Meet Select Board candidate Marcus S. Gomes

Marcus S. Gomes is a lifelong Wareham resident who grew up playing sports and cooking at the now closed Lindsey's Restaurant. Now he wants to help better the community he has called home his whole life.

Gomes, 32, son of Alan Gomes and Cindy Logan is on the ballot for the one, two-year unexpired Select Board seat left vacant by current member Sherry Quirk, who announced her resignation in March.

Gomes has been a member of the Wareham Cultural Council for three years and said that experience helped him "get his feet wet" in town government and he now feels ready to run for Select Board.

"All I've seen is the beauty in town and I saw room for growth and I like being in this small town," Gomes said. "I want to get people behind having a great town."

If elected, Gomes said he would advocate for getting people outside and into nature by installing a disc golf course.

"When I found out about disc golf I fell in love with it. But all of the courses are 30 minutes away which is not good for people in town because they'll never know about it," he said. "It's great to have a sport you can just go out and play where you meet hundreds of people who have the same attitude that you do."

He added that if he could install the course, each hole would have a placard that gives players a brief history lesson on something in Wareham like Wickets Island or Minot Forest.

In order to help preserve land, especially forest for people to enjoy, Gomes said he would advocate against knocking trees down in favor of large scale ground mounted solar developments.

"When they put the Walmart in and the field behind it was all taken by solar panels, my reaction was, where did all the animals go?" he said. "It didn't look good, but there must be a better way of implementing those by maybe putting them on top of businesses, because right now, who is that really benefiting?"

Gomes said he sees Main Street as a place for the town to grow and believes the best way to do that is by improving what already exists, not by adding more to it.

"We need to fix up the couple of buildings that are run down and put a business in there," he said.

He added that events like the Oyster Festival and the Swan Festival is also something he wants to promote.

"That's the kind of stuff that promotes camaraderie in the town because people know that something is going on," he said.

Gomes, a Wareham High School graduate, said he would want to pursue solutions to get more Wareham kids in Wareham High School.

"Over the past few years we've seen more and more kids aren't going to Wareham, their parents are bringing them elsewhere and there's a reason for that," Gomes said. "Schools like Tabor Academy and Upper Cape Tech offer a lot more than we can and we need to find ways to make the school more appealing to parents."

Gomes added that his father is a pastor and his upbringing in the church has inspired him to try and do good.

"I see the light in a lot of things," he said. "If somebody is going through something I try and help them because we are all people in this world and I think everyone should have an open heart."