LEWISTON – Years spent monitoring the pulse of Lewiston’s heritage and culture should give Lionel Guay an edge helping manage its future, he said.

Guay, the president of the Franco American Heritage Center and organizer of the Festival de Joie, said he thinks he can improve the quality of life and economy of the area.

“I believe that I can involve many, many organizations and get them to work together in new ways,” Guay said. “I understand how the community really works and I believe I can bring them all together.”

He’s spent his life involved with public groups, but this is the first time Guay has run for public office. Unlike brother Normand, the mayor of Auburn, Guay has never served on the City Council. He doesn’t want to, either.

“I’m not a politician,” he said. “I have no ambitions in that area, so I’m not going to promise no tax increases. We don’t know what the economy is going to bring next year or the year after. If we can avoid them, we will.”

Instead, Guay said he wants to take his accountant’s eye and study the city’s budget more closely.

“We can make sure that we are operating as efficiently as possible in getting value for our services,” Guay said.

Finding efficiencies, coupled with a larger and more vibrant tax base should stave off both tax increases and service cuts in next year’s budget.

“Eliminating staff, eliminating services is no way to balance the budget,” Guay said. “If we have to work harder to improve the economy, we will. That’s the way to avoid job cuts.”

Guay said he would like to resurrect the Lewiston Ambassadors program. Community business leaders would promote Lewiston around New England carrying city-produced packets of information.

“You can’t just sit back and wait for the business to come in,” Guay said. “Those days are no longer here. Now, you have to go out and find it and bring it back. That’s how we expand our tax base. It may not lower our taxes, but at least it will keep them from going up.”

Guay said he also favors selling the Bates Mill to private developers.

“It may be done by the time I’m in office, but I would try and find a buyer,” Guay said. “I understand that there are contracts we cannot get out of and we need to honor those. But we need to find a way to move on from there now. City staff has spent enough time dealing with this. We have other things they can do.”

Guay didn’t fault Mayor Larry Raymond for the intention behind his letter to the Somalis last year.

“I think maybe he should not have put that in writing,” Guay said. “It probably would have been better to sit with the people and talk. But I think he did what he thought was best for everybody.”

Above all, he senses great things for the city.

“We’ve been told all of our lives that Lewiston is a mill town, and that’s all we’ll ever be,” he said. “But look at some other mill towns, Manchester, N.H. or Lowell, Mass. They were mill towns and they’ve developed into showcases for their states. We can do the same thing.”

With projects like the Oxford Networks expansion on lower Lisbon Street and the Central Maine Civic Center rehabilitation show those changes in process.

“It’s something we’ve been waiting for, for a long time,” he said. “Now it’s up to us to keep it going, within budgetary constraints.”

– Scott Taylor

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