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“You can be in a nice wilderness setting in 20 minutes,” says Candy Guerette, president of the Bangor Region Chamber of Commerce. “You can be at the ocean in 40. You can go watch great college basketball and hockey. You can go see B. B. King.”
King, now 83, played the Bangor Auditorium as recently as November 2006. The Bangor Region Chamber of Commerce is even more venerable—it will celebrate its 100th birthday in 2011. For the past 12 years, Guerette has been at its helm.
“Ten years from now the waterfront will be finished,” Guerette says, looking out the window of the small office building tucked below the auditorium at Paul Bunyan’s right elbow. “Main Street’s going to look much different than it does now. There will be a new arena, possibly on this very spot.”
The Bangor Region Chamber of Commerce represents businesses and organizations in 21 towns. Its primary mission is “to promote and advance a healthy business environment.” The personable, outgoing Guerette, who’s fond of a joke even if it’s at her own expense, likes to extol the virtues of doing business in Greater Bangor.
“We have a great workforce, we have good transportation connectivity with the interstate and the airport, and we’ve been rated one of the safest small cities in the United States,” she says. “The only thing that hurts us is the climate—both the weather and the economic climate.”
Guerette, who is married with two grown children, enjoys the outdoors, but perhaps thrives in the social climate more. “I’m a people person. I like people; I like communicating,” she says. “Maine’s just a big small town. There are two degrees of separation between any two people in the state. The state is large geographically, but it’s so small and so connected that it’s very easy to work with people on statewide issues.”
She grew up in Millinocket and graduated from Stearns High School in 1970, a time when women weren’t expected to set their sights on becoming civic or business leaders. “Girls in high school were still being encouraged to become secretaries or nurses,” she recalls. “I didn’t go to college until I was 26 or 27. I was a ‘nontraditional student’ at a time when there weren’t too many of us.”
She earned an undergraduate degree in business and an MBA from the University of Maine, and, soon after, accepted a job in the Orono town office. The experience she gained there, working on issues of business development, solid waste disposal, and welfare and general assistance, led to a six-year stint as town manager in Orrington. She was hired by the chamber of commerce in 1996.
The transition from public to private sector proved to be smoother than she had anticipated. “In municipal government, you’re providing services to a community,” she says. “Here, I’m serving the community in different ways. I’m not plowing roads, but through the chamber’s advocacy committee, I’m perhaps building a road.”
One such road may be the long-sought east-west highway, which the chamber strongly supports. The chamber has also been active in the fight to raise the weight limit for trucks on Maine’s existing interstate highways. “It makes no sense to have these big trucks driving through downtown Bangor,” Guerette says. “It’s dangerous.”
Under Guerette’s direction, the chamber has grown to 793 members, including large and small businesses, nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, and municipalities. During her tenure, the chamber has strengthened the sister-city relationship with Saint John, New Brunswick. The chamber’s succesful Fusion program, which facilitates networking among the area’s young professionals, was inspired by a similar program in Saint John.
Guerette is particularly proud of the Building Bridges program, which she helped expand statewide at the urging of then-governor Angus King. The program brings together employers and educators to address the labor needs of the future workplace.
It’s easier to get involved and make change than to just complain about something,” she says. “My mission is to make a difference.”
