Waldo's Littlefield: All in For Local Control

Kathy Littlefield has been First Selectman in the Town of Waldo for nearly 40 years. This question-and-answer profile marks the ninth and final installment in Maine Municipal Association’s 75th Anniversary series, which began last April.

Q. Please start with a description of your municipal career. When did you get started and what got you motivated?

A. I have to be honest with you, I was upset over a dump issue which was up the road from my farm. But a bigger part of that was being a farmer and raising a family, we could use every bit of money that we could get. I can remember the money was only $200 a year at the time. But that was something.

As I went on for now, I believe, 40 years, I just got hooked on it. I love the people, even the people who aren’t nice! I like the debate. I like the back and forth. I like going back and forth to Augusta. Well, sometimes I say I don’t like that part.

Everything goes into a basket, if you’re going to help your town. You’ve got to know what’s going on in Augusta. You’ve got to know what’s going on in your county. You better know what’s going on with your schools. You better really know what’s going on with the legislators in Augusta. To me, that’s just always been a big part. And it’s been a wonderful experience. There have been good parts and bad parts, you know, but I hope I’ve influenced the town. I hope I’ve helped people. And I hope I can still do it for a few more years.

Q. You’re the chair and the founder of the Waldo County Municipal Association. You have a very interesting philosophy about why you think that’s important. Can you share that?

A. I just have always thought that selectmen and managers within an area need to have a common sounding board. They need to come together and they need to know they don’t have to continually re-invent the wheel. You have to have a discussion. Things work well in one town, maybe they’ll work well in my town. If you come across this issue in your town, how did you handle it? And there’s always strength in numbers. When the big issues hit in Augusta, you need numbers, you need people who can branch out and get things done.

We’ve seen it at work time and time again. We’ve made a big difference in county issues. We’ve made a big difference with municipal issues – the LD 1s, the TABORs and all these things that sought to reduce local control, to get it to Big Brother government which, in my opinion, is never good. It’s always better if you can handle it at the local level because you’re not going to call Gov. LePage, or whoever’s governor, at midnight and say, “My road is messy, it’s potholes, it’s got this and that.”

You know, you round the corner at the supermarket and I used to look up the aisles to see if there was anyone there who I knew because I was in a hurry to get my groceries and get home. But I’ve always enjoyed talking about issues with people and helping them solve that. The Municipal Association does just that on a larger scale.

Q. The state Board of Environmental Protection, you served on that for eight years. Did that help you as a person, as a selectman? Did it help your citizens? What were some of the issues that you learned about during that period that perhaps you didn’t know about when you started?

A. Boy that was a real education to me. Like a lot of people back then, you didn’t think much about dumping out old gasoline. You know, there was just a little bit left in the can. You didn’t want to mess with that oil pan so you thought, “That’s not so bad. I’ll just take it a little farther away from the house and dump it.”

When I got on the BEP, I learned why you shouldn’t do that. I learned why lead paint was bad… It really educated me. It wasn’t just somebody saying, “You shouldn’t do that.” Then I said to myself, “I can’t be the only person who didn’t know that.” So I would get all those brochures from the BEP and I would include them in the Town Reports for people to read about lead paint, to read why you don’t dump your gasoline out in the back. I hope that the experience educated not only me, but other people in my town.

Q. You have been active with the Waldo County Budget Committee and you think that’s the way to go, that a committee with diverse membership needs to have influence over the county budget. Talk to us about why that’s so important to you.

A. I just think, again, the closer you can keep it to local control, the better off you are. A short time ago, they tried to get a bill through the Legislature that would take away the budget committee’s authority over the county budget in Waldo County and York County. In my opinion, this was very, very dangerous… These budget committees are made up of municipal officials.

Usually, the buck goes up the ladder, but in government the buck really goes down because the selectmen and the local managers are the last ones who have to deal with whatever happens. If the federal government cuts money to the state and the state cuts it to the local people, we’re the ones, being the selectmen and the taxpayers in every local town, who have to make up the difference. I always look at it that way. The buck goes down so you have to always look at these issues. A local budget committee that is made up of local, municipal officers is the only way to go.

Q. You can’t control school spending if you’re a selectman but you can pay attention. School spending is about 78-80 percent of the municipal budget bills that go out in Waldo. You’re active in going to school committee meetings and paying attention to their issues. Why is that?

A. School spending is the biggest chunk of the money and school issues are very complicated. There again, they have to deal with what comes down from the state. The state has to deal with what comes down from the feds. But everyone plays a part. You have to get involved. It’s like having a broken cog on a wheel: If you don’t get in, everything’s going to collapse. You have to make what difference you can make. It’s not always the cheapest budget that you can get; it’s the best budget you can get. Hopefully, sometimes that is the cheapest one.

Q. Speaking of rolling downhill, revenue sharing in Maine, I don’t know if it’s under siege but it’s certainly not what it once was. What does revenue sharing mean to Waldo, now that it’s significantly down? What are your concerns about the future?

A. Municipal revenue sharing isn’t a huge part of Waldo’s budget but in this day and age, every little bit helps. If that is reduced, then (local) taxes go up. The state Legislature has raided the revenue sharing pot over the years to the point where they just think it’s an extra purse of money that they can reach into at any time. It shouldn’t be. That was promised to us.

The Legislatures from year to year are not bound by the promises of another. I guess it always comes down to that. When one Legislature promises X, Y or Z the next Legislature can say, “Oh, no, they were wrong; changed our minds. We’ll give you back these roads. We’re going to borrow a little bit more from revenue sharing because, after all, you don’t need it anyway. You can’t handle money.” That’s one of the common mindsets in the Legislature for the past number of years – that local municipalities can’t handle their money. I think that is about as ridiculous as it gets because we handle our money much better than any other entity.

Q. The good news on that front is that when MMA sees or is involved with polls, most people agree with you. They feel that handling the money is best done at the municipal level. You go up to the state level, not so well done. You go up to the federal level, really not so well done.

You just touched on local roads. Waldo, like all towns and cities, has a mixture of state and local roads. How do you feel about the (Maine) Department of Transportation’s mindset along those lines?

A. I attended several meetings – and a lot of other municipal officials did, too – that MMA hosted in conjunction with DOT, and their little proposal to get us to believe, those of us who would be getting roads back, that it was a nice little program, that they’re going to fund it, that they’re to put the roads in wonderful shape before they give them back to us. Then, they’re going to give us a whole pot of money to maintain them.

That’s not going to work. That’s not going to happen. If anyone thinks it is, they need to research the issue a little further. I go way back. I can remember town road improvement funds. I can remember promises. I can remember when the first roads were turned back to municipalities and what a fiasco that was. Nothing was ever as it was promised from DOT. Nothing.

Q. One thing that you’ve noticed over the years is that when people move into a town – and Waldo’s a small town, with about 730 people – that their expectations can be out of line sometimes with the municipal reality. That’s the bad part. The good part is that getting an outside view sometimes is a healthy thing. How do you deal with that and people who are either new to local government or new to Waldo?

A. In Waldo, we usually get zero people at our Select Board meetings. At Town Meeting, depending on the issues, we can get 60, 70, 80 people, maybe sometimes more if the issue is really controversial. I always encourage people to ask questions. Don’t take status quo. Just because I’ve been doing this a long time doesn’t mean I can’t stand a fresh view now and again. I can and I welcome that. I welcome a healthy debate. That can open up some issues that nobody’s thought of before.

I started a number of years ago a community breakfast meeting before our town meeting. I always advertise it. You know, sometimes people would come (to Town Meeting) and they would wait to ask questions and, as everybody knows, you can only address what’s on your warrant. I felt like I was always gagging everybody. “Oh no, you can’t speak on that.” So then we started having a breakfast meeting. You can have a conversation about anything anyone wants to bring in. If they want to argue about something, if they want to ask about something… there are all kinds of opportunities there. Sometimes I don’t have many people but usually I have enough to get a healthy conversation going.

Q. Where do you have it, right here in Town Hall?

A. We have it right here, just before Town Meeting.

Q. Do you remember over the years a particular Town Meeting that, I don’t want to say it was contentious, because maybe it was positive, but one Town Meeting that was particularly full?

A. I can remember that way back, if you used the word “ordinance” in the town warrant that drew people out, because nobody in this town wanted anything to do with being told what to do, especially with their land. We had a couple of ordinances that people thought we ought to get passed and, boy that really drew people out. As soon as that was taken care of, half the people at that town meeting left.

I got so that I kind of figured that one out. So, when I advertised for Town Meeting, I always used to put in: “And various town ordinances,” even though we didn’t have any. People would come. Then they got wise to me. They figured it out after a while.

Q. One of the previous subjects in our anniversary series, Steve Brown, who’s the First Selectman in Carthage, told me that in a small town without a large commercial base, you really run the town from a “what’s needed” basis and put basic needs first. Is that the approach in Waldo?

A. It really is and I don’t like to do it that way but we don’t have much of a choice. You put at the top of your list what is the most beneficial to the most people.

You still keep in mind things that are for the next year. We didn’t used to have reserve accounts but now we have reserve accounts for those kinds of things. People say, “Well, we’re going to need a computer.” That way you can raise a little bit of money for these projects.

Sometimes you just try to keep your head above water. I hate to say that, but you look in the newspaper and there’s foreclosure after foreclosure, bankruptcy after bankruptcy.

Q. Do you feel that keeping your head above water is something more common in recent years, or was it true 10, 20 years ago, just like it is now?

A. That’s kind of an interesting question. I’ve never really thought of that. Years ago, we didn’t raise much for our road account and then we made the plunge and said, “These roads are really bad. They’re going to be impassable in the spring.” I guess you could say it’s sort of been that way for a long, long time.

In recent years, you get used to getting a certain amount of money from somewhere and it’s very hard doing without it. With these state promises, like revenue sharing for instance, that’s a pot of money that you begin to count on… When it’s taken away, there’s no place to go other than to raise taxes or cut services. That’s what’s happening with municipalities. The buck stops with us. We’ve got to make up for everything that’s taken away.

Q. Forty years plus as a municipal leader, what would you say is the highlight?

A. I like it. There are times when I don’t like it so well. The establishment of the (Waldo County) Municipal Association is one of the highlights… We’ve gotten all of our bridges taken care of, rebuilt by the state. Not only did they rebuild them – we had to kick in an amount, a very small amount – but they took over responsibility for the maintenance of those bridges.

We needed a place to meet. This was a growing town, so we petitioned the local school to turn their building over to us. That was quite a process, actually... We closed an old town dump that had to be closed. We built a sand-salt shed down back. The town has no debt.

Q. Is there anything for you as a person that you experienced that keeps you coming back?

A. It’s the people. Even when they’re giving me the devil and complaining about things, they keep you on your toes, you know? That’s what it’s all about. We’re here to serve the people.

The hardest part of the job, for me, is the General Assistance. I’ve seen that grow a lot lately. It’s really tough to have people come in and you know they’ve got a family, you know they’re going be cold this winter if things don’t come in. When the feds and state start cutting funds that help these people, there’s no place for them to go except to the town. It’s very hard to sit in judgment of whether they get money or not. That’s been the hardest thing for me to do.

But I’ve enjoyed getting to know people at the state level, the federal level and the townspeople so that they can call me at night and they can stop me in the grocery store, if I can’t evade them! I just like it.

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