Sorrento voters keep fire chief and reject recall ordinance
After enduring months of heated arguments over and among their municipal officials, Sorrento voters decided Saturday to keep their current fire chief and road commissioner and to reject a recall ordinance that was fueled by a dispute over LGBTQ+ books in a local school library.
They also elected new members of the local school board and select board.
Joey Clark, the town’s incumbent fire chief and road commissioner, received 99 and 93 votes respectively for those positions, while challenger Jon Mickel received 68 and 69 votes for each position.
In the school board race, Newbold “Terry” Noyes received 88 votes while Gerg Bullock received 80 votes. Noyes will replace outgoing member Janet Wilpan on the school board.
In the selectman’s race, former board member Hilly Welch Crary received 96 votes while newcomer Stephanie Bullock received 73.
The turmoil in town politics began to build this past winter when Janet Wilpan, a member of the RSU 24 school board, voted to keep LGBTQ+ books in the district’s middle-high school library, angering some local residents. Wilpan decided not to seek re-election this year, but said this was because of the completion of the RSU’s new Sumner school, not because of the book controversy.
Still, the furor over the books prompted the citizen’s initiative to adopt a local recall ordinance.
The school board race made headlines on Friday after Maine First Project sent mailers to local voters that excoriated the RSU board over its decision to keep one of the books, “Gender Queer,” in the school library. The conservative group endorsed Bullock for the board, but Bullock said he was “appalled” that the group had sent the mailers out without consulting him.
At the same time the school board was embroiled by the book controversy, feuding between then-Town Clerk Kathi Moore and the Select Board began to build. Moore pressured the fire department to provide her with fuel receipts, which led to one firefighter being charged with theft for using a department credit card to gas up his personal vehicle.
The feuding between the board and Moore took a weird turn in April when the town’s attorney received a hoax letter signed with a name no one recognized alleging that Mickel, who at the time was on the select board, had embezzled money from a previous employer and that he and Moore should not be trusted to have oversight of town funds.
Mickel, an ally of Moore, resigned over the letter, saying the accusations were false and that Sorrento should have done more to find out who sent it. He decided to run for fire chief and road commissioner against Joey Clark, who has held both positions for years.
That dispute reached a boiling point in August when the Select Board’s two members, Diana Gazis and Rob Wilpan (who is married to Janet Wilpan), voted to fire Moore. They cited Moore’s attempts to get the town to pay for her personal legal fees as a reason for her termination.