SUMNER — Clifford McNeil, a former selectman and owner of a Sumner mobile home park, is challenging Selectman Walter Litchfield in Saturday’s town elections.

The vote will be held during the annual town meeting at 9 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 10, at Hartford-Sumner Elementary School.

Litchfield, 66, was elected in 2011 to fill the term of Mark Silber after the longtime selectman resigned. This is Litchfield’s first run for a full three-year term.

Now retired, Litchfield was a teacher in West Paris for 32 years and moved to Sumner in 1962, he said. “I’m almost a native,” he joked.

He served the town as a volunteer firefighter for 22 years as well as a term on the School Board, he said. 

The condition of the town’s roads needs to be addressed, he said, and as selectman, he has pursued inventorying the town’s roads and developing a long-range road-improvement plan.

“As a small town with limited resources, we can’t do all the roads at once so we have to prioritize them,” Litchfield said. 

Aside from looking at the town’s comprehensive plan and some ordinances, Litchfield said there were no areas he thought needed to be reformed. 

He decided to run for re-election to continue working for the town and its residents. 

“I’ve enjoyed working for the town and tried to be responsive to the citizens,” Litchfield said. “Whenever they call me, I make a point of trying to get back to them and letting them know if I can help them and, if I can’t help them, why I can’t.” 

McNeil, 46, whose family has lived in the Hartford-Sumner area for four generations, said the town needed reform and a pro-business outlook.  

He served on the board for nine years, until 2006. He owns and lives in a mobile home park on family land in East Sumner. 

He has noticed a change in the dynamics among the town’s board and committees and wants to help the town work together harmoniously, he said.  

“I just want to try to get back involved and see what I can do to get people to work together in harmony and for the good of the town as opposed to selfish motivations,” McNeil said. 

The town should do more to stimulate business growth and encourage more businesses to locate in Sumner, he said, especially as increasing school taxes begin to put a burden on property owners.

“We don’t have many businesses in town,” McNeil said. “We’re really out of balance.”

The town should also do more to train and advise new members of the town’s various boards and committees to help them understand their roles. 

He said it is important for people to become involved so they could better understand, through training and classes, some of the possibilities for development that existed on their properties. 

McNeil said he would not have been able to do what he has done with his mobile home park if it was not the experience and training he received as a selectman and Planning Board member.