Maine
Maine announces resource center to aid opioid settlement spending
The attorney general’s office is putting nearly $2.5 million toward a resource center that will offer assistance to Maine counties, cities and towns as they decide how to spend opioid settlement funds, Attorney General Aaron Frey told The Maine Monitor in an exclusive interview.
In June, Frey’s office signed a contract with the University of Southern Maine’s Catherine Cutler Institute to support the development of a resource center dedicated to helping the state’s 39 counties, cities and towns — or “direct share subdivisions” — that are set to receive approximately $66 million in opioid settlement funds over 18 years.
The research and data generated by the center will be made available to the public in an effort to boost transparency and help communities make informed spending decisions. The contract is for five years.
The money the attorney general’s office is using to fund the center and the money going to the direct share subdivisions comes from settlements reached with nearly a dozen pharmaceutical manufacturers, distributors and retailers accused of “supercharging” the opioid epidemic.
Maine expects to receive about $230 million across 18 years, though that number may increase when several pending bankruptcy cases are finalized.
On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy plan that would have added billions of dollars to the settlements nationwide, but would have given the Sackler family immunity from future litigation.
It will likely be years before a resolution is reached and states like Maine see any money from the OxyContin maker.
“While today’s Supreme Court decision means we have more work to do, my office will continue to litigate to obtain resources from the Sacklers to save lives and fight the opioid epidemic,” Frey said in a statement after the ruling. “Make no mistake about our resolve: Confronting the devastation of the opioid epidemic requires that we work to hold accountable those bad actors who are responsible for it, which includes the Sackler family.”
Frey’s office signed memoranda of understanding with more than 50 counties, municipalities and school districts that were party to the massive multidistrict litigation case that led to the settlements.
Under these agreements, Maine’s share of the more than $50 billion that will be distributed nationally will be divided into three funds: 50 percent to the Maine Recovery Council, 3 percent of which must be spent on special education programming in schools; 30 percent to direct share subdivisions that were party to the lawsuits or have a population of at least 10,000; and 20 percent to the attorney general’s office.
“While it’s a significant amount of money, it is limited,” Frey said. “The crisis is such that it is going to be so important that the way in which these resources are directed today, that it provides that foundation so that over the next 18 years these resources do end up addressing the harm that all of these defendants caused.”
Supplement, not supplant
The settlement agreements say the funds must be used for “opioid abatement,” and provide a long list of approved uses, from increasing access to medication for opioid use disorder for incarcerated people to expanding treatment and recovery services for pregnant or postpartum women with substance use disorder, and flooding communities with free, easy-to-access naloxone, the overdose-reversing drug.
The guidance stipulates that the money should be used on evidence-based programs that supplement, not supplant, existing funding.
But designing evidence-based programs for treatment, prevention, harm reduction and recovery requires a level of expertise and access to resources that may be out of reach for some Maine counties and towns.
In the two years since settlement payments began, a number of subdivisions have reached out to the attorney general’s office for assistance, Frey said.
In a survey conducted by the Maine Recovery Council late last year, municipalities noted they could use assistance in conducting a needs assessment, support for creating a grant process to distribute funds and community engagement training.
The attorney general’s office said the resource center will help the subdivisions conduct comprehensive needs assessments, plan evidence-based programs, develop measurable objectives for their spending and more — all at no cost to the subdivisions.
The center will also create publicly available “community profiles” and a data dashboard.
“One of the things that I’ve been very concerned about is just making sure that everybody is on the same page about how these resources can go out and be used in a supplemental way to help address the crisis,” Frey said.
Questionable spending decisions
Earlier this year, The Monitor found that some of the subdivisions’ spending decisions have already begun to raise concerns among experts and advocates. Saco and Falmouth, for instance, have each spent about $20,000 in settlement funds on handheld drug-checking devices for their police departments.
While the departments claim they purchased the devices for “officer and victim safety,” and to quickly and accurately identify substances in an overdose situation, experts doubt the accuracy of the tools.
“Those handheld devices are worse than bad, they are plain dangerous,” Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta, a senior scientist researching street drugs at the University of North Carolina’s school of public health, told The Monitor earlier this year.
The TacticID-N Plus and TruNarc devices, purchased by Saco and Falmouth, respectively, are “garbage,” Dasgupta said.
The devices use a technology called Raman spectroscopy, which works fine in limited, often lab-controlled circumstances, in which a sample only has one or two substances present, he added. But with street drugs, which often have multiple substances present in a single sample, the drug-checking devices often miss substances and can produce false positives.
“They’re not scientific tools. They’re legal tools for cops to be able to arrest people,” Dasgupta said.
Ever since opioid settlement payments started hitting bank accounts, companies like the ones that make the TacticID-N Plus and TruNarc devices have gone on marketing campaigns to encourage government officials to buy their products, a 2023 investigation by KFF Health News found.
In general, advocates have warned against spending opioid settlement funds on “law enforcement personnel, overtime or equipment.” Yet The Monitor found that nearly a third of the state’s subdivisions have spent money on law enforcement and jail programs.
It is up to the counties, cities and towns to decide how to spend their 30 percent of the funds, so long as they follow the guidance on approved uses. Unlike the Recovery Council, the subdivisions are not required to publicly disclose their spending outside the usual public access laws, according to the MOUs.
And although the list of approved uses is hefty and detailed, it is still open to interpretation.
“There are some interventions or some expenditures that maybe have less efficacy in abating the crisis,” Frey said.
Frey said he hopes the resource center will help steer subdivisions away from that kind of spending.
“Different municipalities, different counties, they’re going to make decisions about how to best do what makes sense for their communities,” he said.
Boosting transparency
The Monitor surveyed all 39 subdivisions earlier this year and found many have yet to determine a process for making these decisions, while others’ approaches varied greatly.
In Franklin County, commissioners abruptly disbanded the opioid settlement committee, which was tasked with soliciting proposals and making recommendations to commissioners. Several members told The Monitor they thought the committee hadn’t been structured properly.
In June, county commissioners agreed to restart the group as the Opioid Settlement Advisory Committee, deciding to cap membership at five rather than nine. People interested in serving on the committee must submit an application that requires they disclose their criminal history and current employer, and list three references.
Bylaws are now publicly posted. The major difference from the previous version (which several former members told The Monitor they never received) is that members are barred from submitting an application while serving on the committee and must recuse themselves from that review round if an organization they are associated with applies.
Frey said he hopes the resource center will help subdivisions “calibrate their spending in a productive way.”
Making the research and data generated by the center publicly available is to not only boost transparency but provide other communities with information for their own spending decisions.
“The more education you have, sort of what works and what does work, it will become harder, I think, for a range of spenders we’ll say, to spend money on programs that are identified as not being evidence-based — that the evidence shows are not programs that are going to address the crisis,” Frey said.
The resource center evolved from a letter the chairs of the legislature’s health and human services committee sent to Frey and the Recovery Council last July with their priorities for the distribution of the opioid settlement funds, including a pitch for a research center within the University of Maine. Frey began meeting with the Cutler Institute in the fall.
The Cutler Institute will receive the first and largest funding installment — about half the total commitment — this summer. The establishment, startup and initial operations of the center are estimated to take about two years, according to the contract. The remainder of the funding will be dispersed in the second and third years.
In addition to the center, the attorney general’s office signed a contract in March with Eliot-based Pinetree Institute to provide a one-time payment of $60,000 to support the initial engagement and implementation of a York County Recovery Coalition.
The attorney general’s office has also allocated $3 million to the Department of Health and Human Services for its OPTIONS (Overdose Prevention Through Intensive Outreach, Naloxone, and Safety) program to double the number of local liaisons — or service navigators — from 16 to 32, and has given $2 million to the Office of Behavioral Health to support substance use programming that was at risk of losing funding.
Emily Bader can be reached at emily@themainemonitor.org.
Eleven races in the Maine Legislature that were contested on Nov. 5 are headed to recounts, the Maine secretary of state’s office announced Wednesday.
Ballots will be recounted in nine House races and two Senate races. Recounts will start on Friday and continue through Nov. 25.
Preliminary counts included a dead-even tie in House District 141, and three races where the margin between the apparent winner and loser was fewer than 20 votes.
The results below are unofficial preliminary counts provided by the secretary of state’s office.
House District 44
William Pluecker – 2,731
Ray Thombs – 2,369
House District 52
Sally Cluchey – 2,748
David Guilmette – 2,732
House District 58
Sharon Frost – 3,158
Daniel Newman – 3,114
House District 75
Stephan Bunker – 2,318
Randall Gauvin – 2,308
House District 81
Peter Wood – 2,835
Joan Beal – 2,816
House District 96
Michel Lajoie – 2,550
Kerryl Clement – 2,514
House District 98
Kilton Webb – 2,995
Guy Lebida – 2,941
House District 141
Patricia Kidder – 2,476
Lucas Lanigan – 2,476
House District 142
Anne-Marie Mastraccio – 1,938
Amy Bell – 1,874
Senate District 8
Leo Kenney – 10,112
Michael Tipping – 10,229
Senate District 15
Richard Bradstreet – 10,820
Raegan LaRochelle – 10,621
Maine law does not have mandatory recounts, but when the apparent margin of victory is 1 percent or less in statewide or multi-county races, or 1.5 percent or less in legislative or single county races, a candidate can request a recount free of charge.
When the margin is larger, the candidate must pay a deposit. That money is refunded if the result is overturned by the recount.
Wednesday was the last day that a candidate could request a recount in a non-ranked-choice race, according to the secretary of state’s office.
Transgender support groups in Maine said they are seeing a spike in contacts similar to those reported by national LGBTQ+ groups since Donald Trump’s election last week.
Bre Danvers-Kidman with the Maine Trans Net said about 100 people came to the group’s post-election support event and that many others have reached out through various platforms in the week since.
Some have expressed fears about losing their gender affirming care, the potential roll back of Title IV protections and a rise in harmful rhetoric.
Danvers-Kidman said that though there is valid concern about federal funding for care being rolled back, Maine has its own protections in place.
“We have the good laws here, we have the infrastructure to fight those battles with. And so to the extent that those battles rear their heads, Maine is going to be a place where I feel like we can fight them and we can win,” Danvers-Kidman said.
They expressed confidence that the “good laws” in Maine would remain, even if policy changed at a federal level.
“If the state offers greater protection to citizens than the federal government, the state wins. And so those greater protections that Maine offers to trans people, those will hold. I expect those to hold,” Danvers-Kidman said.
The Trevor Project, a national suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ+ youth, reported a 700% increase in crisis contacts the day after the election.
Maine
As Maine’s farmers struggle through extreme weather, local restaurants feel the pinch – The Boston Globe
Scientists would soon find the culprit: longfin squid followed warmer waters into the Gulf of Maine migrating from farther south, which led to the collapse of the fishery. A decade later, as heating in the Gulf of Maine continues to outpace most bodies of water in the world, the shrimp fishery still hasn’t recovered.
The shrimp were an early sign of how changes in the climate can decimate a food source, affecting a harvest and the restaurants that depend on it.
Increasingly, those signs are hard to ignore. Farmers and fishermen around the state said erratic weather patterns are leading to regular crop failures, loss of infrastructure as roads and farm structures are battered by rain and wind, and more — issues that add costs and stress onto a livelihood that was already costly and stressful.
Restaurant owners — who also face dips in tourism during extended rainy periods, and expensive repairs when extreme heat pushes air conditioners past their limit — said local food is a core tenet of many of Maine’s vaunted restaurants. Losing those sources means losing a piece of what makes their food so special. Shipping food in from other places means sacrificing taste and quality, while also adding new sources of carbon emissions from long-haul deliveries.
“We get a lot of people in the restaurant who believe in the same stuff that we do,” said Jake Stevens, head chef and owner of Leeward in Portland. “They want to eat local food. They want to get organic food. But it does get to a tipping point . . . some people just can’t abide paying, you know, $75 for a pork chop. It’s just untenable.”
Independent restaurants such as Leeward are the fifth-largest employer in the United States, according to a recent report by the James Beard Foundation, and they are among the most vulnerable. More than a quarter fail in their first year of operation, and 59 percent fail in the first three years. While restaurant revenues have largely rebounded from the hit they took during COVID-19, it isn’t expected to last, as a warming climate impacts crop yields and drives higher inflation.
The worst of those impacts are expected in years to come, but already, some are showing up.
At Bumbleroot Organic Farm, an 8-acre plot outside Portland that sells vegetables and flowers to roughly 30 local restaurants, it’s been one challenge after another.
The summer of 2022, it was sweltering temperatures and little rain. Crew had to wake up throughout the night to irrigate fields and save the crops. The following year, the reverse — the rain didn’t quit. One field got so saturated, it never really dried out, causing entire plantings to fail.
“We have to literally be ready for every scenario, because it’s not just wet, it’s heat, it’s extended heat, it’s late frost, it’s early frost,” said Ben Whalen, co-owner of the farm. “The extreme nature of what we’re dealing with, even right now, is crazy.”
Leeward is one of the restaurants that get regular deliveries from Bumbleroot.
“The carrot that was $2 a pound is now $4 a pound because half the crop got washed away,” said Stevens. “That either gets passed on to consumers or we have to make tough decisions and not serve that stuff.”
When it comes to vulnerability and carrots, farmer Seth Kroeck knows the story well. This spring, a major storm dropped 3 inches of rain not long after fields of carrot seeds were planted at Crystal Spring Farm in Brunswick. Thousands of tiny seeds floated up from the quarter-inch of soil they were buried under. In the end, they were only able to harvest about 30 percent of the expected 18,000 pounds of carrots.
It’s not just the carrots. “In two of the last four springs, we’ve had a late enough frost that we’ve lost our entire blueberry crop,” Kroeck said. “Old timers” in Maine’s farming community have told him that no one can recall such frequent and severe losses.
Crop insurance and some business planning has allowed Maine’s farmers to squeak through, “but it’s been a huge challenge,” he said. Increased costs for labor, fuel, and packaging have further hurt their bottom lines.
Similar challenges are playing out in the ocean. In 2023, Maine lobstermen reported the smallest catch since 2009, according to the Maine Department of Marine Resources. While this year’s official numbers won’t be reported for months, locally, lobstermen report a more typical catch. It’s not yet clear what caused that, though winter temperatures in the Gulf were not as warm as they have been in recent years and lower bait and fuel prices may have led to more consistent fishing. Regardless, researchers expect that as the Gulf of Maine continues to warm, lobster will move north.
“It’s the slow change that really is going to be the problem in the long run, right?” said Matt Moretti, co-owner of Bangs Island Mussels in Portland. “It’s the constantly warming, slow crawl up in temperature” and the increased acidification, as the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide, which over time can weaken the shells of some ocean species.
Then there are unexpected acute events, triggered by climate change. A few years ago, when Moretti’s team went out to harvest wild mussel spawn, which they use to grow mussels for restaurants, instead of finding ropes covered in spawn, they were met with an ugly surprise: 100,000 pounds of sea squirts, an invasive species that’s becoming more common as the gulf warms.
“We could not capture the muscle seed at the time when we’re supposed to catch it,” Moretti said.
Both at sea and on the land, harvesters aren’t sitting back and waiting for the next crisis. Moretti has begun buying mussel spawn that’s more resilient to warming waters from the Downeast Institute, a marine research laboratory in Beals, Maine. Bangs Island is doing regular ocean monitoring to better understand how changes in the Gulf of Maine may be affecting seafood. They have also diversified, growing oysters and kelp in addition to mussels.
Diversification is key on land, too. At Bumbleroot, low vegetable sales last year could have been devastating had their cut flower sales not buoyed the business.
Meg Chase, whose family owns Chase’s Daily — a restaurant in Belfast — and grows food and flowers on 20 acres of their farm in nearby Freedom, is transitioning to no-till farming, a method that increases the drainage capabilities of fields. She’s also working with the Natural Resources Conservation Service, an arm of the US Department of Agriculture, to plan for resiliency and apply for grants.
One thing that’s top of mind: funds for a new farm road. “At this point, we can’t even access our fields at some points, because it’s too wet,” Chase said.
All this stress takes a toll.
Last year, as the fall came to a close, Whalen, of Bumbleroot Organic Farm, gathered his crew together to take their temperature: How was everyone feeling?
Over and over, he heard the same thing. “We put so much energy and effort into growing high-quality food . . . you do all this work, and then yet you get a zero,” he said. “Their souls were just crushed.”
This year, as the farm diversifies its crops and looks for other ways to become more resilient, they’re also seeking out ways to support each other, including a mandatory week of paid vacation during the summer for all year-round workers.
Soon, they’ll repeat last year’s mental health poll. “I think everyone’s gonna be at like, 80 percent,” said Whalen. “That’s a win. That’s a huge win.”
Sabrina Shankman can be reached at sabrina.shankman@globe.com. Follow her @shankman.
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