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Michael Cianchette is a Navy reservist who served in Afghanistan. He is in-house counsel to a number of businesses in southern Maine and was a chief counsel to former Gov. Paul LePage.
A week before Christmas, all throughout Maine
The roads were washed out, no power remained
A storm had blown in without hue and cry
The rivers then peaked and water was nigh
For the second year in a row, we’ve been walloped with a massive windstorm in the days before Christmas. Several people have lost their lives due to this year’s storm. There were millions of dollars in damage in Skowhegan alone.
Central Maine Power and Versant were seen
To call in more crews from where they had been
Opponents lined up to shout and to flay
With nary a quote ‘bout roads gone away
Since everything in our life now seems to intersect with political debates, some former Pine Tree Power supporters started attacking CMP and Versant for a “failure” to appropriately respond to the storm.
No doubt about it; there was significant damage to our electrical infrastructure. Trees were downed throughout the state. People were without power and timelines were not clear on when they would be restored.
Yet blaming CMP and Versant for these outages is absurd. Pine Tree Power argued in favor of essentially a government-run model. But our government-run road system — the Maine Department of Transportation — had roads wash out completely in several areas throughout the state leaving people stranded.
It isn’t clear when our road infrastructure will be fully fixed.
The storm that blew in was more than was thought
With wind far surpassed by a bevy of knots
Sometimes we must face that we do not know
What nature will bring, like rain, wind, or snow
The “surprise” nature of this storm — with the forecasted wind and rain being off by nearly 50 percent — is a great reminder about our fallibility. For all the technology, data, science and other parts of modernity, this world remains much more complex than our most capable models.
Private businesses and government organizations alike try to prepare based on thoughts about the future. That is true with short-term events like the storm or longer-term changes in society.
Sometimes they guess right. Other times, they don’t. This storm was an example of the latter. Both Maine businesses and the Maine government were on the wrong side of the prediction. And I’ve yet to meet a forecaster, meteorological or otherwise, who always gets it on the money.
Famously, Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman once opined that the internet would have a similar impact on our economy as the fax machine. That forecast was even worse than the National Weather Service’s this past week.
An answer that might one day seem so clear
Could then fall away the very next year
Plan for the future is what we must do
And then plan again, with data anew
The art of making policy is trying to predict what the future will bring, structuring plans to meet it, and hoping that it is all close enough to reality for government work.
Earlier this month, Maine’s Revenue Forecasting Committee announced its forecast that there will be more than $100 million in additional tax revenue in the current fiscal year than previously predicted.
As the Legislature prepares to return to Augusta in January, hopefully lawmakers can take some lessons from this storm. Like maybe prepare for a bit worse scenario than what the forecasters predict.
Christmas will come, a New Year will be here
Augusta then meets with both hate and cheer
Taxpayers’ gifts are thought to be quite strong
But leaders should plan if that guess is wrong.