First elected mayor of Belfast in 2000, Hurley brought his penchant for “more” to town long before he took on the mayor moniker. He opened his first business there—The Belfast Café —in 1979, in the historic district where 30 storefronts stood empty. “The chicken and shoe industries were closing,” he says. “Those were really tough times in Belfast. That’s what I come out of.”
Hurley credits an active chamber of commerce and a willing group of merchants working hard over a long period of time to bring Belfast back from the brink. “We knew we had to get ourselves out of this—there was nobody else to turn to
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When MBNA was sold to Bank of America last year, he leapt into action to mobilize his city, his chamber, his merchants’ group, and the state of Maine itself to keep that facility operating in Belfast. “We worked very hard to protect those jobs, benefiting the greater region, not just Belfast.” He adds, “I did not want to feel ‘I should have done something.’”
While some mayors opt for little more than photo ops and ceremonial ribbon-cutting, Hurley first ran on the platform that the mayor should be more involved in the meat-and-potatoes of running the city. He credits his two reelections (the last by a 2-to-1 margin) to having publicly led the fight, repeatedly over six years, against a super Wal-Mart.
His passion about preserving Belfast’s coastal character doesn’t mean Hurley is closed to new ideas. At a national hardware show in Chicago, Hurley saw that city’s “Cows on Parade,” and brought the idea back to beget the Belfast Bearfest, drawing thousands of visitors for four successive years. “I’ve had a lot of people say they didn’t want me doing this stuff,” he says, “and I say, ‘Well, get me thrown out of office, because I’m doing it.’”
Outside of city hall, you could call Hurley a “serial entrepreneur.” In 1995, he restored Belfast’s Colonial Theatre to art deco glory, then did the same for Houlton’s historic Temple Theatre in 2002. In between, he launched a theatrical website called bigscreenbiz.com, which, he says, gets 30,000 visitors a month. Another of his companies manufactures and distributes a tool Hurley invented called the Mini Scraper. Most recently, the success of Belfast Bearfest has led to the creation of Fiberglass Farm, a company that manufactures large fiberglass figures for museums and street fairs.
He doesn’t see himself as the sum of his enterprises, and it’s hard to keep a conversation going in that vein. Hurley admits to being insanely in love with his city, and for him, all roads lead to the mayor’s office. “I am,” he says proudly, “the mayor of Belfast. I take it very seriously.” Deep into his sixth year in office, he seems to have developed a leadership style that pleases most of the people, most of the time. “That’s not by accident. I work really hard at it,” he says, “and the people of Belfast have rewarded me by saying, ‘Yeah, Mike, keep it up.’”
Hurley was recently visiting another coastal Maine town when someone said to him, “I wish you were our mayor.” His reply was vintage Hurley: “You know, a lot of people in Belfast might agree with you.” Zingers aside, Mike Hurley has no intentions of passing the mayor hat anytime soon. With no term limits, he says, “I could run forever.”
