Sanford resident Connie Garber walked into Senator Susan Collins’ Portland office on Monday and spoke to a staffer through glass.
Garber was delivering a stack of questions written by the several hundred attendees of two town halls — one on Aug. 20 in Portland, another in Bangor on Aug. 29 — that Collins was invited to but failed to attend to field questions from constituents.
It was a familiar scene for the hundreds of Mainers who have visited Collins’ offices in an attempt to speak with her as the votes over the government shutdown, or the Kavanaugh confirmation, or GOP tax cuts loomed. The glass, the staffer, the promise that the senior senator would receive their message.
The 16 Counties Coalition posted a video of the drop-off on their Facebook page.
Garber invited Collins to the Portland event, and was told beforehand that the senator wouldn’t attend.
“I have a stack of questions,” Garber told the staffer. “And all of them have the person’s name, the town they are from, a phone number, and an email address, so there’s a way to connect back with them.”
Among the questions delivered, Portland resident Doug Lynch asked of Collins, “I’m wondering why you voted in favor of the tax bill, when at the time, the economists said exactly what’s happened now — that we have massive debts as a result of the loss of tax revenue?” He added, “There’s a growing, and a very damaging divide between the one percent and the rest of us.”
The organizers say that these town halls would have been Collins’ first free, open, and advertised public forum since her first term in office, which began in 1997.
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