{"id":12482,"date":"2026-09-25T19:07:50","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T19:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stage.pressherald.com\/voter-guide\/candidates\/samuel-purinton\/"},"modified":"2026-09-25T19:07:50","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T19:07:50","slug":"samuel-purinton","status":"publish","type":"candidate","link":"https:\/\/stage.pressherald.com\/voter-guide\/candidates\/samuel-purinton\/","title":{"rendered":"Samuel Purinton"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Previous Offices Held<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Ran for Gorham town council in 2025 (lost)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Top Three Priorities<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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I have many goals, but two are most important\n1) Ensuring the schools are funded.\n2) Minimizing property taxes for the residents (both in the short and long term)\nThe way I intend to achieve both of these goals is by focusing development pressure onto land that\u2019s already been developed. This way we can grow our tax base without increasing expenses, because it\u2019s not requiring more road\/water\/sewer, etc. to be built.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Why are you running?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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At the risk of sounding self-important, I\u2019m running because I feel as though it\u2019s my duty to the people of Gorham. Gorham is at a crossroads, and the decisions we make in the next three years will be looked back on decades from now with either appreciation or regret. I want to make sure we pick the right path and set ourselves up to remain a prosperous town into the future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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What is the biggest challenge facing your town\/county? The biggest opportunity?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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It\u2019s hard to pick one issue that stands above the rest. But I think the biggest issue facing Gorham is the high school building. It is (more than) 100 students over capacity, as well as being outdated, and there are no clear long-term solutions. What the town decides to do with the high school is the major decision looming in the next three years.\nThe biggest opportunity is the pressure to develop. This pressure can be used to minimize property taxes if the town guides it thoughtfully.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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If you could change one thing about how the town\/county functions, what would it be and why?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Transparency. The town council shouldn\u2019t have sold the land to Amazon the way they did. They didn\u2019t inform the public of Amazon\u2019s interest or allow the public to weigh in at any point in the process. If I were on the council when this happened, I would\u2019ve said \u201cno\u201d to a non-disclosure agreement, and I would\u2019ve let the public weigh in either at the beginning of the process to understand their concerns, or at the end when an agreement had been reached.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Do you support more development \u2013 i.e. more housing construction and business building in your town\/county? Why or why not?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Not all development\/construction is created equal. I believe that careful, thoughtful development represents the best way out of the property tax mess we find ourselves in. That means making it easier for people to do things like building an in-law apartment over the garage, starting a business from your home, or building an 850-square foot ADU in the back yard. Building this way increases Gorham\u2019s tax base without having to build out new roads, sewer, and other public infrastructure.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10913,"template":"","meta":{"voter_guide_candidate_first_name":"Samuel","voter_guide_candidate_middle_name":"Rodney","voter_guide_candidate_last_name":"Purinton","voter_guide_candidate_suffix":"","voter_guide_candidate_race_id":12480,"voter_guide_candidate_age":30,"voter_guide_candidate_hometown":"","voter_guide_candidate_occupation":"Community organizer","voter_guide_candidate_bio":"","voter_guide_candidate_education":"Bachelor\u2019s in Economics from Eckerd College","voter_guide_candidate_years_in_municipality":"","voter_guide_candidate_headshot_url":"https:\/\/drive.google.com\/open?id=1N9bGcx_hij4PSj7jN9_8YCeZPLwwLAaY","voter_guide_candidate_date_filed":"","footnotes":""},"vg_party":[1073],"vg_residence_municipality":[],"class_list":["post-12482","candidate","type-candidate","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","vg_party-democratic"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stage.pressherald.com\/voter-guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/candidates\/12482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stage.pressherald.com\/voter-guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/candidates"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stage.pressherald.com\/voter-guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/candidate"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stage.pressherald.com\/voter-guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/candidates\/12482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12483,"href":"https:\/\/stage.pressherald.com\/voter-guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/candidates\/12482\/revisions\/12483"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stage.pressherald.com\/voter-guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stage.pressherald.com\/voter-guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"vg_party","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stage.pressherald.com\/voter-guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vg_party?post=12482"},{"taxonomy":"vg_residence_municipality","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stage.pressherald.com\/voter-guide\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vg_residence_municipality?post=12482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}