LEWISTON – Controversy over a storm-water fee escalated into a war of words Tuesday night, with each side charging the other with playing politics with city money.

Mayor Lionel Guay and councilors berated and belittled David Hughes and Larry Poulin, the two men who started a petition drive aimed at killing the city’s new storm-water utility fee.

“You got your 15 minutes of glory, didn’t you?” Guay asked Hughes, the Lewiston resident and state House of Representatives candidate who’s behind the petition. “But what it did, it blew our budget. This is true life we’re talking about, and because you were not intelligent enough to understand what you were doing, real people are going to suffer.”

Hughes countered, saying city leaders were the ones playing politics.

“You say you’re going to get rid of the Police Department, and you’re not playing politics?” Hughes asked.

Hughes, Poulin and Jay Taylor, three of the 10 signers of the petition, were far outnumbered Tuesday at the first council meeting since the group began its effort last week. It was crowded to standing-room-only with Lewiston firefighters – all wearing yellow Wal-Mart smiley-face stickers to show their unity – and other city employees.

It was a night full of hostile denunciations of the petition, the people who created it and Councilor Stavros Mendros.

Mendros complained that he’s stuck in the middle of the matter. No fan of the storm-water fee to begin with, Mendros is personal friends with several of the 10 originators of the petition and shares an apartment with Taylor.

But Mendros said he did not advise the group how to write the petition or suggest tactics.

“I showed them where to look in the charter and that was it,” Mendros said. “That’s the same thing I would do for anyone that asked, whether I agreed with what they were doing or not.”

City Administrator Jim Bennett said he was to blame for not doing a good enough job explaining the storm fee this summer while councilors debated it.

Councilors adopted the utility-fee plan as part of their budget in June and settled on the details in September. It charges a fee based on the amount of hard surface on each property, including roofs, sidewalks, parking lots and driveways. Single-family homes would pay $30 per year, duplexes $45 per year. All others, including businesses, churches and nonprofits, would pay 4.4 cents per square foot.

“The bottom line people need to understand, if you are a residential taxpayer, you pay less with the rain tax than you do with property taxes,” Bennett said. That’s true for single-family homes and apartments. Bennett said the city is still working on a fee scheme for trailer parks.

“But once people understand that, I expect them to support it,” he said. “I think they’ll say they don’t like the rain tax, but they like what it does for their pocketbook.”

The petition would force a November 2007 vote on the city’s storm-water utility. If 1,000 voters sign the petition by Jan. 11, it will force the city to suspend the new fees until the vote. That would leave a $1.8 million hole in the budget, Bennett said.

Bennett suggested councilors wait before considering budget cuts. He and staff managed to save $927,671 by delaying or canceling several capital projects, waiting to purchase some new public works equipment and not hiring 11.5 new employees.

That leaves $872,328 left to cut if the petition is a success. Bennett suggested councilors give the petition a month and see how many signatures it collects.

So far, 60 Lewiston voters have signed the petition, according to City Clerk Kathy Montejo.

Petition creator Hughes said he was offering the city a way out. He and his co-signers would stop the petition if the city did two things. First, the city must release the petition to Hughes and his group, letting them take it door to door. Second, the City Council must agree to put the matter before voters in November 2007.

“We take care of the problem by putting the petition in our pocket and the city can continue to collect the fee for the next year, until the vote,” Hughes said.

But Bennett said the city can’t legally do that. City ordinances require that the petition reside in City Hall until it gets 1,000 signatures or until Jan. 11.

“Now that it’s going, there is no way to stop this petition until it runs its course,” Bennett said.