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Two current Bangor city councilors are running in the Democratic primary to serve on the Penobscot County Commission. If elected, councilors Dan Tremble and Joe Leonard have both said they would continue to serve on the council in addition to the county role.
For anyone wondering, yes, they can do this under Maine law. But they, and the many other public officials from both parties who have served in multiple roles at the same time, should no longer be allowed to do this. It is time for Maine to strengthen its laws around dual office holding.
From our perspective, having elected officials serve in multiple roles at the same time raises obvious questions of ethics and representation. Which constituency are they serving when they make a certain decision or take a certain action? City councilors should not be allowed to be county commissioners, too. The president of the Maine Senate should not also be able to serve on a local select board at the same time, as Sen. Troy Jackson tried to do last year. Mayors and town managers (though the latter is not an elected role) should not be able to serve in the Legislature simultaneously.
Maine statute already outlines roles that are considered “incompatible” for officials to hold concurrently. But this does not go far enough. To us, there is an inherent conflict of interest when allowing elected officials to serve different groups of people at the same time. The appearance of this conflict should be enough for Maine lawmakers to follow other states that have broad prohibitions on dual office holding.
Just as an example, here’s some language from North Carolina’s Constitution that sounds good to us: “No person shall hold concurrently any two offices in this State that are filled by election of the people.”
Prohibiting officials from serving in two elected roles at the same time, as North Carolina does, would be both stronger and simpler than Maine’s current approach to dual office holding.
Under Maine law, certain municipal and county offices are considered incompatible.
“A person holding the office of county commissioner may not at the same time hold either the office of mayor or assessor of a city or be a member of a select board or hold the office of assessor of a town,” reads some of the relevant statute.
This means that, if Tremble or Leonard were from a town with a select board-style of government where board members are sometimes also tax assessors, then they wouldn’t be able to serve as county commissioner without resigning the assessor role. But since they are city councilors, not select board members and tax assessors, they don’t have this added complication. (Tremble’s council term expires in 2025, and Leonard’s in 2026). Also, if we’re reading state statute correctly, they would potentially cross the line into incompatibility if they were to serve as mayor (chair of the city council) while also serving on the county commission.
Confused yet? We’re right there with you. Even when technically allowed, and while we recognize the difficulty of filling local elected roles in Maine, dual office holding seems questionable.
The simplest thing, and strongest thing from a good governance perspective, would be for Maine to prohibit dual office holding. It is an admirable thing for people to want to serve the public, but they should do so in one elected office at a time.
