Pension help in Congress
On March 22, there will be a hearing concerning H.R.711 before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Social Security. The bill is known as the Equal Treatment of Public Servants Act and reforms the Social Security windfall elimination provision. This hearing is the first on the issue in more than eight years.
The Massachusetts Retirees Association, the Texas Retired Teachers Association, AARP and other groups will testify. This is a major step in the process of repealing or reforming windfall elimination provision, which has been unfairly affecting retirees in Maine and 13 other states for 30 years. If all goes as it should, the bill will be brought to the House floor for a vote. Then it would go on to the Senate and then to President Barack Obama to be signed into law. This will take a while, but the goal is to get all this done in 2016 and the law enacted in 2017.
Retirees currently affected by the windfall elimination provision like myself will see their benefits recalculated in 2017. Amounts of increase will vary between retirees, depending on number of years paid into Social Security. There is also talk of also addressing the government pension offset, which affects survivors of deceased spouses who received Social Security benefits. This unfairly affects women more than men. Obama filed legislation reforming both the windfall elimination provision and government pension offset within his 2017 federal budget proposal.
Contact Reps. Chellie Pingree and Bruce Poliquin and Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King and urge them to support repealing or reforming windfall elimination provision and government pension offset. We the people can be heard and initiate action if we keep working on this.
Karen E. Holmes
Cooper
Troop greeters tribute
I’m visiting our son and family at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. I was talking to one of the chaplains when he asked me where I was from. When I told him, he immediately mentioned the troop greeters and how touched he was that they would get up in the middle of the night to greet his flight coming back from Afghanistan. He said he would never forget it. And neither should we.
Thanks troop greeters.
Claudette Michaud
Bangor
Rethink recycling choices
As an established leader in the recycling industry for more than 40 years, Allan Co. facilities are adept at servicing generators of recovered materials. They currently own and operate 12 buyback and recycling centers that are open to the public in the Los Angeles area.
The city of Dalton, Georgia, features source sort for cleaner, quality products, similar to the successful, 20-year Bangor program. Their four collection depots, called convenience centers, are located in the four corners of Whitfield County, where the city is located, and the city provides sorter trucks with seven separation compartments each.
Were these alternatives looked at by the Municipal Review Committee as it decided on post-2018 options for recycling in our region? Presorted recyclables result in a cleaner, higher-quality product for the reuse and recycling markets.
The Penobscot Energy Recovery Co. and Fiberight single-stream collection continues a culture of disposability and is wasteful. I have shared a nine-page concept with drawings with officials in Dedham, Bangor, Brewer, Orono, Old Town, Dover-Foxcroft, Holden, Hermon and at the University of Maine and the Municipal Review Committee.
The PERC and Fiberight methods rely on single-stream collection, requiring an extra, energy-intensive step to sort at a plant what was commingled at the collection point. By various reports, this method results in substantial waste from contamination of clean materials with dirty materials.
Constructively, perhaps a source sort method for the 187 towns and Fiberight could in part coexist. A valuable resource for information on recyclables and their sale in the marketplace is the Maine Resource Recovery Association in Bangor.
Jay Dresser
Bangor
SaviLinx success
Last week, it was my honor to announce that SaviLinx will be hiring an additional 200 agents this spring. It is a milestone for us made possible by many, including the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority, which encouraged us to set up shop at Brunswick Landing; the Brunswick Town Council and the Southern Midcoast Maine Chamber; our state and federal delegations; and especially to Sen. Angus King, who more than a decade ago as governor laid the groundwork for businesses like SaviLinx to thrive here and who today continues to support small businesses at the federal level.
I am grateful to the Bangor Daily News for covering our announcement and to readers who shared our news by word of mouth or via social media.
Our announcement that a current client is expanding its work with SaviLinx is a testament that our strategy to acquire both government and commercial contracts is working; that our staff is knowledgeable, skilled, and reliable; and that our management team is solid. Our people are our most valuable asset.
Maine is my home. I remain steadfast to growing SaviLinx here.
Heather Blease
Freeport
Better politics with ranked-choice voting
Ranked-choice voting addresses many of my concerns with politicians and politics. I was born between the generation Xers and the millennials and share many values with both groups. Similarly, I have never identified with any political party because my values lie on both sides of the political spectrum. In the past, I found the polarity within politics so distasteful that I preferred to remain disengaged from the entire environment.
Now I am employed in a full-time profession, own a home, have children in school and am looking for improvements in our political system that will keep candidates honest, open, considerate and seeking after the interest of “We the people” rather than any single political party or interest group. In the quest to win our hearts and minds, candidates often get sidetracked by attacking and defending rather than using valuable, finite resources to think about and address real problems — problems that are not bound by political, economic or social boundaries.
Ranked-choice voting will compel each voter to consider the merits of each candidate and will require each candidate to consider each voter. It will provide an opportunity for all of us to engage with our to-be elected officials in a way that will bring civility, candor and efficiency to our political process. This is why I am recommitting myself to re-engage with the political beast I previously loathed.
Jonathan Bench
Veazie