HARPSWELL — Incumbent Selectwoman Elinor Multer successfully defended her seat Saturday against challenger C. Matthew Rich and write-in candidate Richard A. Daniel.
In the contest for road commissioner, candidate Ronald Ponziani beat Paul Standridge by a margin of 391 votes. Ponziani received 559 votes and Standridge received 168 votes.
Joanne Rogers, an uncontested incumbent representative of Harpswell on the School Administrative District 75 board, received 551 votes.
Results from Saturday’s voting put Multer ahead of the other two candidates for the Board of Selectmen by more than 300 votes. A total of 730 votes were cast in that race, with 467 going to Multer.
Rich netted 157 votes and Daniels took 106 as a write-in candidate.
In an email to The Times Record, Multer said she is grateful to Harpswell voters for what she takes “to be an expression of a certain amount of confidence.”
“But I have been around long enough to know that such an expression lasts only as long as one’s performance meets expectations,” Multer wrote.
Multer said she will try hard to win the trust of those who voted for other candidates and urged voters “to make your thoughts on town affairs known to a selectman of your choice.”
In her statement, Multer also indicated that she was pleased with the tone of the campaign and said that it might “ serve as a model and substitute for what confronts us daily on the national political stage.”
“I want to acknowledge Matt Rich’s generosity to me in his remarks throughout the campaign,” Multer wrote.
Rich said in an interview with The Times Record last week that his candidacy is not a statement about the job his opponent is doing, but that “competition is healthy for a community.”
West Harpswell School
Voters also weighed in Saturday in a nonbinding straw poll about what to do with the vacant West Harpswell School building.
The poll asked voters to rank in order of preference four choices for how to use the building.
Currently, the building is open to limited use by application. Only one group — the Ash Point Community Organization — has completed that application process so far and plans to keep open a library with more than 40 of the books that previously were on the shelves at the school.
Saturday’s results do not indicate a clear preference for the use of the building, with around 300 voters ranking either keeping the building for town events and activities and selling the building “with restrictions to protect the neighborhood” as their top choices.
The idea of keeping the building for town activities earned the most support by a margin of 22 votes, receiving 316 first-choice votes in all.
The idea of selling the building earned 293 votes and the next closest option — developing the land for affordable housing for seniors or working families — received 110 votes.
The idea of developing the building as a business center received the fewest first place votes. That idea is something the Board of Selectmen recently explored and expressed interest in pursuing.
At a meeting in December, the Board of Selectmen met with Jim Howard, president and CEO of the development firm Priority Group LLC, to discuss the possibility of converting the facility into something like Priority Group’s Border Trust Business Center in Topsham.
During the town’s annual business meeting, voters also approved a $60,000 appropriation for the upkeep of the school building through the rest of the year in a budget that includes $6,000 for site planning and other related services.
According to a document about the non-binding vote issued by the town regarding the straw-poll vote, the voting results will be weighted based on rank, with first choice votes receiving 4 points, second choice votes receiving 3 points, and so forth.
The results will be “carefully considered” by the Board of Selectmen going forward, the document states, and no “winner” will be declared based on the results.
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