Ray Scollin (Enterprise photo — Chris Morris)

SARANAC LAKE — The chair of the Franklin County Republican Party, Ray Scollin, will step down Oct. 2 after three terms in the position because he believes in self-imposed term limits.

“I believe political leadership should term-limit themselves; I always believed that. It keeps them healthy,” Scollin said. “We want younger people to be involved. They’re never going to become involved if the people who have experience and have been there a while, the older ones, don’t make room.”

Scollin said he did not want to lead a political “dynasty” and knew he would spend no more than a decade in the county party chair position. After six years, he feels it is time for new Republican leadership in the county.

“It’s painful,” Scollin said of leaving the position.

There was an effort by other members of the party to draft him and not let him leave, but he was determined to give the position a fresh pair of eyes.

Scollin is stepping back from several of his roles in county and state politics, roles he earned through more than 30 years of working and volunteering in the party.

He got his start when his neighbor, a Saranac Lake football coach named Bruce Bullock, asked him to attend a meeting in 1987. He started from the bottom up, working in village, then town, then county, then state politics.

“Now I’m 60 years old, and I’m looking to do kind of a reversal,” Scollin said.

In the six years he led the Republican Party, Scollin said Franklin County saw a rejuvenation of candidates on the ballots and a high number of signatures in each election.

He said there were no “breakthroughs,” or flipping of the way the county Board of Legislators leans. He said the board is a good measure of party affiliation in a county. When he started, there were three Republicans and four Democrats; now there are two Republicans and five Democrats.

Scollin said he hopes fellow Saranac Laker Jim Murnane, who recently sold the Best Western hotel he ran for 26 years, can win the legislature race against Democratic interim county Legislator Melinda “Lindy” Ellis of Saranac Lake in November, returning the numbers to where they were when Scollin started.

Membership in the Republican Party is currently down. There are 19 towns in Franklin County, with sometimes multiple election districts in each town based on its size. Each district gets two representatives, and though there should be around 90 county-wide, Scollin said there are several vacancies, bringing the total down into the 80s.

One of Scollin’s goals as the party chair was to increase transparency. Though there were a lot of executive committee meetings before his time, only open to the town chairs, committee officers and the state committee man and women, he never held one. Scollin always held general meetings, including all members in the decision making.

Scollin said open meetings meant his ideas were challenged more often, but he said that was a good thing.

“The people came to the county meetings, and they were pretty much just following the lead of whatever the chair said,” Scollin said. “I didn’t like that. There wasn’t a good dialogue going on back and forth, a good argument.”

Scollin said he feels he is now leaving behind a vibrant party community that is willing and eager to speak up when members disagree with something. He said civil disagreement is good, within a party and for politics in general.

“All you have to do it look at politics in general right now; it’s very hyper-partisan,” Scollin said. “The last thing we want to do is stay on a rail where we’re only going one direction. That’s why I’m stepping away. We need to have constant change.”

Scollin said he remembers the days when he was running to be the Saranac Lake deputy mayor and candidates from both major parties would party together after the tense election season.

“It was common for the Republicans and Democrats to go down to Little Joe’s Bar and raise a glass, spend election night together even though there were losers and winners in there,” Scollin said.

Scollin said that when he was elected, Little Joe Gladd, a Democrat, pulled him aside and told him what he wanted him to do as a newly elected deputy mayor. In fact, Scollin also said Bob Rice and Dennis Dwyer, the Democrats on the village board, were his closest political mentors.

To avoid hyper-partisanship, Scollin said he likes to to engage with people he disagrees with face-to-face, talking with the people he sees around his neighborhood, at high school football games or at church.

“One of the things that will suck you into [hyper-partisanship] very quickly is Twitter,” Scollin said. “Twitter was a great tool for helping to change conversation directions. So I used it very effectively two years ago. This two-year term has been very hyper-partisan, and I find myself sucked in like everybody else.”

He said memes and name calling do not make for an effective political climate; empathy and listening do.

Scollin said hyper-partisanship makes the job of a county chair more difficult, too. It is harder to get someone elected when politics are partisan, and Scollin has said it has been tiring in recent years.

“Even though you may have a candidate who has issues that Democrat, Republican, Green, Conservative, Independent can agree with, they often stick to their foxholes because it’s a way to stay strong,” Scollin said.

He said it is better to focus on local issues, which usually deal with budgets and taxes. Scollin said his successor would do well to see that the southern end of the county gets more attention and tax dollars.

He said a gas line running through the north end of the county fuels jobs and low-cost gas but sucks up tax dollars, meaning places like the Adirondack Regional Airport, which is owned and run by the town of Harrietstown, has to fight to stay revenue neutral. Scollin said if the county agreed to not tax the fuel the airport uses, it could break even.

“There’s those inequalities that need to be addressed, and I think the Republicans seem a little more attuned to the inequalities of the tax dollars,” Scollin said.

Scollin said he wished he had done more fundraising as the party chair, admitting he is not good at it. He said the party needs people with fundraising experience and that he has been talking to possible candidates for such a position.

An ad hoc search committee for a new county chair, led by town of Moira chairman Terry Trudeau, began with five interested parties and has worked itself down to two candidates. The new county chair will be announced on Oct. 2, Scollin’s last day on the job. Scollin said he will be there to help the new chair transition if his help is wanted or needed.

Scollin was also one of nine regional vice chairs who work with state Chairman Ed Cox on the state Republican committee, and stepped down from that position in January.

Scollin said he will still stay busy in politics at town and state levels, holding roles on the Harrietstown Republican committee and state executive committee for county committee and state meetings.