ROYALSTON — Rick Martin, who has served in several appointed positions in Royalston in recent years, is making his first foray into electoral politics by mounting a challenge to incumbent Selectboard member Roland Hamel. Hardly a newcomer to public service, Martin is a member of the Finance Committee and the Cable Advisory Committee and served on the committee which recommended the hiring of Eric Jack as the town’s new fire chief.
“I’ve gotten into some smaller aspects of helping out in town,” he told the Athol Daily News. “I guess I just want to help out a little bit more. So, I said, ‘OK, I have confidence in myself. I think I could do a good job. So, this should be the next step.’”
Martin, who is 64, said there is no specific issue which has motivated him to run, nor is he critical of Hamel’s handling of the job.
“I just thought with what I’ve done in my life, what I bring to the table, that maybe I could help out with what’s going on in Royalston,” he explained. “And help out with what’s going to be going on in Royalston in the coming years.
“Royalston is, well, Royalston. It really hasn’t changed much, and a lot of people in town like it that way — which is fine. But the world around Royalston is changing and in order to either stay the same — or change — you’ve got to deal with everything that’s going on around you. I think I bring to the table a little bit of experience in business to try and help the town get to where it wants to go.”
Martin is a 1975 graduate of Athol High School. After graduation, he spent two years at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn. After taking a year off from his educational pursuits, he spent three years at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y., where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1981.
“After graduating from RIT, I spent about five years working in and around Rochester at various manufacturing companies,” he said. “Then I came back here to New England and worked here for another 30-some-odd years. I worked in Massachusetts, businesses in New Hampshire, businesses in Maine — big companies and small companies. My expertise was in materials purchasing and logistics, warehousing, trucking, purchasing.”
While he hoped to find work a bit closer to this area, the opportunity never presented itself.
“I tried. I really did try,” he continued. “I wanted to come back to the area, but for the past 20, 25 years there really weren’t a lot of places around here to find a job. There was a dearth of manufacturing. It’s gotten a lot better in the last 10 years or so, but back then there wasn’t a lot of opportunity locally.”
Martin and his wife, Cathy, have lived in Royalston for 10 years. They first moved to South Royalston, where they purchased and rehabbed a property next to the Country Store. Recently, they built and moved to a home on Northeast Fitzwilliam Road. The couple have three grown children; one daughter lives in Charleston, S.C., another lives in San Antonio, Texas, and their son lives in Greenfield, N.H. They also have several grandchildren.
The desire to serve the public may be in Martin’s genes. His father was a member of, and eventually chief, of the Athol Fire Department.
Martin said he’s gotten a lot of questions asking him what he’ll do if elected to the Selectboard.
“I just say, ‘To tell you the truth, a) I’m not going to commit right now, and b) I don’t know.’ I don’t think right now there’s a consensus of where the town wants to go. It’s never going to be 100 percent, but where to the majority of the people want to go? How do they want Royalston to be in, say, five years or 10 years?
“I think the town needs to get that consensus,” said Martin, “and then we need to work on a plan. How do we get there? Now that we know what the town wants to do, how do we get there — what’s the plan? Once we have that thought on where we want to go, then everybody will get an idea of what they need to do to get there.”
He said the thoughts of Royalston residents need to be heard and believes a public meeting would be a good way to discern public opinion.
“I don’t think people sitting in a room, without input from the town and the various areas of town, can know what people want. If you don’t have a focus, you’re taking a shotgun, scattershot approach, saying, ‘I’ll try anything.’ That doesn’t always work out so well.
“And you’re wasting your energies on things that people don’t want, where you could be putting focus, that money, that energy into what they really do want.”
Martin endorsed the idea of undertaking an effort to develop a master plan for Royalston.
The Annual Town Election is scheduled for Monday, April 4. Balloting will take place at Town Hall from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. The race for the three-year seat on the Selectboard is the only contested position on the ballot.
The Athol Daily News will continue to reach out to incumbent Hamel for an interview.
Greg Vine can be reached at gvineadn@gmail.com