Kyle Shank
Three-year council candidate
Kyle Shank
THE BIO:
Kyle Shank is currently the director of media analytics and technology at The Hershey Company where he leads a large team dedicated to supporting and measuring the effectiveness of approximately $1.5B in marketing expenditures every year. He is also a visiting faculty member at the College of the Atlantic where he has focused on applied data science. He has previously worked at Facebook/Meta, MDI Biological Laboratory, CLEAResult, and as a bartender at both Side Street Cafe in Bar Harbor and Hearth & Harbor in Southwest Harbor.
Kyle has helped to support a variety of institutions and non-profits across MDI. He is currently the chair of Bar Harbor's Comprehensive Planning Committee and previously served as the vicepresident of the HUB of Bar Harbor. He has also previously served on the boards of the Island Housing Trust and Kids' Corner and is currently a member of the Alumni Association of the COA.
Kyle has a deep passion for issues related to housing, economic development, and education, and the ways in which public and private institutions can work together to solve problems in both the short- and long-term. He likes numbers just about as much as he likes people and currently lives towards the head of the island with his lovely wife, Allison, and his two lovely - but also feral - children, Willa Brave and Gideon Scot.
THE QUESTIONS:
Why do you think so many people are running this year?
I think that many of the candidates for the election this year are running because they do not believe that our community is on the right path and they would like to offer their time, energy, and leadership to set us on a better course.
Why are you running? How does your why for running delve into your bigger life purpose?
I’m running for a simple reason: I love Bar Harbor. It is no more complicated than that.
This place has been my home now for eleven years. It is the place where my children were born and, if my wife and I are so lucky, where our grandchildren will be born too. It’s the community where I’ve made some of the closest, dearest friendships of my life. It is the town in which I’ve made memories both fond and funny and where I’ve truly been able to lead the life I’ve wanted, the way all lives should be. All of this has been given to me, if not freely, with very little effort other than a sense of neighborliness, some hard work, and a motivation to leave this place better than how I found it.
That’s why I’m running: because I love it here, and I’d like to give back.
How would you try to create more trust between people not on town boards/committees and those who are?
I believe that there are three foundational elements to building and maintaining trust: integrity, transparency, and communication. My hope is that we, both as individuals and as hopeful members of Town Council or other elected positions, can focus on modeling these elements for others so that we can rebuild and strengthen the trust between our community and the people that seek to represent them.
We can first focus on rebuilding a perspective of integrity amongst our elected and volunteer officials by revisiting, revising, and reinvigorating our Ethics Ordinance. The Ethics Ordinance may need to be updated and clarified, but more important is that we build the cultural norms that must exist to make the ordinance useful in practical terms. We must practice self-declaration of possible conflicts of interest and make it normative for people to question one another’s potential conflicts in a good-faith manner that is neither intended to be, nor interpreted as being vindictive.
With renewed integrity can then come a further commitment to transparency and communication. The actions and deliberations of council, as currently structured, are only really available to people who can join the meetings in-person or who have dedicated time to watch the recordings or read minutes. I believe council members, individually and as an institution, should be in direct dialogue much more frequently with the public, both in structured and unstructured ways. Engagement with the various parts of our civil society - traditional newspapers, bloggers, public forums - should be viewed as both a privilege and a requirement of the role, despite the personal discomfort that can sometimes come along with it.
The last year or so the news has been full of cruise ships, short-term rentals, and affordable housing. This isn’t saying that those aren’t all tremendously important, but what are some of the things that we might not be focusing on as a town that needs to be focused on instead?
My personal view is that most, if not all, of our problems are intertwined in complex ways that make them very difficult to tease out. That said, I think an area that we don’t talk about enough is economic development.
Bar Harbor has been a tourism-oriented economy for a long, long time. There is nothing wrong with this; it’s created wealth and opportunity for a large number of our residents and provided memorable experiences for people from all around the world. What is clear, however, is that the people of Bar Harbor want to be more than just a tourism-oriented economy, yet there is no clear articulated vision for what that may mean in practice. What does it mean to be a “year-round economy”? Does that mean having more than two coffee shops open in the winter? Does that mean having a more diversified set of commercial entities doing business in Bar Harbor? This, to me, is one of the more fundamental issues facing our town and is the one that seems to have the least amount of serious discussion.
Do you have any ideas for increasing revenue to the town and alleviating the tax burden on property owners, ideas that don’t involve property taxes?
A few!
We absolutely need to combine forces with our state representatives to try - again! - to pass a Local Options Tax ordinance. We must embrace that we are political actors and go to Augusta as often as necessary to highlight the undue burden placed upon Bar Harbor’s citizens as one of the largest generators of tax revenue in the state but also one exposed to truly substantial tax burdens on an individual basis.
We should revisit the idea of a Pay-as-you-Throw (PAYT) program for our Solid Waste Disposal program to shift the funding of this service away from a taxation model and towards a use model.
The town, as I understand it, currently has no functional entity - either within the structures of the town government or without - focused on economic development. This is not intended as a slight against the Chamber of Commerce - far from it! The Chamber does a fine job on promoting tourism and the businesses that already exist in our town. But without any entities focused on finding ways to truly expand and diversify Bar Harbor’s economy, we will never be able to expand the commercial tax receipts in such a way as to help alleviate the demands on residential property owners.
Although this is less focused on growing revenue versus becoming more efficient, one area we should really focus on is improving our planning process to take into account the ways in which density can interact with town expenses. We should make sure that the growth of our community is happening in the most efficient way possible from a financial perspective.
There’s a school bond on the ballot and a school that’s in dire need of repair. How have you educated yourself on the potential reconstruction of the school and what are your thoughts on how the council and school board can work together to lessen the tax implication for the residents?
As I said in my letter to the editor in the Islander several weeks ago, I believe it is our duty as a community to support the construction of a new school to provide the learning environment that Bar Harbor’s children deserve. The costs of this effort are going to be high, but the cost of doing nothing is significantly higher. We’ve kicked the can on investments in our infrastructure for as long as would have and, unfortunately, now those bills have come due.
I believe, as I said previously on how we need to address our tax burden, that the best answers here are legislative in nature. The work of Representative Lynn Williams to have legislation passed to allow us the ability to use parking funds in this effort is a phenomenal first start, but we can go further by investigating alternative revenue streams and more vigorous prioritization within our budgeting process.
As a follow-up to that, how do you prioritize education for Bar Harbor students and in what way do you see that the school does or doesn’t fit into a future, healthy community?
I believe that, in the long-term, island-wide consolidation is the only reasonable way to continue to provide the excellent education that the children of MDI deserve and that the children of Bar Harbor currently receive. With that said, all of the current consolidation proposals would have a school building located in Bar Harbor for both logistical and demographic reasons, so I do not believe we should spend much time focusing on whether or not our community should have a school, but instead on how we can more efficiently organize our district to more equitably share the support of that school for all of the youth on MDI.
What skills do you bring to the table that you think other candidates might not bring?
Before I answer about myself, I think it’s best to take a wider lens: I believe that the citizens of Bar Harbor should be thrilled at the immense amount of experience, expertise, and enthusiasm they have to choose from amongst their candidates this election cycle. There are many candidates whom I would be proud to call my representative.
As for myself, I believe I bring two unique skills to the table. First, I have made a career out of drawing insights from data that is then used to effect change. Bar Harbor is awash in data: from consultancies to committees, we have an ample amount of information that could be sorted through to help to craft the strategies Bar Harbor needs moving forward.
Second, I have had the privilege of serving with several non-profits, such as the Island Housing Trust and the HUB of Bar Harbor, as well as our Comprehensive Planning Committee, that have given me an excellent opportunity to see first-hand how important the issues related to housing and economic development are to our community and the kinds of actions we’ll need to fix them.
What’s a question that I should be asking you that I’m not asking?
I think that more candidates need to be asked about what they love about Bar Harbor and what parts of our community they want to promote and expand versus focusing on what isn’t working and should be curtailed. It’s easy to find problems and hard to find solutions, but the motivation for both can’t exist in the absence of understanding what’s working and positive within our town.
What have you done for yourself that you’re the most proud of? What have you done for the community that you’re the most proud of?
I am deeply proud of being a father to my children: Willa, 8, and Gideon, 5. I did not grow up with a father figure in my household, so I’m playing it a bit by ear, but through hard work and the unending patience of my wife Allison, I think I’m doing okay.
When it comes to the community, I’m immensely proud to have been a part of the Comprehensive Planning Committee and to have had the privilege to serve as the chair over the past year and a half. The committee is staffed with some of Bar Harbor’s brightest and most engaged citizens and I have no doubt that the end work product will be invaluable to Town Council and the people of Bar Harbor for years to come.