Interview with David August, for City Council

How long have you lived in Belfast?

I’ve been in Belfast for the past 13 years and have spent 17 years in Maine in total.

What’s your favorite thing about living here?

Access to the ocean. It’s funny – I don’t own a boat or really go out on the water, but just being here feels right. My family history in the United States – stretching back almost 400 years goes mainly through six communities: Belfast, Thomaston, Thorndike, York in Maine, and Gloucester and Fall River in Mass. And then on my Italian side they were 20 miles from the coast for generations and on the Portuguese side, they lived in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean (in the Azores) for as far back as we can tell. Just being able to walk down to the bay and breathe the ocean air is all the grounding I need on some days. I’m really proud that my son was born here in Belfast.

I’m also captivated by the small town feel of Belfast and the fact that we have managed to avoid so much of the bad development practices of the past 50-70 years. I’ve seen communities near where I grew up go from farming towns to suburbanized hellscapes and I desperately want Belfast to get smart about its zoning codes before that’s what we become here.

What motivated you to run for City Council?

Our broken housing system. It’s beyond frustrating to me that we have zoned our small developers out of existence. I am driven by a lot more than profit – I see myself as a small developer and want to be able to produce small-scale apartment buildings because this is my only retirement plan, and lately I’m feeling robbed of the opportunity to do this. I’m tired of butting heads with inane zoning and planning restrictions, most of which have no empirical evidence to support their use, and I’m frankly getting angry that opportunities that were prevalent for small scale development 20-40 years ago are not feasible for my generation. It was helpful to see that there are organizations on a nationwide scale asking the same questions – and it feels empowering that I’m not alone wondering why we’re making it so hard to build the things that we desperately need.

What do you see as the most important issues facing the City now?

Housing. Housing. Housing. After that, small business support, broken zoning and planning processes, tax fairness, better fiscal transparency and erosion of resilience. And our pricing out the working class is really bumming me out. Rather than vilify newer residents that are paying very high prices for homes here, I just want to make it very easy and incentivize them to open up housing opportunities to people they are displacing.

What experiences and skills would you bring to the Council?

I have varied experience. I was a high school math teacher for two years and I have been a small business owner (property management & contracting) for nearly two decades. I own rental properties (all at affordable rents). I have carpentry and HVAC experience and currently perform services in these two trades (mainly small projects, heat pumps and gas appliances/heating). I have writing experience, volunteer experience and youth coaching experience. I work on my own cars and consider this therapy. I like to consider myself a completely resourceful New Englander who is well rounded and this is part of the reason I love Belfast – there’s so much of this here.

What is your stance on broadband?

I would like to see the community-owned option back on the table. I would like more transparency as far as where the current fiber-optic build out stands with GWI (Contracts? Out clauses?). There’s just too much hard tellin’ not knowin’ going on here for my liking due to the lack of disclosure. It’s been too long and our service in some neighborhoods is abysmal.

What is your stance on small-scale sustainable aquaculture?

Without having a definition of “small-scale” I’m going to say I like it. The contrarian in me believes that Nordic Aquafarms would describe their operations this way if it helped them get their permits. Joking aside, I subscribe to a philosophy of antifragility (as described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb) and small-scale in everything (housing, businesses, farming, education) is much more resilient. I’m tired of large development being forced downwards. What happens in one-factory towns when the factory goes out of business or moves? What would have happened if the town had 20 smaller factories instead? There’s risk of failure in both approaches, but the latter has much more adaptability. I like seafood and would like to see it remain a viable food source -- and overfishing and overstressing the environment means that small-scale sustainable aquaculture is the only way forward if Nordic-like proposals are the alternative.

I don't see a specific question about Nordic, but I'm going to overshare and state my opinion on it. First, if I happened to be on the council when the proposal was first made, it would have never passed the smell test for me. I'm naturally sceptical of large-scale development and did not trust groundwater projections (because we're really not good at making long-term predictions surrounding the climate). And I never would have voted to change zoning to accommodate Nordic - I would have told them to come back with a much smaller-scale proposal that fit within existing codes. I would not have put the city in the position of being an active promoter of this business because I do not see the city's role as a business development entity. Yes, it's easy for me to say this all now, but I don't have to contort myself to explain this because nothing that has happened between then and now has changed these concerns. It was way out of scale with Belfast's development pattern and it caused way too much distraction, fighting and sapped resources that could have been put to better places, like housing.

What is your stance on climate change?

It’s very real and moving faster than we can anticipate, and here’s the big point: it’s unpredictable. Helene’s tragic consequences in North Carolina and recent large rain events in Vermont show this, so to think Belfast is immune or some kind of climate refuge, is willful ignorance. The most important thing I think we can do is to reduce our dependence on bad habits of the past century-plus. It pains me to see technological solutions presenting as the only way to do something about climate change. I am a firm believer in the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” concept – with reducing being the single-most important thing we can do. On a local scale I am going to try hard to reduce car-dependency. Of all the things about my neighborhood (east side of Belfast along Searsport Ave) I could change, car-dependency is the biggest. It makes no sense to me why the MDOT cannot turn the Searsport-Belfast corridor into a much slower mixed-use road. It pains me that the only functional way to get into town is by car (and I say this owning four of them). There is so much institutional inertia and complexity in our planning system that it’s going to take large coalitions to make necessary changes on the scale, but I’m ready to start trying.

Thank you for your questions, and if you'd like to know more about how I feel about other topics in Belfast, please go to my substack at augustforbelfast.substack.com