How does ACR play into today's elections?

What does everyone think about the contested seats in this election?

When I was writing up profiles on the candidates, I had a hard time discerning the differences between most of the candidates, to be perfectly honest.

Today would have been quite different if Mickey Desmarais had decided to run for re-election, because he and Paul Maroun have pretty different takes on the ACR. Even though they both "support it," they have had very different ways of going about doing so.

But even the incumbent village trustees didn't have much to say about the project other than that they are superduper in favor of it. Even though their challengers had a lot of criticisms about how the village has handled the project so far, both Leon LeBlanc and Marty Hughes (once he decided last week to mount a write-in campaign) said defended the village's record on the project and said they believe the village has done enough to protect its taxpayers.

The town council candidates may be more important to the ACR anyway — the town doesn't have to but should be in agreement if a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes is granted to the developers. Both Patricia Littlefield and Eric Shaheen, the two candidates who have a little bit of experience dealing with PILOTs, expressed some skepticism about the draft PILOT proposals that have been floated so far but said they needed to study it more. James Facteau wasn't really familiar with the plan so far. I can't remember what David Tomberlin said about it, to be honest. I think I may have forgotten to ask him about it. I know, shame on me. It certainly is important to the town's future, but then again it's tough to take a stand on it anyways at this point, since it's still being revised.

There was a meeting at the Park Restaurant last week to discuss PILOTs in a sort of general way, since there isn't a final, formal proposal on the table yet. I believe most of the candidates were planning on attending that, and I haven't gotten a chance to talk to them since then to see if anyone's take has changed.

So back to the point. Go vote!

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