Times Record Staff
RICHMOND — Richmond voters will elect municipal officials at the polls Tuesday.
Five candidates seek two three-year terms on the five-person Board of Selectmen. The top two vote getters from among Pauline Beasley, Frederic Browne, Clarence Cummins, David Guilmette and Gary Poulin will win the seats. Cummins is an incumbent seeking re-election.
In other contests, Thomas Webster challenges incumbent Robert Bodge Jr. for a three-year term on the Richmond Utilities District board of trustees.
Jay Brown and Lori Umberhind are competing for a one-year seat on the Regional School Unit 2 board of directors.
Kimberly Valek-Molnar is unopposed for a position on the Budget Committee. One other position on that committee will either be filled by write-in or by appointment from the Board of Selectmen.
Enterprise Grange hosted a forum for municipal candidates last Wednesday. About 40 people attended the forum, and Dana Sullivan served as moderator. Here is a summary of that event:
Four of the five candidates — Pauline Beasley, Frederic Browne, Clarence Cummins and Gary Poulin —running for two three-year seats on the Board of Selectmen attended.
Guilmette couldn’t attend, but asked Marilyn Stinson, the community service chairwoman for the Grange, to read a letter about his candidacy.
The candidates introduced themselves before accepting questions from the audience.
“I lived in Richmond all my life,” Beasley said. “Hopefully, we can change some things.”
Poulin has been married to his wife for 28 years and lives on Parks Road. He is a self-employed contractor who works by himself. He enjoys hunting, target shooting “and riding my Harley Davidson,” as well as spending time with friend and family.
Poulin said he is running for selectman because he is “hoping to lower taxes or spend (money) in better places sometimes. I also feel that the back roads and some of the town’s infrastructure needs to be improved. … “Complaints about the town’s roads are “just constant,” he said.
“One of the big reasons I’m running,” Poulin said, “is I’d like to get a better understanding of how town government works. Hopefully, I can help make a difference in improving it.”
Cummins has lived in Richmond for about 16 years, first arriving in Maine on a Navy deployment in 1957. He returned in the mid-1960s, flying out of Brunswick in patrol planes for about six years.
After a total of 27 years in the Navy, he worked for a government contractor in Rhode Island. When he retired, he and his wife returned to Maine in 1996. He served a three-year term on the Richmond Budget Committee and is finishing a three-year term on the Board of Selectmen.
“I think I’ve learned a great deal about the town,” Cummins said. “It gets complicated at times, and yet other times it’s quite easy. The major point is that all of us here, I think, are here to serve the town the best we can, and I see it as trying to establish a balance between the resources we have — which is essentially taxes and the infrastructure and equipment which we have — and the needs of the town. … Do we have enough money to buy the equipment we need so we can maintain the roads… so we can afford to keep the employees we have so we can continue to provide the level of service we’ve been providing, and it’s not easy? … It hurts every time that the town raises taxes.”
Browne isn’t a Richmond native but said he’s adopted it as his town. He grew up on Boston and said Richmond is a nice place to be. He is running for selectman because, “I think to a point it’s civic duty. I think that if you are in a town that perhaps you have a responsibility to try to give something back to it. I think I have something to give to the town, and I’d like to be able to do that. Obviously I don’t have the experience that Mr. Cummins does, but in my past I have worked in management in the graphic arts industry in the Boston area and I am perhaps familiar with some of the workings of how an entity should function,” including budgets.
Richmond is a town he said, “not necessary of residents; not necessarily of voters; but Richmond is a town of people. And I see that. I’m a substitute teacher and I work frequently at Richmond High School.”
Referring to students there, he asked, “What is it that we’re going to do to make this a better place for them when it’s time for them to take over?”
A number of students leaving the high school to go on to college or other things, “have said frankly they want to get out of Richmond,” according to Browne. “They don’t see opportunity here. A number of them said this is my town, this is where I’m going to stay. I want to go out and perhaps get myself better prepared so that I can come back into this town and be a functioning part of it, raise my own children here. … We’ve got to prepare this town for our children and our children’s children.”
Stinson read a letter from Guilmette, who wrote that he was born and raised in the Gardiner area and moved to Richmond in 1988. He graduated from Gardiner High and attended the University of Maine at Augusta, where he majored in public administration. He has taken a five-year correspondence course in mechanical engineering at Penn State University and is a graduate of the Maine Criminal Justice Academy. He served in the U.S. Army from 1966 to 1969 and is a combat veteran assigned to the 9th Infantry Division in South Vietnam.
After working in law enforcement for more than 40 years, Guilmette now works as a special deputy secretary of state in charge of the law enforcement division.
“I’m running for selectman because I’m fiscally responsible and I believe I can make a difference,” Guilmette wrote. “As a public servant, I know we must spend taxpayers’ dollars to provide services. I feel part of my job along with the other selectmen is to spend those dollars wisely and get a dollar’s worth of product or service for every dollar spent.”
Guilmette wrote that at his current job he is responsible for a $1.2 million budget and currently serves on the town’s budget committee.
“I have a good deal of experience in this area,” he wrote. “I have come to realize as a member of the budget committee for the past three years that there is a great deal of room for improvement in the area of communication among the different departments in our town government. As a selectman, I will work hard to improve communication, which we all know will allow town government to run much more efficiently and effectively. As a pubic servant, I believe we need to listen to our citizens and react to their concerns quickly and in a fair and honest manner.”
Richmond Utilities District
Thomas Webster has lived in Richmond since 1995. He and his wife have two daughters, the eldest whom graduated Saturday from Richmond High School.
Citing past experience as an employee of the district and public works department, Webster said, “I feel I have good knowledge of its inner workings and how the board works. … I see a change where we need to rotate people out. Things tend to get a little stagnant and I think I can offer some change in many ways.
Incumbent Robert Bodge Jr. has lived in Richmond all his life and has been on the RUD board for about 15 years. His interest in serving on the board stems from a desire to give back to the town.
“When I got on the Richmond Utilities District years ago, I figured it was the least political thing that I thought I could do to help the town,” Bodge said, acknowledging it has been more political than he desired at times. “The district now is headed into somewhat of a new era with the trying times happening. … We are on a scheduled long-term plan from our infrastructure to where we’re at with our old aging plant, and I think I’d like to stay there and see it continue to carry out that plan as long as I can.”
Budget Committee
Kimberly Valek-Molnar is running unopposed for one of two, two-year terms on the Budget Committee. She has lived in Richmond for about six years and has two sons who attend Marcia Buker Elementary School.
“I have a lot of questions that are unanswered when I attend meetings and I kind of feel that I want to be a little more involved and try to find out a little more as to where they’re spending our money and what is it we can do to help people in need, but also to help people who are living on a week-to-week paycheck and can’t afford these (tax) increases every year. It’s hard enough when gas goes up and fuel goes up and now groceries go up and no one’s getting (pay) increases to help with this. I just hope that maybe I can put a couple of cents in to help the town not have those increases, because we just can’t afford that. … I do work in finance so I do have that background.”
RSU 2 school board
Jay Brown is running against Lori Umberhind for a one-year seat on the RSU 2 school board.
Brown has lived in Richmond for 10 years and says he loves the town. Two of his children attend Marcia Buker and one is getting ready to transition to the middle school.
He’s served nearly 21 years in the military and currently works with the Department of Veteran Affairs in the new Pleasant Street office in charge of the Freedom of Information Act/Privacy Act department.
Brown says his military service has given him experience with multi-million dollar budgets and various budget classes. He’d like to get involved in the regional school district because “questions are unanswered. You can sit in on the meetings and listen but then go into closed door discussions and that drives me nuts because I want to know what they’re talking about and that stuff doesn’t get published. So I’d like to sit on it and find out what’s actually going on and make a difference for Richmond.”
Umberhind said her husband is a life-long resident of Richmond who built their house 21 years ago on Alexander Reed Road. She has three children in Richmond schools.
“I’ve been in the school system,” she said. “There’s been lots of transitions, lots of frustration, lots of working together. I’m a big advocate for our teachers, but I’m also for accountability with our administration as well as with teachers and our students. I really want to be helping this whole RSU conglomeration with Hall-Dale and Monmouth. We just are really in our infancy and there’s lots of questions that need to be answered. That’s why I’m running.”
 

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