Like and Share if you agree that the Legislature needs to Connect the Dots! As published in Downeast Coastal Press 1/28/14 Connecting the Dots: Augusta Can’t Be All Things to All People By Will Tuell This past week an estimated 200-plus municipal leaders went to Augusta to testify against further cuts to revenue sharing—that portion of the sales tax the state “shares” with towns—and I was one of them. The question: why would anyone brave sub-Arctic temperatures, the threat of a storm lurking off the Gulf and five grueling hours of mostly redundant testimony for a three-minute rake at the Appropriations Committee? The skeptic would say, “Well, he’s running for Legislature, trying to get votes, grab a few headlines and a photo and be gone.” Indeed, that seems to be the trend in politics today, but I am not very photogenic, eschew getting up at 4:30 a.m. unless it’s to hop on the bus to Fenway Park, and you can’t get votes just by getting your name in the paper—they have to be earned through hard work and determination. “Well, he’s a selectman, just trying to get all he can get for his town.” All selectmen are, or should be, advocating for their towns. I’ve said countless times that if they were willing to take the fight to Augusta, Maine’s small towns would not be squeezed nearly so often, their citizens would have more liberties and the state government would be more accountable to the people who make Maine work. So I’ll not deny that one, nor belabor the point. When I finally was beckoned from the “welcome center” where I watched three state employees work furiously for 45 minutes to get a plasma TV hooked up so we could view the overfilled hearing room in crisp HD from outside it, I encouraged legislators to take a serious look at Maine’s real problem—wanton spending based on ill-defined, oft-changing priorities that pit Mainer against Mainer in win-lose confrontations rather than win-win negotiations that place what’s best for the state as a whole ahead of special interests. Put bluntly, Maine has a financial cloud over its head that even all the Bangor weathermen can plainly see. No flurries. No 1-3 inches along the coast. We’re talking the mother of all storms. It didn’t go out to sea or turn to freezing rain. It’s a $190 million blizzard of IOUs burying Maine from Kittery to Madawaska to Eastport, and all points in between, and the Maine Legislature is either unable or unwilling to say no to misguided spending, further obligations and promises beyond the sunset. Specifically, I asked the elected officials to go back in time a week when special interests and their fellow legislators such as Katherine Cassidy (D-Lubec) suggested in their testimonies that an already bogged down Department of Health and Human Services could somehow cost-effectively cover some 70,000 additional MaineCare, i.e., Medicaid, enrollees once the federal “obligation” under Obamacare has been met. If it is truly met and Maine can unilaterally walk away, that is. Healthcare is wreaking havoc on Maine’s budget, comprising some $100 million of the aforementioned $190-million blizzard. Adding another 70,000 people onto the rolls only obligates Maine taxpayers over the long term, deepening the snowdrifts of IOUs four- to five-fold, and puts legislators of all parties and persuasions in the unenviable position of having to eliminate revenue sharing forever—not suspend it, not nibble away at it—but eradicate it. But I did not “pick on” healthcare exclusively. Lawmakers are plotting new and inventive bond packages designed to garner 60-plus percent at the polls, a favorite revenue enhancer given the electorate’s tendency to support benevolent-sounding referenda with little understanding of the greater and wider financial implications of such commitments. Yet the storm still rages, and while good friends like Washington County Sheriff Donnie Smith have called into question the need for some of these obligations, our jails, towns, schools, fire departments, roads and libraries and treasuries go wanting, held at bay by weathermen from afar who don’t know enough to come in out of the snow. My point, and that of some very articulate Augusta friends like Sen. Dave Burns, Reps. Larry Lockman, Joyce Maker, Beth Turner and Ray Wallace, is that Maine needs priorities. If we don’t dramatically rein DHHS in, if we don’t knock off the bonds, if we don’t say no to someone, and if we continue to plug the holes with new taxes and promised down-the-road returns, all of these things that define our small communities will be wiped out. Those of us who like shoveling snowdrifts will get our exercise, because the blizzard of IOUs will only intensify, sending Maine into a fiscal Ice Age worse than any sci-fi flick.
Posted on: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 17:27:39 +0000