Good days are ahead for the state of Maine. We are blessed with abundant resources, beautiful scenery and a workforce that is second to none in the country.
It is a true honor to represent my favorite corner of the state, Waldo County, in the Maine Senate.
One of my favorite parts of being an elected official is visiting people in their own homes, as I have been doing over the past few months. During these visits I am often reminded of why I ran for office in the first place: to be a voice for those I serve.
Such a moment happened recently when I spoke with a family that has a disabled young man in his early 20s still living at home. For years, this family has been on the waiting list to receive state services that would provide much needed help for the young man with significant disabilities.
It shouldn’t be this way. This family is symbolic of whom our social safety net should be protecting.
It also is a reminder of the misguided priorities in Augusta that were decades in the making that led to this. We have expanded our welfare programs to the point where those who are in most need of services — the elderly and the disabled — have to compete for limited resources with those who are able-bodied and capable of working.
The misplaced priorities also extend to caring for our older residents. Maine nursing homes, particularly rural ones, are on the financial brink because of low Medicaid reimbursements. This has caused several of them to close in recent years, creating hardships for nursing home residents and their families who have had to scramble to find homes, often hundreds of miles away. This is the reason I supported emergency funding for nursing homes in the final days of the last legislative session.
When the current two-year state budget was crafted, there were significant cuts to the state revenue sharing program. That’s why I could not vote in favor of this budget. I was, however, glad to support the restoration of this funding later on in the legislative session. I also submitted a bill to bring back the Circuit Breaker program, which provides rebate checks for Maine homeowners.
Many of the funding problems that plague Maine could be helped immensely by improving the state’s business climate. When you increase the number of businesses and workers, you grow the tax base and thus the funds coming into state government. It’s simple economics. I am the former owner of a construction company that has employed hundreds of Mainers and am starting a new business to manufacture snow shovels that also will create jobs in Waldo County.
As a business owner, I can tell you that we have made tremendous strides in improving Maine’s regulatory climate over the past four years. We have added more than 20,000 private sector jobs to the economy, and our unemployment rate has dropped from 8.4 percent to 5.6 percent, lower than both the national and New England unemployment rates.
But much more needs to be done if we are going to continue to grow our economy and compete with other states. One of the biggest barriers to attracting new businesses to Maine is high energy costs. If companies realize that the cost of doing business is too much in Maine, they will look elsewhere. We must continue to look for other sources of cost-efficient, readily available energy sources for Maine.
We need a tax structure that doesn’t punish businesses, large and small, for investing in Maine.
Maine also must have a welfare system that gives temporary assistance to those who need it and provides incentive to get off government assistance. We need to be better stewards of Maine taxpayers’ dollars by denying benefits to those who abuse EBT cards.
Finally, we need to have a state government that Mainers can afford; one that doesn’t require Maine families to surrender more of their paychecks to bureaucrats in Augusta, but is still responsive to the needs of Mainers.
Again, significant progress has been made. But if Maine is going to see its full potential, we need to pursue policies in Augusta that lead us to that goal.
Sen. Michael Thibodeau, R-Winterport, is the Republican leader in the Maine Senate.