The Maine Wire sat down Wednesday with the City of Portland’s newly elected and inaugurated Mayor Mark Dion for an interview on his outlook for the city’s future and several of the issues he will confront during his term.
Dion, former Cumberland County Sheriff and District 5 City Councilor, won the city’s mayoral election in a rank choice runoff after receiving nearly 40 percent of the Election Day vote.
[RELATED: Mark Dion Elected as Portland’s Next Mayor After Rank Choice Runoff…]
During his campaign, Dion differentiated himself from the rest of the candidates with his strong stance on ending the city’s homeless encampments and emphasizing public health and safety.
While the other mayoral candidates ran on platforms of expanding emergency and transitional housing to combat homelessness, Dion frequently spoke to the concerns of Portland residents and business owners affected by the city’s large homeless encampments.
[RELATED: Portland Mayoral Candidates Explain How They Would Tackle the City’s Homelessness Crisis…]
When asked if he would buy the City of Portland if it were a stock, the mayor said yes.
“There are some issues we gotta deal with, but I believe in this city,” Dion said. “I got here in ’72 — I can remember when it was a tough fishing town, and we’ve come a long way.”
Ending the city’s homeless encampments and reducing regulatory barriers to the construction of new housing are top priorities for Hizzoner.
“Housing is going to be a problem,” he said. “I want people to be able to live here — when I came here it was still affordable. I know things have changed, but I still would like to see more housing that’s more affordable. I’ve been talking to a lot of people and I want to try to do that.”
Dion applauded the efforts of neighboring Westbrook to build affordable housing and improve upon their downtown area.
“[Building affordable housing has] been one of my bugaboos in my campaign, and we even talked about it during the strategic planning session — we almost make it impossible for you to be successful if you want to build something,” Dion said. “There’s always one hoop, after another hoop, after another hoop, so I’d like to cut that down.”
Housing was one of four goals developed by the City Council to guide their policy work in 2024; the other goals being diversity, equity, and inclusion, addressing climate change, and improving public engagement.
“It’ll make for more of a downtown feeling here, the parcels that are going to become available — we’re going to have to go up seven or eight stories and put 40 or 50 units in a building, but you know, it seems to work in downtown Boston,” Dion said of his plans for affordable housing.
“[Portland has] had a dip in the market, as a stock — I get it — but I’m determined to bring the stock back up, I think there’s a lot of potential,” he added.
On the issue of rent control, Dion said “I totally get it — wages have been kinda stagnant for some people, not so much for other sectors.”
“I’m okay with protecting your rent — if you’re a good tenant, landlords are pretty good about protecting rent, they don’t want to lose you,” he explained. “If they have had an experience with an eviction, they don’t want to go there again. So there’s actually a mutual interest about wanting to keep you in place.”
“My objection to the current structure of rent control [is] it doesn’t provide money to the property owner to maintain his asset,” he continued. “If you can’t put on a new roof, or paint it, or give you new cabinets every eight years or so, I mean, what have you done? You’ve protected a cost, which is legitimate, but it’s not up to date.”
“Look, maintain your rent, you stay somewhere for ten years, when you leave let’s adjust the rent to the reality,” he said. “Right now the tenants and their groups aren’t open to that conversation. I’m hoping to try to bring them together and say, ‘let’s get real,’ because no one is going to invest in owning an apartment building if you lock them out of that.”
The Maine Democratic Socialists of America (Maine DSA) have been responsible for several ballot question initiatives in Portland related to imposing rent control on landlords and preventing the rollback of adopted rent control policies.
[RELATED: Small Landlords in Portland Speak Out Ahead of Rent Control Referendum…]
“[Tenant groups] harbor this idea that every landlord is a millionaire,” Dion said. “My father had a nice apartment building, he offered it to me, and I go ‘no way dad, no way, because I know how hard you work to maintain it the way you like.'”
“I don’t know why we have to feel guilty when we make money these days, I really don’t understand that,” the mayor added.
In response to whether Portland should entertain the creation of a local options sales tax, Dion said yes — but with the caveat that he does not think the measure would pass through the State Legislature.
[RELATED: Lawmakers looking to nickel and dime Mainers with a local option sales tax…]
Instead, Dion suggested a lodging tax, with a sharing formula to distribute the funds gained from the tax across Maine’s municipalities.
“I think a lodging tax makes sense, because that’s a pure export tax. Sales tax, you’re punishing the very people you hope to protect,” Dion said. “If there was some sort of sharing formula, of that lodging tax, it might work. But it’s a perennial issue, and it always dies a glorious death — but I think it would help save taxpayers the burden of funding everything.”
Another issue the Legislature will consider in its upcoming session is whether or not to raise the state’s share of municipal General Assistance (GA) welfare reimbursement to 90 percent — a move that would disproportionately benefit Portland.
An examination of municipal GA spending across the state by the Maine Wire revealed that the City of Portland accounted for $79.6 million of all GA spending in the state from Jan. 1, 2019 to June 30, 2023 — 73 percent of the total GA spending across all of Maine during that time period.
Under the current GA reimbursement formula, 70 percent of Portland’s GA spending — or $55.7 million — was funded by taxpayers throughout the state.
“I think the burden of dislocated individuals falls largely to Portland right now, but we’re seeing that challenge arise in Sanford, in Biddeford, in Saco, in Bangor, in Lewiston,” Dion said of Portland’s disproportionate GA expenditure.
“It’s a combined problem, it’s not just homelessness, it’s the grip that fentanyl and it’s derivatives have on a community, and they gather and aggregate together to survive that under the homeless camp umbrella,” Dion explained.
Dion referenced his recent attendance at the “Harvard Program for New Mayors,” which selected 27 newly elected mayors from across the U.S. to participate in a training program.
“From Chicago to Portland, we all have this problem — it’s not unique, the only difference between Chicago and Portland is scale –but then when you start to do proportionals, we’re in a bad spot,” he said. “So it’s a challenge, I’m going to be going up to Augusta and trying to talk reasonably with people.”
The Maine Wire then asked Dion if the problems Portland faces now with homelessness and its GA spending could be attributed to former Mayor Ethan Strimling.
[RELATED: City of Portland Claims Migrant Crisis an “Act of God”…]
In April 2019, after former President Donald Trump put forward the idea of sending illegal migrants to sanctuary cities, then-Mayor Strimling challenged Trump to send more immigrants to Portland. Those comments ran prominently in the New York Times.
“If he wants to send more immigrants our way, bring them on,” Strimling said at time.
Since then, the influx of thousands of homeless migrants into Portland has brought the city’s shelters and services to a breaking point.
“I don’t know what I have to do to shake the Ethan [Strimling] ghost, it’s like Christmas Carol, he keeps coming back with chains looking to put me on the same circuit,” Dion said of the former mayor. “Some legacies are just hard to shake.”
“I don’t think [Ethan Strimling] is ever going away, cause he has his own cadre of individuals that believe in his vision,” he added.
Dion noted how Strimling criticized him in the press for his post-election interview in which he said he was okay with having 5-4 votes on the City Council.
“Well [Strimling] does a big editorial, he gets on TV, and says ‘Dion believes in conflict, he will not seek consensus’ — he put the worst spin on it,” Dion said. “When I see him next, which I don’t know when, I’ll say, ‘Ethan, how could turn something upside down like that,’ it’s not helpful.”
The newly elected mayor added that during the Council’s recent strategic planning session he reiterated that “it would be nice” to have 9-0 agreement on every question, but “it’s not going to happen.”
“We can’t delay votes just because we’re waiting for that perfect moment,” he said, explaining that he had urged the previous Mayor Kate Snyder to hold votes on questions without unity among the City Councilors.
Dion praised former City Councilor Andrew Zarro, who he described as a progressive, but who was “always open to a reasonable compromise,” and that he “had a moderating influence on some of the other members of the Council.
Watch the full interview:
