Most of Maine’s county commissioners are in their 60s and 70s, according to a review by the Associated Press, a concentration of older officeholders that is coming into sharper focus as Lincoln County’s 89-year-old commissioner prepares to retire. William Blodgett will leave the midcoast seat at the end of this year, and his all-but-certain successor will lower the commission’s average age by only two years.
Walter Voskian, the lone major-party candidate for Blodgett’s seat, is an 87-year-old Democrat who argues that his decades in national security — he spent a career at the Central Intelligence Agency helping to prepare briefings for multiple presidents — make him an asset, not an anachronism. “I don’t think it’s a matter of age, it’s more a matter of experience,” Voskian told the AP. “To be able to draw on those experiences when you have to make a decision” is what matters for the county.
Voskian has served on Bremen’s planning board and was involved in local government in Virginia before moving to Maine. He described himself as in excellent health and said the county would benefit from his depth of background. No other major-party candidate has emerged to challenge him, making his path to the seat in the heavily Democratic county effectively clear.
If Voskian wins, he will not become the state’s oldest commissioner. That distinction remains with H. Sawin Millett, the 88-year-old Oxford County commissioner and a veteran of Maine politics, whose current term runs until just after his 90th birthday. Millett’s long tenure and Voskian’s pending election together illustrate a pattern that the AP analysis found across the state: Maine’s county governments, which oversee budgets, jails, and local infrastructure, are run by a cohort of leaders whose careers began when most of today’s voters were not yet born.