TURNER – Joan Bryant-Deschenes was “stunned” Tuesday when she learned selectmen had discussed a motion to have the town boycott Citgo stations.

Bryant-Deschenes’ store, B&A Variety on Route 4, has a Citgo sign. She’s owned the store for 23 years. When she was widowed at 43, the store helped her support her children. Her mother and father ran the business before her for 35 years.

Any boycott wouldn’t hurt the intended victim, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, it would hurt Bryant-Deschenes and the other two Citgo stations in town, she said.

“All it’s going to do is hurt small, local businesses,” Bryant-Deschenes said. “We don’t need more problems.”

At a board meeting Monday night, Selectman Charlie Mock made a motion that the town stop doing business with Citgo because Chavez had insulted President Bush. Mock suggested that the town should not send money to a dictator who has nationalized the Citgo company. Citgo is a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company.

At the United Nations in September, Chavez made headlines when he likened President Bush to the devil, and said the podium where Bush spoke the day before “smells of sulfur still today.”

Three selectmen at Monday’s meeting voted to table the motion and instructed the town manager to find out where local gas stations get their oil, said Chairman Dennis Richardson.

Two members opposed, including Richardson, who resigned as chairman over the issue.

Selectmen have no right to ask businesses where they get their oil, Richardson said Tuesday. “Turner should not boycott local people who pay taxes and employ town people. It doesn’t make sense.”

On Tuesday, Mock submitted a letter to the Sun Journal saying he did not intend to create any hardship for Turner businesses. Other communities have ceased doing business with Citgo as a result of Chavez berating the president, he said.

“The discord created in this community by this well-intentioned, but obviously not well-thought-out motion, is not worth any message that would be sent by its passage,” Mock said.

He said he will withdraw his motion at the next meeting.

Bryant-Deschenes is a Republican running for re-election to the Maine House of Representatives. She said she doesn’t agree with Chavez calling Bush names. “But he has a right to free speech.”

What Mock and other selectmen did is “irresponsible,” Bryant-Deschenes said.

The other two Turner stores with Citgo brand gas are the Big Apple and Schrep’s Corner Store.

Citgo does not own the stores, said Denise McCourt of the American Petroleum Institute in Washington. They are independently owned businesses, said McCourt, who owns a home on Little Wilson Pond in Turner.

The owner of the Big Apple, CN Brown, said selling Citgo gas is like having Coca-Cola in their soda coolers. “It’s just a product that we offer,” said Jinger Duryea, the president of CN Brown.

The stores “are independently owned and operated by folks who live here in Maine, family businesses like CN Brown,” Duryea said. The stores pay taxes, are good citizens, raise money for charities like Muscular Dystrophy. “We’re part of the community,” Duryea said.

And there is no way to determine which country’s gas a motorist is buying at the pumps, store owners said. All of Maine’s gasoline comes to terminals in South Portland and is mixed. There’s no way to know whether the gas came from Canada, Venezuela or the Middle East.

Bryant-Deschenes asked what’s worse: buying oil from Venezuela, or from Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries run by princes and religious dictators?

The United States should become “independent of any source, conserve, and develop ways of better using the supply,” she said.

Last year, prior to Chavez’s most recent criticism of Bush, Gov. John Baldacci praised a deal with Citgo that saw the company donate $5.5 million to Maine for use by state Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program participants.

That money came at a time when heating oil was retailing at nearly $3 per gallon in some parts of Maine.

Also last year, members of Maine’s Penobscot Indian Nation visited Chavez in Venezuela and cut their own deal for assistance to tribal members.

The Penobscots invited Chavez to visit Maine.