St. Albans Town Manager Hayley Lancaster is not afraid of hard work and is keenly aware of the responsibilities placed on public works departments throughout the state — her community being a prime example.
In July, when her road commissioner took a much‑deserved vacation, Lancaster laced up her sneakers and pulled on her gloves to join the 60‑plus‑year‑old resident — a retired public works employee with whom she contracts to fill potholes — for the day’s work.
He insisted he could handle the job himself, but Lancaster would not hear it.
“I told him, ‘Nope, I’m coming with you,’” Lancaster said.
She said running a town demands full commitment from everyone on the payroll, especially as municipalities in Maine operate with limited staff and tight budgets. St. Albans is no exception, and Lancaster said the town’s poverty rate sits in the double digits.
“I’m full hands on deck as well,” she said.
For example, the St. Albans Public Works Department cleared 65 miles of town roads last winter despite being down one full‑time position for most of the season — a stretch Lancaster defines as Nov. 1 through the end of March. She said she paid out more than 100 hours of overtime during that period, a necessity that strained both employees and the municipal budget.
Kate Dufour, director of advocacy and communications for the Maine Municipal Association, or MMA, said Maine is fortunate to have dedicated municipal employees.
“It is important work,” Dufour said, “and we as residents have to do a better job of appreciating what municipal employees do on a regular basis.”
No surprise, then, that on the Municipal Career Center website Aug. 2, public works positions topped the listings with 46 openings. The next highest were in public safety: police at 38 and clerk positions at 32.
For many municipal administrators, filling vacancies can be daunting. Public works positions, as the numbers show, are particularly difficult to fill — and administrators cite several reasons:
- Shrinking budgets for municipal staffing and municipal responsibilities.
- Random drug testing required for a commercial driver’s license in a state with legal recreational marijuana.
- Fewer young workers willing to take on-call jobs that demand long, often brutal shifts.
- Growing competition for a relatively small pool of qualified candidates.
- An aging workforce, with many municipal employees nearing retirement.
Fairfield Town Manager Michelle Flewelling said she is well aware of the challenges facing municipal government.
“We have a huge issue right now,” she said. “We are completely understaffed in Public Works.”
Flewelling said she recently had to contend with the departure of her Public Works director, who had worked for the town for 30 years. His reason for leaving was straightforward.
“He didn’t want to plow snow anymore,” Flewelling said.
That is often the reality for road commissioners and public works directors when they lose a staff member — they end up filling the gap themselves, and turnover in public works tends to be frequent.
Flewelling said one of the biggest challenges is the shrinking number of people — especially younger workers — willing to take a job that, particularly in winter, puts them on on‑call status and almost always involves long, tough overtime hours.
Another challenge, she said, is the mandatory random drug testing for those who hold a Class B license. That requirement has long reduced the number of willing candidates, but managers say it has become an even bigger obstacle now that Maine has legalized recreational marijuana.
A lot of people who smoke pot, Flewelling said, do not want to take a job that subjects them to random drug testing — another pothole, as she put it, for administrators trying to find qualified applicants for public works vacancies in a state with low unemployment and a competitive labor market.
Dufour said she sees the issue partly in terms of the wages many communities are able to offer.
“The issue is a little more challenging,” she said of filling public works positions, “because there may be limits to what the community can pay.”
Flewelling said she has firsthand experience with this. She recently had to make cuts to her budget after voters rejected two municipal funding items at the annual town meeting.
St. Albans’ Lancaster said her candidates for positions in the Public Works Department tend to be older individuals with families — people more willing to be on call and work overtime.
“We do get a large amount of applications from the higher age group in our list of candidates,” she said. “We can’t discriminate, but the reality is many of them already are nearing retirement.”
It is a different story in Calais, where City Manager Mike Ellis said he regularly gets young people applying for positions in the Public Works Department. In his experience, he said, younger candidates are eager for jobs that offer ample overtime — though that does not mean filling positions in Public Works is easy.
Ellis said he posted an advertisement for two full‑time positions last week and so far has no applicants. For a candidate with limited experience, typically someone just out of high school or a vocational program, the starting wage is about $21 an hour. The wage goes up if the applicant has a commercial driver’s license, or CDL.
The city also offers an attractive set of benefits, including retirement and health insurance, though Ellis said those perks are not a strong selling point for younger applicants, a cultural shift he has noticed in recent years.
“What I have noticed when I interview people is that wages is their focus,” he said. “For the previous generation, the big draw was retirement and good health benefits, but now they don’t care about benefits.”
The mindset of many workers today, Ellis said, is to approach the job market with a transient mentality — that they will spend three or four years in whatever position they accept and then move on to the next opportunity.
Understanding this, Ellis said he has shaped his hiring strategy accordingly, especially given that workers tend to have more leverage in the current labor market.
“You have to offer a good starting wage,” Ellis said, “because there’s a lot of competition out there (for workers).”
For Dufour of the MMA, the appeal of working for a town or a city goes beyond wages, benefits and other traditional incentives. What a job in public service offers, she said, is an intangible often missing in today’s world.
“It is a real opportunity,” she said, “to have a meaningful career and leave your fingerprint on the local community.”
