CARIBOU, Maine — The five leaders of the Caribou Secession Committee are preparing to submit a petition to the City Council that will begin the process of breaking the community into two parts — the proposed Town of Lyndon, which would encompass 80 percent of Caribou’s current rural mass, and 20 percent of the municipality around the downtown area to remain the city of Caribou.
The secession process is a long one, requiring a local public hearing followed by state senate authorization before the idea is brought back to the city for a local vote on the matter. It’s a long road, and Secession Committee members are getting ready to take one more step down it.
First announcing their intentions in the spring of 2014, committee members circulated the secession petition during this past summer and fall. In order to move the petition forward, it needs half the signatures of all the registered voters of the rural area looking to break free of Caribou.
Committee members ended their petition circulation around early December and since that time, they’ve been going through the signatures to ensure they have the numbers needed to move forward. That process has taken over a month, and Committee spokesperson Paul Camping is concerned that the quiet counting may have been perceived by the community as a loss of momentum.
“There’s a lot of time that’s passed between our announcement in mid-July and today,” he said. “We were a topic of conversation quite a bit and our Facebook page was getting quite a lot of views, but there’s this inactivity that we’ve experienced due to the fact that we’re not circulating — we’re tabulating,” Camping explained.
Camping doesn’t want people to lose interest in the secession movement and points out that the committee is still hard at work preparing for the next step, “which will be the submission of our petition to the city for certification and we’re confident that we’ll prevail and have a public hearing.”
Committee member Maynard St. Peter believes that the petition could be presented to the council as soon as the end of January.
Though the committee did not wish to share the number of signatures they’ve gathered — it was estimated last summer that they’d need about 1,030 —they did share a bit of a numerical discrepancy that they’re paying close attention to.
“Surprisingly, a large extent of people thought they were registered and they weren’t, or their voter registration record had been misplaced,” Camping explained. “We’re doing our best to perfect our petition so that if they’re registered their signature counts and if they’re not registered, we know in advance before we submit the petition for certification.”
St. Peter said that he’s spoken with the Secretary of State’s office and so long as the voters become registered before the petition is submitted, their signatures will be considered valid.
The committee said they’d also discovered that some of the folks on the registered voters list have moved away or are no longer in Caribou, which would change the number of signatures required to pass the petition.
“We would like the spread between what we need and what we have acquired to be as large as it can be,” St. Peter said.
City Clerk Jayne Ferrin said that the first thing she’d have to determine once the petition is submitted would be how many voters live in the territory — as the petition needs to have 50 percent of the voters in the territory at the time it’s submitted.
As committee members crunch the numbers, they will submit the petition once they’re satisfied they have what it takes to get to the next step.
“We’re being very cautious and we’re trying to anticipate problems before they arise,” Camping stated. “You have to be one step ahead of your opposition, and we do anticipate stiff opposition — we have from the beginning,” he added. “It’s no secret that the act of secession is not a popular idea with the city administration.”
Though they have encountered opposition to the secession movement, the five committee members — Camping, St. Peter, Doug Morrell, Milo Haney and Freeman Cote — still believe in the cause wholeheartedly.
“People in the rural community are still pro-secession, pro-public hearing and tired of the tax increases, so the support is just as strong as it’s ever been,” Camping said.
