Pine and Roses’ Todd Chretien sat down for breakfast at Ruski’s Tavern in Portland with Maine DSA member and recently-elected City Councilor Wes Pelletier to talk over his priorities in City Hall.
TC: What’s your favorite breakfast here at Ruski’s?
WP: The oatmeal. It’s four dollars. It’s a good deal.
TC: Excellent. Cheap government, that’s an old slogan from the Marxist movement.
TC: How did you decide to get involved in this whole mess of American politics?
WP: I’d been canvassing and phone banking with the Dems from a very early age. I always watched the Daily Show and was a real news junkie. But then at a certain point, I was thinking about climate change and decided I needed to get involved. I heard about DSA six or seven years ago and signed up and started paying my dues. One day I got an email from DSA about a meeting and I decided to show up. Turns out they needed a secretary, and I got convinced to take the position and since then I’ve been learning how to organize, how to run a campaign. I met a bunch of comrades and then decided to, from a psychological point of view, put all my stress into things that I can try to control at the local level. Even as a non-elected, you have more control over local politics than state and obviously national issues. It’s where you can affect change and actually improve lives and show people what good government can do. We had a friendly city councilor stepping down, so I decided to run.
TC: When you decided to run for city council, what was central to your platform?
WP: There’s a huge housing crisis in Portland, and in Maine generally. We passed a number of referendums in 2020 under the banner of People First Portland, including rent control. And we’ve defended it from several attempts by landlords to overturn or weaken it. It’s wildly popular in Portland, but the city government does not want to proactively enforce it, which means that for a lot of folks, the law just doesn’t exist. So we need a city council that’s willing to take action rather than just sit by.
TC: Trump’s 2016 election, Bernie’s 2020 campaign, the Covid pandemic, and Black Lives Matter spurred Maine DSA into action. Really enormous political events shook the country. Now we’ve got two socialists on city council. Do you think there is something unique about the way that Portlanders have responded to all those crises?
WP: Portland is somewhat unique. We think of ourselves as a city, but we are basically a large town. But we’re the biggest city in the state. DSA keeps the bar to entry low so we’ve been able to organize and train a lot of people. So, sometimes, we’re able to do more than the Democratic Party machine, which isn’t as powerful as it is in a lot of places. But the structure is set up so that the unelected city manager and high-level staff have more capacity and power than the mayor or the city councilors. When Black Lives Matter arose in Portland, one of the organizers’ main demands was getting rid of the city manager. We’ve lost a little bit of momentum on that but we are able to take these national moments you mentioned and engage a large enough coalition including labor unions, leftist organizations like DSA, and progressives to get things done. It’s a broad set of alliances. For instance, former Portland Mayor Ethan Strimling is a pretty prominent member and leader in DSA and he has a lot of knowledge about how the system works. That institutional knowledge and experience is critical when you combine it with organizers who are adept at ground-level organizing to give enough volume to these ideas that they can’t be ignored. We can show up in big numbers given enough organization. We are able to leverage a lot of different parts to build a bigger thing that has more impact due the smaller size of the government.
TC: Being a newly elected city councilman, what stands out to you?
WP: The most obvious thing is that the city councilors don’t really have a ton of power. Honestly, I didn’t run on this point because it is sort of a bleak message, but I did understand the dynamic beforehand. The power city council has on paper is really watered down because we all have second jobs and no support staff, while city management is able to devote their full time and hundreds of staff hours toward moderating the political course of the city. To be clear, the vast majority of the work done by staff, both by management and by the largely unionized rank and file, is mostly unseen and underappreciated. It’s what holds our social fabric together. But there’s chafing when that establishment comes into contact with democratically elected leaders, because we are there by design to make changes to the status quo to best serve people. Those changes usually create logistical hassles for staff. In looking to minimize that hassle, city management has taken on a conservative political role, often slow-walking or hampering councilors’ efforts that they either publicly or privately disapprove of through a combination of legal hand-wringing or simply deprioritizing the research and legwork needed to see those efforts through. That creates a sort of paralysed government that can’t adapt to a changing political and economic landscape, and it’s a huge reason Portland is in the crisis it is.
To cut through that malaise and effect change, I need to leverage organizing structures to get our own research and legwork done to bring forward proposals even without management’s blessing, which is frankly one of the most exciting opportunities presented by having an elected DSA cadre. I’m not an electoralist, and I don’t believe that we win socialism simply by getting someone elected, but it allows us to get back to what the party system used to mean, which is to have working class people come together as a team and organize to use democracy to win change.
TC: Can you give me an example of the power imbalance between the city manager and the city councilors?
WP: The city manager runs all of the full-time staff, and the higher level department leaders get paid well over $100,000. Whereas we get paid $7,000. In reality, I get a check every week for seven bucks, because it goes into benefits. Don’t get me wrong, the health care benefits are good! But being on the city council is not a working-class position. You have got to have another job or the economic flexibility to live off something else.
TC: Who are the big economic players in Portland and what kind of access do they have to the City Manager and the staff?
WP: Historically it’s been the Chamber of Commerce. Recently, they’ve been pretty, I would say, poorly managed. They’ve staked out a very right-wing stance, and promoted a lot of stuff that many people in Portland find very odd. They’re more anti-worker than they are pro-business. They are an outside organization, they’re not part of city government, but they get to be on decision-making calls, right? They have access to the city manager and department heads that even I don’t have. They’re not lobbying me because I have not been a friend to them.
TC: What do you want to accomplish this year and what are the biggest barriers you see?
WP: The number one thing we’re facing right now is a budget shortfall. The state, let alone the federal government, is looking to slash general assistance. A lot of things that are now helping people stay on top of a very thin edge. And without those, it is going to be a bit of an apocalypse. That’s not set in stone yet, and we’re hoping that the state doesn’t make that decision, but we do need to prepare for it and we need to start raising local revenue in creative ways. That means looking for ways to raise taxes and fees on the wealthy, to raise fees while not impacting people who are barely making it through.
For instance, there’s a push to expand a tax program that sends a check back to people who meet certain requirements after they pay property taxes, which is a workaround to allow us to raise taxes on the wealthiest. But we also have to try to make Maine Med—the biggest hospital in the state— pay its fair share. As a non-profit they don’t pay property taxes even though they continue to purchase property, draining us of revenue which would otherwise allow us to fund social services which could prevent people from needing to go to the hospital in the first place. We can make the cruise ships actually pay disembarkation fees that at least begin to offset the amount of environmental damage they do. We can make the yacht owners pay when they tie up here in the summer. We can start issuing fines on landlords who are breaking rent control. We’ll need to raise revenue so that we can pay our workers and maintain services rather than give into the nihilism of austerity in the face of economic hardship
TC: Trump has declared that unless the state bans trans athletes from competing, he will defund the state. The number I saw was $256 billion in federal funding for Maine. How should we respond to this threat?
WP: There are two kinds of tactics. There is an instinct to keep your head down and not draw attention to yourself. I think that there’s something to be said for that, but I also think that vulnerable people in our community do not benefit from that. I am not a Mills fan by any stretch of the imagination, but I do very much respect holding the line and saying to Trump, you know, fuck you, that’s fascist. We’re not going to go along with that. We have to state our values and make sure that people in our community know that they are safe, regardless of what happens on the federal level. We’re going to be looking after them and we’re not gonna throw them to the wolves. We might think sacrificing one part of our community will save us, but it won’t. Trump’s gonna cut funding over one thing or another. We’re a blue state and he’ll punish us for it.
The other tactic is really building up community, stuff like holding street fairs, block parties, just showing up and getting people to know each other and building those connections so that when this shit hits the fan, we don’t resort to fearing each other. That’s what fascism preys on. We have to stand in the way of that and build up our side.
TC: As part of your work in Maine DSA, you’ve helped launch the Portland Tenants Union. What inspired you to get involved in that and what role do you see for the union?
WP: Everyone is entitled to a place to live, right? If you’re paying rent, you start to have an understanding that this is my home, why is the landlord able to take that away or gouge me on a whim? Building a tenants union means building consciousness and awareness of that antagonistic relationship, and really building up your community, to go back to what I was just staying. You get to know your neighbors and understand that, together, you’re able to push back against someone that otherwise is holding all the cards in their hand. Portland’s in a very unique place because we have rent control so there are tools to fight back. Even if you’re not in a labor union, you are able to say, yeah, I understand what it means to have solidarity and to have comrades and to organize. And all that’s important because, even if it’s not necessarily you who is facing harassment or eviction, you know your neighbors will be protected if it comes to it.
TC: Last question and this comes from Jess, our Maine DSA communications co-chair. People should join trade unions, tenants unions, immigrants rights organizations, local churches, community groups, softball teams, and local PTAs. We want people to join all sorts of organizations in general. But why should people consider becoming a socialist and joining DSA specifically?
WP: DSA is my political home because, like Portland, it is something that you as a participant and member have the ability to change. You can become involved and you get to know the ropes and you get to know the people. It’s like a social organization, but it is also a political organization. You don’t necessarily need to be friends with everyone, but you know that you are on the same political page. And you get to struggle together and you get to figure out what that means, and really build something that can punch far above its weight. You can help create outsized change by getting just a little bit organized. In DSA, we decide on things together, which doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone’s in agreement or that everyone’s doing it the same way, but we democratically decide on what programs we’re doing and what projects we’re undertaking. Then we pull our resources together, and we pull our members together, and we work to accomplish those plans. We grow because of that and we flex our power. It’s very rewarding. It’s so much more rewarding than sniping from the sidelines, than criticizing everything. Of course, there is a lot of criticism, it’s very much endemic to DSA, but it is part of being involved.
Join Maine DSA and help us win small things because even those tiny wins can be built into something bigger. It’s better than just throwing up your hands and saying, well, this is not revolutionary enough so I won’t participate. Get involved, do stuff that is, at the very least, pushing towards socialism and, crucially, building organization. It is helping us to get together and be ready for when shit hits the fan and to be prepared to take advantage of turning points, which I think we’re going to have a lot of in the coming months and years, locally, nationally, and globally. Getting organized now helps us be ready to turn things around.
