Q&A with retiring Scarborough Town Councilor Michael Wood

Michael Wood

SCARBOROUGH — On Aug. 17, Michael Wood surprised his peers on the Scarborough Town Council by resigning his office, effective with the November elections, due to having secured a job in New Hampshire. An air traffic control supervisor at Portland International Jetport, Wood has served Scarborough for nearly 15 years, first on the planning board, then on the council, having logged time as chairman of both bodies.

In this interview conducted Aug. 18 at his home, Wood recounts his public service, including the high points, the low points, and why both may have centered on the same issue.

Q: Congratulations on the new job. Tell us a little bit about it.

A: It’s the same job I do here at Portland – supervising air-traffic controllers. They call us front-line managers. We monitor operations, open and close [air] sectors, coordinate equipment outages, coordinate with other facilities, monitor the break rotation, things of that nature. This is the same job, but it’s in a different location. It’s called Boston Center and its located in Nashua. It controls all of new England, much of Upstate New York, Long Island, and about 150 miles east, over the ocean. They take all that area and they divide it into five distinct sub-areas – “areas of specialty” they call it. Each supervisor is assigned an area of specialty.  I’ll have Area C, which is over Boston, Providence, Norwich [Conn.] and south of New York City.

Q: So, why did this prompt a need to resign your town council seat?

A: It’s going to be a big commute, because I don’t want to move. I don’t plan on commuting every day, but when I do it’s three hours. I just don’t feel that I’m going to have the time to prepare. Making the Wednesday night council meetings is, in itself, probably quite doable, but the preparation time, and the subcommittee meetings, being accessible to the community – it’s not unusual to have a citizen call and want to meet you somewhere to show you something – and I’m just not prepared to be that accessible anymore.

Q: Clearly, there’s more to being a town councilor than just attending the bi-weekly meeting. How much time do you spend on public service each week?

A: It varies. In the summer, it’s slow typically, and that’s by design. But depending on how many subcommittees you’re on, and what kind, you can easily put in six hours a week.

Q: Given the commute, why not move closer to the new job?

A: Oh, I just love it here.

Q: Are you a local, or are you a convert to Scarborough’s charms?

A: We moved to Scarborough in 1985. Then I transferred to Boston Center, and we came back in 1992. We only looked in one town, at that time, and that was Scarborough, because we had made some really great friends in the time we were here before. The one thing I thought would be really good, if I could control it, was to have my kids essentially grow up in the same house, and go to the same school system, throughout their years, and be able to move on in life and always regard this place as the place they grew up in.

Q: Were you able to do that?

A: Yes, so far. We have three daughters. They’re 22, 20 and 16. So, I don’t want to leave. This is paradise.

Q: Where are you from originally?

A: I was born in Concord, New Hampshire. I lived in Stoneham, Mass. until eighth grade. Then my parents moved to Long Island. I went to high school on Long Island and college in Upstate New York. By the time I finished college my parents had moved back to Massachusetts. Within two years of graduating college in 1982, I was hired by the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration].

I went to Oklahoma for my initial screening, which lasts for four months. If you pass that, they send you to a location. They let you pick your top three choices. I put down Burlington Boston and Portland. I got Portland.

Q: So, you were happy with that pick?

A: Yeah. Portland’s a great place for air traffic controllers. It’s got everything the big boys have, but it’s not so intense. It’s a good pace to learn. Once I did that for about three years I went to the big boys in Boston – “The Show,” they call it. I was a controller, but then they offered me a supervisory job back at Portland. It was a promotion, but, because it’s a smaller market, the pay ended up being a wash for me. But I jumped at it. Life here is just outstanding. It beats Southern New Hampshire any day of the week.

Q: Where you working on 9/11?

A: I wasn’t. I was at home, but I heard the news and went in about an hour after it happened, to help out in any way I could. One of my best friends in college was working at Cantor Fitzgerald [a financial services firm then located in the World Trade Center] and died in the attack.

Q: What was the mood like in the tower on that day?

A: It was solemn. Nobody was saying anything. I think everybody was in disbelief. I remember after a few hours one controller saying, “Well, the whole word has changes . . . forever.” You could tell that whatever was before, was not longer.

Q: You heard about it on the news. Did anyone in the Portland tower have any idea what was going on before the planes hit?

A: No, not that I know of. But they put it together pretty quick, including the fact that two of the terrorists flew out of here.

Q: How did things change at the Jetport afterward?

A: Well, of course, security went form being discreet to incredibly overt. It was everywhere you went. For a while we had a guard in the tower, 24/7. It was amazing.

A: Have things gotten more relaxed, over time?

A: Security is still a very big issue. At Portland, we didn’t have key-card requirements. There was a time when there was no fence around the tower. Actually, there was no fence around the airport. You could walk in the front door and right up to any gate. Now, you can’t go anywhere without an identification badge, and proper access.

Q: Moving to your municipal service, you started on the planning board. What prompted your interest in that?

A: A friend of mine, Jeff Messer, was on the council. He asked if I would serve on the open space committee.  I reluctantly said, “Sure, why not.” So, I actually did that first. And then, from there, I was asked to consider planning board. I wasn’t sure what that would be all about, but, again, I said, “Sure,” had an interview and got appointed. This was back in 1997, or so.

Q: And what did you think of that experience?

A: Man, was I intimidated at first. It was me and seven other gentlemen and they all appeared to me to be these incredible bright men who probably went into mahogany-walled rooms to smoke cigars at the end of the day. They were mostly all lawyers, and stuff. But, I don’t think it was six months later I was chairman.

Q: How did that happen?

A: Well [laughs], it wasn’t because of my intellect, or anything. People just retired. At the time, Piper Shores had just gone through a contract-zone process. It was a very contentious situation. Many of the landowners down there took the town to court. I remember, Martin Greeley was chairman at the time, and his resignation letter referred to the stress, etcetera, etcetera. He said he chose to spend his free time doing something else. So, with other resignations and what-not, Rick Shinay became chairman, and I found myself as vice-chairman.

Q: Now, at this time, in addition to Piper Shores, Scarborough was really booming with development, is that right?

A: Yes. One thing I remember, in addition to just how busy it was that many of the subdivisions that were being built in town, at least so it seemed, were being brought forth by Norm Berube. Well, Rick had to recuse himself because his law form represented Norm. So, not only did I find myself sitting as chairman a lot of the time, but Norm’s subdivisions always seemed to bring out the most citizens. Anyway, I had to learn quick.

Q: Just how busy was the planning board back then?

A: Well . . . wow. Our meetings started at 7 p.m. and our agendas were often 12, 15, 18 items. And they weren’t five-minute items. Oh, there were one or two of these. But mostly there were full-blown reviews. We enacted a rule that no new items could be introduced after 10:30 p.m.  Every now and then, if there was a small item, we might bend the rules just so that poor applicant could get on with his life. But I remember going to the town planner at the time and saying, “Why are you putting 20 items on this agenda? There’s no way we’re going to be able to hear them all before 10:30.” He said, “I do that to give people standing, so they’re first in line for the next meeting.” It was the only way.

Also, and this sounds counter-intuitive, but, we used to meet every other week, and we actually changed the rules to meet every three weeks, because we were so busy. The reason we did that is that the planning department could not keep up with the applications that were coming in. They could not prepare the data correctly and appropriately. We would get packets in a cardboard box like this [holds hands about three feet apart] at our doors on Friday for Monday’s meeting. Nobody could keep up. It was crazy. We had to slow everything down in order to do anything right.

Q: As a planning board member, how did you process all that was coming at you?

A: What you had to do, you had to figure out your niche. For me, I didn’t pay to much attention to stormwater analysis, or nitrate plumes, or septic tanks and stuff. We had a great engineering team in the planning department and I relied on their expertise. But I liked the overall design, the subjective stuff – trying to instill character. I really enjoyed it.

Q: Looking back on it now, how do you think Scarborough handled the boom times?

A: I think we did pretty well.

Q: Is there anything that you look back on now and think, “Gee, I wish I had done that one differently?”

A: The only project that I wish I had a second shot at is the one I first reviewed. But I don’t really want to say what that was. It’s an active business and I’d hate to get them upset by saying I don’t think their project came out very well.

Q: Okay, well what did Scarborough get right during that time?

A: Well, since we were so well-endowed with applicants, commercial and otherwise, we were able to discuss things like design standards. We didn’t have design standards. Now, any town can sit down and decide how they want their town to evolve – say, we want pitched roofs, we want signs to be just so high, we want certain colors, etcetera, etcetera – but, if you don’t have businesses, or people interested in doing business in your town, it can take forever to see those things come to fruition. The nice thing about Scarborough is that we were able to put in place these kinds of controls and design guidelines and see the results of that very quickly. So, we could adjust quickly, if the result was not what we anticipated, or we could simply be very happy.

Q: Can you cite an example?

A: Well, I remember Tim Horton’s, when that came before the planning board. He had a typical Tim Horton’s right out of the box that looked like it belonged as much in Oklahoma City as in Maine. We talked bout colors, we talked about pitched roofs, we talked about shingles, angling the building, stuff like that. I remember, the [franchise] owner was very much a gentleman, but he was very frustrated with us. But we were not pulling things out of our hat. He had developed design standards and we had a book that we were referring to. He had the same book. But, at the end, when it finally got approved, after many meetings, the district manager of Tim Horton’s came to the meeting and said, “When this first began, I was concerned, but I’ve got to tell you, what we see right here now, is going to be the template for all the future Tim Horton’s.” They were very proud of it.

Also, if you look at Sullivan Tire – a 300-foot-long warehouse – that whole façade was made possible, I believe, in large part, because of the high standards Scarborough has.

Q: Did you created those standards on the fly, as all these projects were coming at you?

A: No. The high demand for time in front of the planning board made us realize that this was an opportunity to put together an ordinance that spoke to design guidelines, because we didn’t have any at that time. Certainly, when applicants came forward, we employed whatever standards we had in place at that time.

I was on the [planning] board nine years, and probably for the first three years of those years, we had design standards as, maybe a suggestion. And then, for the last four or five years, we had them as an ordinance. I was very happy with that.

Q: How did the rapid growth of Scarborough in the 1990’s change the character of the town?

A: I watched Route 1 evolve in many ways. If you look up and down Route 1 now, and if you tried to imagine that 10 or 15 years ago, it’s radically different But the A-number-one reason it grew was because of applications coming forward and wanting to spend money here. I always tipped my hat to them. Whenever we finished a review, my first words were always, “Congratulations and thank you for choosing Scarborough.” That was my way of shaking their hand, because it’s not always easy, I know. We don’t have the demand going on right now, but it’ll come back.

Q: How did you transition from the planning board to the town council?

A: I termed out. In Scarborough, you can only do three consecutive terms on the planning board – nine years.

Q: So, Scarborough has term limits for appointed positions?

A: Yes, Scarborough has had that as long as I’ve known. I think it’s a good idea. A town like Scarborough that sees a lot of activity, you get people on these really important boards that make a lot of really important decisions, I can see how they could, unknowingly even, wield a lot of influence.

Q: How have you enjoyed your time on the town council? Has it been less stressful than the planning board?

A: In some ways it is. It’s much different than the planning board. It’s been good. The nice thing about the town council is, you have a blank piece of paper for the most part. You create ordinances and policy. On the planning board, you only enact it. You’re invited to participate on forums and discussions and such, but when you’re at the meeting your hands are bound.

Q: Of all the things the council had created in your time at the table, what would you say are the best and worst things it’s done?

A: I’m pretty proud of how the Pine Point/Snowberry Park project came out. That was extremely controversial. My wife, Colleen, calls it, “Our Lost Summer.” But, I think my planning board experience was very valuable during that process, because I looked at it from a land-use perspective.

Q: For those who don’t know, briefly review what the project entailed.

A: It was a hotel that pre-dated ordinances for the most part, and then there was a street –about 30-feet wide – then a parking lot from there to a fence, and then at the end of the fence there was a bluff and then the ocean. So, right away, as a planning board member, if someone brought a site plan like that and said, “I want to build a hotel and, across the street, I want to put my parking,” we’d say, “Sorry, you can’t do that. That is not a good situation.”

But the street was not used as a typical street. I was pretty much used for people to access the parking lot and then for people to walk across to get to the hotel. There was no landscaping. It was building, then pavement, then parking lot.

Anyway, the owner, [Peter] Truman, came to the town, and he wanted the town to consider a land swap. He said it would be nicer if he could put his parking contiguous with his building, and the resulting land that was once occupied by part of his parking lot could go to the town. But it wasn’t a 50-50 swap, and that was the big contention down there. A lot of folks thought the Truman family was getting more than the town was getting. I never viewed it that way. I saw it was, we were getting something exceptionally better that what we had. It didn’t matter to e if they go 65 percent of the square footage. What was important to me was that the resulting land was enough for us to create an attractive gateway to the beach.

Q: And you feel like that’s been done?

A: Oh, absolutely, without question. If you go down there and look at it, I think you’ll be impressed.

Q: But people didn’t see that at the time?

A: Oh, no. The meetings were standing room only, with a lot of questions, and heated debates. It really tested my patience, my ability to keep control – not only of myself, but of the meeting – and to moderate. That’s what I think being on the town council and the planning board has taught me more than anything else. It’s taught me to be patient, to listen to somebody’s opposing point of view, even if, in the first couple of minutes, I would typically close down, close my mind, and say I’m not interested. In that role, you have to be interested, because you have to speak to it. And, oftentimes, that broadens you, it broadens your perspective on things. It changes how you see the world.

Q: So, even if you don’t change your view, you view the issue differently?

A: Exactly. And, although I had some pretty big tests on the planning board, that was my biggest. Some people might say I failed, but, overall, I was pretty successful, I think.

Q: Why might some people say you failed?

A: Well, there were a couple of meetings where even I was disappointed, where I was a little cantankerous. I was a little rough. There’s really no excuse, per se, but I had the sense it was getting out of control.

Q: And control is what you do for a living?

A: Yeah, I’m an air traffic controller. It’s all about control. You don’t ask an aircraft to do something. You say, “Turn right.” They don’t then come back and say, “Well, how about left.” Eight hours a day, that’s all you do. So, you have to kind of pull yourself away from that.

Q: Given how things eventually turned out, do you feel at all vindicated in the position you held?

A: Well, I’ll tell you a real story that happened about a month ago. Colleen and I were walking down by the beach, and I wanted to go over and see the newest component, this trellis that public works built.  They did a beautiful job. And a gentleman starts walking into the park with his dog from the other direction. I recognized him right away. He was one of the people who was most vocal against the deal. I mean, very, very vocal against it. So, I recognized him and said hello. Then I asked, “Well, what do you think? You like it?” He said, “Oh, it’s beautiful, it’s wonderful.“ Now, he didn’t go so far as to say, “I was wrong and you were right,” but I didn’t care about that. But, we has truly, truly happy and pleased with the way it came out. So, that was a validation for me.

The other validation was this. It was my style as chairman to speak to an issue last. So, this is up for a final vote, and its gone through all this stuff – many months – and after everyone spoke, by their comments, it was clear, there were four councilors who were against the project, and two who were for it. I was the third.

When it came my turn to vote, I didn’t show any disappointment. I just looked out into the crowd and said, “Well, you folks can count as well as I can, and it looks like this isn’t going to pass tonight. But I’m going to spend my 10 minutes telling you why I still think it should.

Afterward, I called for the vote, “All in favor.” I looked left, I looked right – four! You could hear a pin drop. I was trying to keep my shock and awe invisible, but I’m sure it wasn’t. Then we moved on with the meeting. Afterward, I went up to Councilor Richard Sullivan and I said, “What happened? I thought you were going to vote no? He said, “You changed my mind.”

Well, Sullivan, me, and one other were villainized in the papers – not by the paper, but by people writing to the editor – and so much so, it was crazy. It was so bad, there were several letters, after like six weeks of this, that came to our defense. But Richard Sullivan, he did not get re-elected. He got defeated because of this. That’s how contentious it was.

Anyway, I’m leading to this point: The validation for me truly was that, when it came my time to run for re-election last year, I got more votes than anybody. Time had passed, people could see the result, and, in the end, more people than not, it seemed, ended up seeing it my way.

Q: So, is that project the defining moment of your time on the town council?

A: That was most of my memory as to the blood, sweat and tears of being on the town council and then, at the end of the day, being very satisfied with the result.

But there’s a lot of things that go on. There’s finance. When I was chairman we passed a zero-percent increase, so the taxes would stay flat.

Q: And that’s created some controversy in regards to the school budget, is that right?

A: Correct. Although, in my opinion, most of the cuts there have been directly related to decreased subsidies we are getting from Augusta. It’s been beyond ridiculous. I mean, millions of dollars, and that’s hard to absorb. But I think the schools have done a fairly good job.

Q: In today’s economy, are spending cuts the new normal for Scarborough?

A: Make no mistake about it, for a long time, whether it be the school or the municipal side, Scarborough was, for the most part, printing money, because of the growth from the mid-‘90s, when we were just adding to the tax base hand over fist.

Q: And during this time, Scarborough borrowed quite it bit. Can it sustain that debt load in the current economy, especially given the $39 million bond proposal that will be on the ballot in November?

A: We had a bond debt expert from Moody’s come to address the finance committee about a month ago, and we asked that very same question. He unequivocally said, “You folks are in outstanding condition.” We have the highest bond rating. It was interesting, because a lot of the things that he said gave him confidence about Scarborough was the same stuff we all heard last week about S&P and the U. S. They use the same criteria. Relative to other surrounding communities, we do have a higher debt load than they do. But many of these other communities have not had to spend as much of their own money for school construction, as we did with the high school. Gorham, in particular, has been the recipient of some very, very generous monies from Augusta. But now South Portland had a high school bond that’s been approved. It’s just hasn’t been sold yet. Compare us when that goes on their books.

Q: So, you believe you’re leaving Scarborough on solid financial footing?

A: I think Scarborough is in as good a position as any town in this state, if not better, in this economy. I really do. We can still pull back a little bit in our spending. I equate it to a train going down the track at 120 miles an hour. Some people want you to stop it, but I think to much pain is the result of stopping to quickly. But we’ve slowed it down. The first year I was on the council, the growth in spending was 0 percent. The next year it was two and change. And, last year, unfortunately, though we fought to keep it down, it was 3 percent.

We cut back in many areas to do that, because we made a commitment to our municipal employees that we didn’t want to put any of them out on the street if we could possibly help it. Now, the school department has approached things maybe a little bit differently.

Q: Apart from the loss of some 40 jobs in the school department the past two years, and the Sprague Corp. proposal for new beach access, maybe the greatest ongoing controversy in Scarborough has been the parking at Higgins Beach. How do you feel the town has handled that?

A: The beach communities around here, they’re, well . . . let’s say they’re opinionated. But Higgins Beach, I think, is going well. Nobody got everything they wanted, but everybody got a little bit.

In my view, it’s always been about promoting the parking lot. So, we had to eliminate the on-street parking. It didn’t make any sense to me to spend all that money on the lot and then make more accessible the on-street parking. From my perspective, I think it needs to be what it is.  We did add the parking on Bayview Avenue, as a compromise. It is timed to allow people to have lunch, walk the dog, that kind of thing. Then, long-term users go to the parking lot, and they walk the couple hundred yards to the beach. It makes perfect sense to me. The on-street parking was getting out of control. It’s a very dense, tightly packed community, and the streets aren’t hat wide. I was getting crazy.  People will park where it’s most convenient for them. I get that. But what I was afraid of, if we didn’t so something about the on-street parking, people would still go there and we’d have this beautiful, newly built parking lot that would always be maybe 50 to 60 percent full. It didn’t make any sense to me.

Q: What do you think the biggest priorities are for Scarborough now? I know you’re a big proponent of rebuilding Wentworth Intermediate School.

A: I am. I am going to help that in any way I can. I was a skeptic at first, but I listened, I took tours, I participated and I looked at the numbers.  It just makes no sense to continue with the present Wentworth.  I firmly believe that every dollar we put into Wentworth as it sits is something we’ll never get back. It’s just to keep the lights on. Others will argue, and they’ll argue it very well, that, in today’s economy, should we be building a new school? Well, in my view, I don’t think the economy is going to change appreciably in the next five years. We’re going to continue to have this question in front of us until it’s built. That’s not a threat, it’s just a reality. The building is not going to improve itself.

I so much believe that’s going to be true, I’d rather build it now than five years from now.

But, overall, for Scarborough, the biggest challenge going forward is going to be the budget.

Q: Now, in your job, you have forced retirement at 56, and that’s just three years away. Might we see you run for office again?

A: Sure, sure. In fact, I am hoping once I end my time on the council to be appointed to the long-range planning committee. I will make that application. I am very open to stay involved.

Q: Any last comments for the public.

A: Just that I appreciate everybody’s support, and the confidence they’ve shown in me. I also want everybody to understand that, when I ran last year for a new three-year term, this certainly wasn’t my plan. I had every intention of completing my term. But, these types of opportunities, you never know when they are going to come up, and you have to take advantage of them when you can.  I hope everyone understands that I had not only the best interests of my family at heart, but also of the town. That’s why I feel its best that I resign now. There was a part of me that wanted to test it, but I didn’t want to get to January and learn I could not keep up with council work and my new job. If I resign then, the town will have to hold a special election, and I didn’t want that to be the reason for incurring that cost to my fellow taxpayers. So, by announcing my resignation now, people have time to collect signatures and get on the ballot for the regular election.