Hancock County’s top administrator will work his last day on Friday, June 3.
While the county looks for a new administrator, it will hire former Bar Harbor’s former town manager on an interim basis, a county commissioner said Tuesday.
County’s county administrator since 2016, decided to resign. Adkins confirmed his last day will be June 3 but did not respond to a request for comment on his reasons for leaving.
“I am assuming he’s taken another job,” Paul Paradis, one of the county’s three elected commissioners, said Tuesday.
Paradis said the commission met Tuesday morning with consultant Don Gerrish of Eaton Peabody to discuss how to move ahead with a search for a new county administrator. He said that Gerrish recommended that the county hire Cornell Knight on an interim basis while it looks for a long-term replacement for Adkins.
Knight served as Bar Harbor’s town manager for 7 years before he retired at the end of 2021.
John Wombacher, the commission chairman, and commissioner William Clark couldn’t be reached Tuesday.
The county also is looking for a new deputy administrator. Rebekah Knowlton, who held that post for several years, left earlier this month to take a job in the private sector, Paradis said.
Paradis said the county likely will focus on hiring a new county administrator on a long-term basis before it looks to fill the deputy administrator position.
The county does have a new treasurer. Gov. Janet Mills has appointed Monica Cease, the county’s finance director, to the position, which had been vacant since Michael Boucher resigned in March. Boucher, who feuded with Adkins and commissioners over his commitment to the job, was elected as a write-in candidate in 2018.
Cease already entered this year’s race for the county treasurer position as a Democrat. She is running unopposed in the June primary. Candidates who want to run as unaffiliated candidates in the November general election have until 5 p.m. Wednesday, June 1, to file certified nomination papers with the Secretary of State’s office.
