one of the three recognized parties had to collect signatures from at least 200 registered voters in Cape, have them validated at the town office and submitted to the Secretary of State’s office by 4 p.m. on that day.

Nobody took out nomination papers, according to Caitlin Chamberlain, deputy secretary for communications in the Secretary of State’s Office. However, she notes that any Cape resident may run as a write-in candidate, so long as they register their intent to do so with the state by July 18.

Cape Elizabeth Town Councilors had asked for the special election to be held alongside regular balloting in November. However, Chamberlain said the earlier date was picked in order to fill the seat before a brief special session of the Legislature, expected to be called in September to address congressional reapportionment.

A panel of federal judges has ordered the Legislature to redraw the border between Maine’s two Congressional districts by Sept. 30. According to the 2010 census, District 1, which includes Maine’s southernmost counties and much of the mid-coast area, now has 8,667 more people (a 1.3 percent difference) than District 2, which covers the remainder of the state.

A Maine law passed in 1993 calls on reapportionment to happen “every 10 years thereafter.” As a result, the Congressional line has subsequently been redrawn not by the Legislature in place when census numbers are announced, but by the one established at the first election thereafter.

On May 20, two Cape Elizabeth residents, William Desena and Sandra Dunham, filed suit in U.S. District Court, claiming that by leaving its Congressional districts unbalanced until 2013, Maine is violating the Constitutional doctrine of “one man, one vote,” as established by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The U.S. Constitution does not directly address how states should divvy up their allotted representatives. However, in Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), which challenged the relative sizes of Congressional districts in Georgia, the Supreme Court held that where Constitution calls on representatives to be chosen "by the People of the several States" (Article I, Section 2), it means that, “as nearly as is practicable, one person's vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another's.”

Maine’s federal bench has agreed that leaving the two districts unbalanced for the 2012 election cycle would violate the high court ruling. 

A 15-member commission of Republicans and Democrats is being assembled in hopes of submitting, before Aug. 31, a recommendation on how to juggle towns in order to achieve district parity. A special session of the Legislature, including Cape Elizabeth’s new representative, will then be convened to vote on that plan.

If they miss the Sept. 30 deadline, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court will have until Nov. 15 to take a whack at it. If it, too, fails to make Maine’s Congressional districts equal in size, the federal court would do the job.