OAKLAND — Four town residents are making a pitch to be a voting member of the Regional School Unit 18 committee that forms every five years to review cost sharing among the five towns that make up the district.

This will be the second time the committee has been formed. The first was in 2011, after reorganization set a fixed percentage for cost-sharing, and the district’s towns determined they’d rather use a formula using valuations and student populations.

RSU 18 administers eight schools in Rome, Oakland, Belgrade, Sidney and China. Residents in all five towns approved a $34.6 million budget for the 2016-17 school year May 24.

Oakland’s candidates each had five minutes to tell the Town Council about themselves Wednesday and why they wanted the position while the other candidates waited outside the meeting room.

Kelly Pinney was the first candidate to talk with the council. Pinney has worked at Colby College as assistant director of administrative financial services for 17 years, overseeing millions of dollars in purchasing for the school. She has built rapport with local vendors, which is something she could bring to the table for RSU 18 and Oakland, she said. She also has two children enrolled in the district and was president of the Parents-Teachers Association when they were in elementary school, where she helped the schools complete projects and do fundraising, she said.

Sherry Gilbert was a teacher for 38 years in the public school system. She said she thinks she understands the budget after having attended many budget meetings. She’s committed to keeping taxes in Oakland as low as possible while still maintaining a good school system for the children, she said.

Tyler Backus leads the school finance team for the Department of Education in Maine.

“I get to deal with this on almost a daily basis,” he said. He said he thinks the process is important because it lets the towns have a say.

School board member Laura Tracy has been on the cost-sharing committee before and has been on the school board for 18 years, six of those as chairwoman. While she said the cost-sharing was complicated to understand at first, she understands it now and she’d have that expertise going into the committee if chosen again. She knows how sensitive the issue of school taxes is, she said, so she would try to do what’s best for the town as a whole. She is the wife of police Chief Mike Tracy.

The councilors will send their votes for who should be on the committee to Town Manager Gary Bowman via email by Monday, and he’ll notify RSU 18 officials by the end of June.

The committee meets about three to five times from July until November. The Town Council must pick two voting members to represent Oakland, but the meetings will be open to the public, so others who are interested still can go and give input, Councilor Dan Borman said.

Borman said he plans to go to the meetings, although he won’t be a voting member.

Information on the status of committee members from other towns in the district wasn’t available Friday.

In other business Wednesday, the council accepted a $27,076 bid by Quirk Ford, of Augusta, for a new police cruiser, 5-0. It was the lowest of three bids. The other two were from Darling’s in Bangor.

Councilors also chose a real estate agency for the property at 21 Railroad Ave., which was foreclosed on and is now owned by the town. The council chose the bid by Century 21, which will list the single-family, two-story home for $14,000 with a 4 percent commission. Councilors included a proposal that the agency possibly raise the listing price. Snow Pond Real Estate offered to start listing it at $49,000 with the same commission.

Bowman said the house is “in bad shape.”

Madeline St. Amour – 861-9239

mstamour@centralmaine.com

Twitter: @madelinestamour