Bob Butler

Maybe you secretly thought Bob Butler was a CIA agent.  He’s lived in Afghanistan (volunteering for the Peace Corps) and Saudi Arabia (working for the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia)! He’s fluent in Arabic and German!  But, sigh, he was never even approached by the CIA, and was turned down by the Foreign Service, too. Bob Butler grew up in Hibbing, a mining town in northern Minnesota with a top-notch public school.  There, Bob got on the train for learning and never got off. Away from Minnesota and at Johns Hopkins, he graduated with both a BA and MA in German Literature the same year.  He followed with an MA in International Relations in D.C. and years later, an MBA at Boston University.  He’s taught English in Kabul and worked for oil companies and banks in Saudi Arabia.   His life has zigzagged. Through an old acquaintance, Bob got involved with jojoba.  He returned to the United States.  For 25 years he ran The Jojoba Company with his wife Sally.  Six years ago, they sold it, freeing Bob to put all his energies into Waldoboro.  This includes sitting on the board of the Waldoboro Library, the Finance Committee, the Maine Municipal Association Executive Committee, the Municipal Review Committee Board, the Transfer Station Committee, and Waldoboro’s Select Board for twelve years without a thought of retiring.

You choose your battles.  But I try not to choose battles, but to choose conversation, so that we can have a talk.  And we can hopefully walk away, certainly not as enemies, but maybe with an understanding that if we can’t solve this today, we can talk more about it later.  You keep talking.  You don’t stop.

My issue is garbage right now.  Almost twenty years ago people recognized it as a problem, especially John Daigle, and when they brought back the Transfer Station Committee, I raised my hand.

People were coming and dumping stuff from other towns, and we had no control.  So, the committee focused on re-doing the ordinance.  We were three towns – Cushing, Friendship and Waldoboro, trying to plug the holes, trying to insure we had a system of controls.  This took a long time.  But you have to keep going. 

I haven’t always been interested in garbage.  It was the waste of the money that got me.  We spend over one million dollars a year on getting rid of our garbage.  Those are dollars we don’t need to spend.  We could halve that number if we were better at recycling.  But people don’t like to admit that they don’t recycle.  But the numbers tell a different story.  At one point we were recycling more than 30%.  Now we’re only recycling 15%.  

I think, if you had to pay for the bag you’re going to dump at the transfer station, you’d watch what you put in the bag and recycle more.  If you couldn’t afford the bags, the Town would have non-tax funding to help out. 

When we first got here in 2005, I would go to town meetings.  I would be the only one sitting in the room.  I still don’t understand why nobody goes to those meetings.   You don’t get to know a town or place until you get involved. 

Becky Maxwell was on the Select Board back then and she said I should run for it.  So, I did.  I thought I could contribute something to the town.  And I thought I could learn, and when I’m learning, I’m a very happy camper.  Also, I didn’t have an agenda like the guy I ran against, who was interested in springboarding to the Legislature.  I won.

The first thing I learned was that when you’re sitting at a Select Board meeting and you make a motion, someone needs to second that motion.  I don’t remember what it was, but after I proposed one idea, there was just silence, and I thought, “Whoa!!! What just happened??”  And then I realized that somebody needed to second it. 

I didn’t get elected the next time.  That year there were four or five people running.  The next year or the year after, there were even more candidates.  I ran four or five times without getting elected.  I kept going because I was interested in what the town was doing and where it was going.  I pretty much went to all the meetings in that time. 

I don’t remember what my issues were.  I’m sure I could find them in a file called “Letters to the Editor,” because I sure wrote a lot of them.  Sally would come home, see me at the computer and say, “What are you doing, Bob?” 

“Sending a letter to the editor.” 

“Well, if you really would like to get stuff done, you actually need to bring people along to your thinking.” 

I might have mailed one or two letters, but that was all.   I married a very wise woman.  And boy, did I learn a lot.  I learned how important it is to get along with people.  And not to assume that your views are the best views in the world.  I learned you need to listen. 

I got to know people.  I got a feel for this place, and what is important.  I learned that the river is really important to Waldoboro; that the poverty level in Waldoboro is critical; and that people need to understand how big that problem is.  So much of it stems from just plain, bad luck.  You can’t generalize about this.

People talk about there being two Waldoboro’s.  But to me there isn’t.  I grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota.  I went to school every day with kids whose dads worked in the iron mines.  I was no different from them.  We were all in the same kettle.

It was only when I came out East that I realized, “Holy cow! Things are different here.” 

It’s easy to forget about the pockets of Waldoboro where people feel forgotten.  But if you forget them, they will come back and bite you.  I know, from my childhood in Minnesota, that it doesn’t have to be this way. 

I also know it’s not easy.  Our problems, especially those surrounding poverty, are getting worse, not better.  And I don’t have a solution.

But we need to be aware of this and include people.  And it’s difficult to interest people!  It doesn’t matter if it’s about garbage or something else.  And that’s the conundrum.  Because to get things done, we need to bring all parts of Waldoboro into the conversation.