LEWISTON, Maine — As Lewiston residents continue to confront shootings, youth violence and growing fear over public safety, Mayor Carl Sheline used a recent opinion column in the Lewiston Sun Journal to insist that Maine’s second-largest city is not in decline.
For many residents, that message may sound less like leadership and more like denial.
Sheline’s column came in response to longtime Lewiston-Auburn columnist Mark LaFlamme, who recently asked whether residents are beginning to give up on Lewiston after repeated incidents of gun violence and mounting frustration over the direction of the city.
The mayor’s answer was firm: NO.
“Lewiston is facing real challenges,” Sheline wrote, “but we are a city filled with those who face hard moments with courage and fortitude.”
But for residents hearing gunshots, watching teenagers get shot and wondering whether their neighborhoods are still safe, Sheline’s column raises a far more urgent question: does the mayor see the same Lewiston they do?
The recent incidents involving guns and young people have rattled residents across the city. Sheline acknowledged that anger in his column, calling the violence “deeply troubling” and saying residents are right to be upset.
But he also rejected the idea that Lewiston’s “truest story” is one of decline, pointing instead to new housing development, outside investment, young professionals moving into the city and a Canadian manufacturing company choosing Lewiston as signs that the city is still moving forward.
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That message of optimism may play well inside City Hall. It lands differently in neighborhoods where families are watching violence unfold and wondering whether elected officials are more concerned with defending Lewiston’s image than confronting the conditions residents are living through.
Lewiston does not have a public relations problem.
It has a public safety problem.
And that problem cannot be solved with carefully worded columns, speeches about resilience or reminders that developers still see opportunity in the city. Residents are not asking whether Lewiston has potential. They are asking whether their children are safe.
Sheline’s critics also argue that the mayor appears to pick and choose when he wants to address the city’s most urgent issues. To them, his public posture often seems to come only after he has taken the political temperature of the community, particularly among his “New Mainer” base of support, rather than from a clear and consistent commitment to confronting problems head-on.
That perception matters.
Leadership in a city facing violence cannot be selective. It cannot depend on which constituency is upset, which activists are loudest, or which political supporters need reassurance. Residents across Lewiston, longtime residents, new Mainers, business owners, parents, seniors and young families, deserve a mayor who responds to public safety concerns with urgency every time, not only when the politics are convenient.
At a time when families are asking why young people have guns, why shootings keep happening and why residents feel less secure in their own neighborhoods, Sheline’s message was essentially that the city must not be defined by a “handful of reckless acts.”
But residents are not asking for a slogan.
They are asking for safety.
They are asking why children are being shot. They are asking why violence keeps spilling into the streets. They are asking why city leaders appear more determined to control the narrative than to confront the failures that have allowed fear to spread across Lewiston.
That is the heart of the problem.
Lewiston residents are not giving up on their city. They are demanding that their leaders stop pretending the anger, fear and frustration are merely the product of negative headlines.
Sheline is right that Lewiston should not be written off. The city has deep roots, hardworking families, proud neighborhoods and residents who have endured more than their share of hardship. Lewiston has rebuilt before, and it can rebuild again.
But rebuilding starts with honesty.
Residents are not wrong to be afraid. They are not wrong to be angry. And they are not wrong to expect more from elected officials than columns about resilience while bullets fly through their neighborhoods.
Lewiston does not need leaders who simply reject the word “decline.” It needs leaders willing to confront the failures that allow decline to take hold.
The question now is whether Mayor Sheline and the City Council will meet that moment, or continue telling residents that Lewiston is fighting forward while too many families are wondering whether they are safe staying put.
