LEWISTON — So much can change in 41 years.

One person with a computer and spreadsheet can keep track of a city’s $77 million budget, replacing a roomful of people with adding machines.

 That budget itself can grow tenfold and the government can winnow itself down from an amalgam of boards, commissions and political entanglements to a simpler — if just as political — form with one city administrator in charge.

 In the past 41 years, administrators have come and gone, but one person has been at their right hand: Dick Metivier, the only finance director the city of Lewiston has ever had.

 His last day on the job is Friday. He’s being replaced by Heather Hunter, the deputy finance director.

 “It’s a semi-retirement, ” said Metivier, 62. He’ll do contract consultant work for economic development specialist Eaton Peabody when it needs his expertise in municipal finances. Otherwise, he plans to take it easy with his wife, children and grandchildren.

 “I just want to spend a little more time with them, growing up,” Metivier said.

A St. Dominic High School graduate, Metivier joined the city staff in September 1969. He started as assistant to the city comptroller.

“It was a very different situation, with independent boards and commissions running everything,” Metivier said. There was a City Council, but things were managed by the Police Commission, the Fire Commission, the Public Works Board and especially by the all-powerful Finance Board. They held the purse strings for the rest of the city, and the comptroller answered directly to them.

“The comptroller was the closest thing we had to a city administrator at the time,” Metivier said. “He pulled all the threads together, kept track of what everyone else was doing.”

Metivier, fresh from Bangor’s Husson College, was the comptroller’s right-hand man. His job was keeping track of the budget — $7.6 million in 1969 for both city and school operations.

The city adopted a new charter in 1980, replacing the board and commission operation with a full-time administrator. Metivier was named finance director.

“A lot had happened to change the way we do business in the meantime,” he said. Computers had replaced the adding machine and ledger books and the department was getting smaller.

“We’d already started looking to Auburn to work a bit more closely,” he said. The cities formed a joint purchasing agreement to save money on staples such as road salt, sand and police cruisers. An insurance training seminar he attended with his Auburn counterpart helped convince both cities to handle workers comp injury claims in-house.

Somewhere along the line, cities in Maine began using property tax incentives to lure economic development.

“I think the (tax incentive financing) district changed the way we do business, more than anything else,” he said. It let cities return property taxes to developers or set money aside for community projects.

“It teamed us working with the development department for the first time, and that involved us in a very different way,” Metivier said. The tax incentives helped bring the Walmart distribution center to Lewiston, along with $1.2 million a year in new property tax revenues.

It’s the kind of balance Metivier said he’s always strived to keep.

“I’ve always tried to watch the city’s money as carefully as I watch my own,” he said. “I am conservative by nature, and overall I’ve just done what I thought was best for the community.”

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