Noah Miner’s reason for running for the Gorham Town Council is simple: He wants to make decisions that will positively impact Gorham and accurately represent the concerns of residents.

Miner said he has spoken with hundreds of Gorham residents and feels that the Town Council isn’t listen to what residents really need.

“I go to the meetings, and I see what the council is doing, and I say, ‘wait a minute, this isn’t what the residents want.'” Miner said. “When you talk to the public about issues, it’s not what you see going on at the meetings.”

Miner, 33, has lived in the town for seven years. He is a stay-at-home dad for his two children, who are both under 3 years old. He graduated from the Maine Maritime Academy and previously worked for General Electric as an engineer. He lost an election bid to the Town Council in 2007.

If elected this year, he said he wants to tackle issues Gorham is facing as it grows by planning for the town’s future intelligently.

“I see the town being developed in a way that won’t be good for the community in 50 years,” he said. “It’s developing in a sprawling way where the community is going to wish that they did it in a different way 50 years from now.”

Miner said he is also troubled by a growing tax burden on the citizens. One way he said he would try to alleviate that would be to argue for keeping property taxes low and the tax rate flat. He said this would ease the tax burden for older people living in their homes and find ways to keep property taxes reasonable for young people moving into town.

“You don’t want to tax people out of town,” he said. “You own your home, you’ve got investments, fuel costs and so on, and people are scared.”

Realigning priorities when it comes to municipal spending is also a concern to Miner. He said he feels the village has potential to attract sustainable businesses, and the town needs to capitalize on the new bypass that should be finished at the end of this year.

“We have an asset in the village, and I don’t think the town realizes that,” Miner said. “There is a lot of potential to make it a better place to work, walk around. We need to take some yearly capitol investments and assign it just to village improvement and don’t allow another committee to assign it somewhere else.”