Residents in Scarborough and Cape Elizabeth have some important choices to make next month. In addition to choosing new school board members and town councilors, Cape Elizabeth residents will decide whether to adopt a fee for visitors to Fort Williams for the first time, and Scarborough voters will decide whether to spend $55 million on two school construction projects.

Reject park fee

We have been and continue to be opposed to adopting a fee at Fort Williams. Although it costs the town money to maintain the park, and parts of the park are in serious need of repair, we’re opposed on principle to charging.

Many communities pay for parks through local taxes, as Cape Elizabeth now does for Fort Williams. We don’t want to see fees start popping up at public parks all over the state.

The parking fee the town has proposed for Fort Williams is indeed preferable to a fee that visitors would pay at a gate. However, a park that’s completely free and open to the public is ideal. Many people would also likely wind up parking in the neighborhoods near the park.

It would seem that private donations and public funding would be available for a park that attracts so many visitors and is home to one of the state’s greatest landmarks, Portland Headlight. A group of residents have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for an artificial turf playing field. Why can’t the same be done for Fort Williams?

Reject school project

While both Scarborough Middle School and Wentworth Intermediate School are far from perfect buildings, the price tag – $54 million – on these two projects is just too high, particularly with no money coming from the state.

When the town decided to build the $27 million high school with no help from the state several years ago, it was the most expensive school project a town had ever taken on without assistance from the state. Few towns build schools without such help. Scarborough should be proud that residents care so much about the schools that they are willing to invest such a large amount of money in them. However, to follow that investment, just a few years later, by borrowing money to build two more schools at twice the cost, and again without help from the state, is a bad idea.

Additionally, these two projects did not get the scrutiny they deserve from the Scarborough Town Council. There’s no question that the school committee and the building committee have put a lot of hard work into these two projects. They wanted the best buildings they could get for local students. However, the town council should have worked with the committee to come up with a proposal that would balance the needs of the schools and taxpayers. That, unfortunately, didn’t happen, and it might be because of bad blood between the boards left simmering after the debate over the quality of construction on the high school.

Voters should reject these building projects, and force these two bodies to work to together to come up with something that everyone can support.

Scarborough Town Council

In the Scarborough Town Council race, our endorsements in the contest for two seats go to Carol Rancourt and Dave Dedian.

Dedian, a vice president and project manager at Woodard & Curran, a consulting and engineering firm, has spent time in front of councils and planning boards. He’s seen boards that work well together and boards that don’t. Dedian is even tempered and open minded, and his presence could be an asset to Scarborough’s Town Council.

Rancourt, an incumbent, has done a good job of weighing the concerns of her constituents. She’s always willing to reconsider her positions because she keeps an open mind and genuinely tries to represent the people of Scarborough well. She deserves another term on the council.

Cape Town Council

In the race for three seats on the Cape Elizabeth Town Council, our endorsements go to David Backer, James Rowe and Sara Lennon.

Backer, an incumbent, has done a good job on the council. He knows the town and the challenges it’s facing well at this point. He supports the spending cap the town adopted in 2004, something that demonstrated the town was taking its fiscal responsibilities seriously. He’s also opposed to a fee at Fort Williams, a position we support.

When asked why he was running for a seat on the town council, James Rowe’s answer was quite simple: He loves Cape Elizabeth. Rowe has spent his entire life in the same town where five generations of his family have lived. Although we don’t agree with all of his views – he reluctantly supports a fee at Fort Williams, for example – Rowe seems like a thoughtful candidate who genuinely wants to serve the community. He deserves the chance to do so.

Lennon had thoughtful stances on many of the issues we asked her about. She was one of several candidates who believed that the town could benefit from more communication between the town council and the school board. Her experience in education – she taught English in private schools throughout Massachusetts – could help her to be a leader in fostering better communication between the two boards.

Cape School Committee

In the race for three seats on the Cape Elizabeth School Committee, the town is lucky to have three excellent candidates. We could not pick three standouts. Piotrek Stamieszkin, Peter Cotter, Karen Burke and Kevin Sweeney are all excellent candidates. While Cotter and Stamieszkin could bring new and different ideas to the board, Burke brings a background in education. Sweeney is a longtime incumbent who would bring plenty of institutional knowledge and an interesting mix of life experience to the post. Readers can learn more about all of these candidates on pages 4 and 5, and voters can’t go wrong.

Whether you agree with our choices or not, we encourage everyone to get out and vote.

Brendan Moran, editor