A trio of Maine Monitor journalists were heralded with notable awards Saturday night at the Maine Press Association’s annual fall conference and awards banquet.
Rose Lundy, a senior public health reporter at The Monitor, was announced as Maine’s Journalist of the Year for her in-depth reporting over the years on Maine’s aging population. This marks the second time in the past four years that a Maine Monitor reporter was named the state’s journalist of the year.
As part of her COVID-19 coverage, Lundy began identifying gaps in Maine’s health care infrastructure, particularly for Maine’s aging population. In the years since, Lundy has carved out a niche reporting on the lack of quality aging care available in a state that is home to the oldest population in the country.
She devoted 18 months as a ProPublica Local Reporting Fellow to investigate Maine’s residential care facilities, carefully combing through hundreds of pages of monitoring and investigation reports, being dogged in her pursuit of the story and exceedingly careful in her analysis. She knocked on doors, visited facilities and spoke to neighbors.
The investigation uncovered that Maine rarely sanctions residential care facilities even after severe abuse or neglect incidents, and Maine’s health department rarely investigates when residents wander away from their care facilities.
Following the investigation’s publication, the Maine Department of Health and Human Services announced plans to provide its first major update to assisted living and residential care regulations in more than 15 years. (Lawmakers later replaced the proposed measure instead with reporting requirements and a stakeholder study group.)
Maine Monitor editor Kate Cough was named the inaugural recipient of the MPA’s Mentor of the Year award for how she, as The Monitor’s editor, has amplified opportunities for emerging journalists, including six who have completed internships or fellowships directly under her guidance.
As part of The Monitor’s mission, the newsroom takes seriously its role in training and mentoring early career investigative journalists. As Cough put it in a letter to members earlier this year: “One of the pleasures of being editor of The Monitor is being able to offer intrepid young reporters a way into the field. The Monitor has always created these kinds of opportunities, but we’re doing even more now, once again bucking a trend.”
In addition to her duties as The Monitor’s editor, Cough has generously carved out time to mentor high school students in Mount Desert Island and has spent two semesters advising a Wabanaki history and culture class at the University of New England on its journalism projects.
Kristian Moravec, an education and workforce development reporter for The Monitor, was recognized with the Bob Drake Young Writer’s Award, an accolade presented to a journalist with fewer than three years of full-time experience.
Moravec, while at the Times Record, broke the news about the malfunction of a fire suppression system that discharged 1,600 gallons of firefighting foam concentrate containing forever chemicals at the former Brunswick Naval Air Station. The incident spurred dozens of follow-up stories.
For The Monitor, at the time of her nomination in early July, Moravec had covered stories such as the implications of Maine’s fight with the Trump administration over Title IX, rural communities exploring withdrawals from their school district and what the future holds for Maine’s heat pump workforce.
The Monitor also received first place recognitions for Digital General Excellence and for usage of Maine’s Freedom of Access Act for Rose Lundy’s investigation into residential care facility residents wandering away from their facilities and Alexa Foust’s reporting on safety violations at child care facilities and reimbursement delays by DHHS to child care providers who accept children in foster care.
In addition to these accolades, 11 newsroom contributors collectively received 15 accolades for work produced between April 2024 and March 2025. The Monitor competed alongside daily news outlets including the Bangor Daily News, Portland Press Herald, Sun Journal, Kennebec Journal, Morning Sentinel and Times Record.
The newsroom has now earned 221 accolades from the Maine Press Association since it began participating in the MPA competition in 2015.
First Place
Education Story: Child care providers cited for safety violations by Alexa Foust and Kate Hapgood
Environmental Story: How one Maine town is prepping for its next disaster by Emmett Gartner
News Story: Child care providers cited for safety violations by Alexa Foust and Kate Hapgood
Coverage of Minority Community Issues: ‘Historically left out,’ a Wabanaki organization forges its own approach to addiction treatment by Emily Bader
News Video: The eclipse chasers by Roger McCord
Features/Lifestyle Video: A backstage look at a thriving Biddeford community theater by Roger McCord
News Story Headline: Gulf of Maine lobsters are experiencing a housing crisis by Kate Cough
Second Place
Environmental Story: Community solar is booming, but who owns the projects? by Murray Carpenter
News Story: Maritime officials fear ‘catastrophic’ outcome if mariner shortage worsens by Jacqueline Weaver
Continuing Story: Court system troubles (five stories on indigent defense, public defender’s offices, child removal cases delayed by a lack of attorneys and Sixth Amendment violation decisions) by Josh Keefe
Outdoors Story: Seal Island sees record number of breeding puffins by Derrick Z. Jackson
Self-Promotion: Celebrating 15 years of in-depth and investigative nonpartisan reporting from the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting by George Harvey, Micaela Schweitzer-Bluhm, Pat Richardson, Kate Cough, Stephanie McFeeters and Ashley Carter
Third Place
Health Story: Independent pharmacies are closing. Pharmacy benefit managers may be to blame. by Emily Bader
Education Story: Schools confront unique challenges in ridding their water of ‘forever chemicals’ by Emmett Gartner
Food Story/Feature: UMaine potato breed edges out longtime favorites by John O’Meara
TURNER, Maine (WGME) — The Maine Human Rights Commission is adding a sixth school district to their lawsuit over transgender policies in schools across the state, that’s according to our media partners at the Sun Journal.
Earlier this year, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at keeping transgender athletes out of girls’ sports, arguing it protects fair opportunities under Title IX.
In a board meeting on Thursday, MSAD 52 voted to align Trump’s polices with the district.
Shortly after, the district was added to the list of schools being sued.
“I think it comes to a point where it goes against the state, but we gotta do what’s right. And I think it’s right to support female athletes,” Board Chair Peter Ricker said. “I think there are potential lawsuits regardless on the issue until the state makes up their mind and until the feds make up their mind.”
The board voted 5-4 in favor of passing a policy to keep transgender athletes out of girls sports.
Evan Ipsaro scored 24 points to lift Miami of Ohio to a 93-61 win over the University of Maine in a non-conference men’s basketball game on Saturday in Oxford, Ohio.
Keelan Steel scored 14 points for Maine, which has lost 11 straight games to start the season. The Black Bears trailed 28-6 just over 10 minutes into the first half.
Eian Elmer added 16 points and six rebounds for the RedHawks (8-0).
Sara Bronin is the founder of the National Zoning Atlas, a George Washington University law professor and author of “Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World.”
Over the last few years, the nonprofit National Zoning Atlas team has set out to map every zoning code in America to do one simple thing: let the public see how their communities regulate land. We developed this goal because zoning rules can have big impacts: they dictate to property owners what they can do with their properties.
Before we started work in Maine last spring, we would have never guessed that Maine’s codes would be the most bureaucratic and convoluted of the 30-plus states we’ve worked. We thought that Maine’s relatively small population and few urban centers — not to mention its proud commitment to property rights and personal freedom — would mean the codes would be short and straightforward.
We couldn’t have been more wrong.
We can say authoritatively that Maine’s zoning is far out of the norm because we’ve analyzed zoning conditions in nearly 9,000 cities, towns and counties across America, and we’ve read over a million pages of zoning codes. We’ve become experts in analyzing the arcana of minimum lot sizes, setbacks, height caps and parking mandates.
In Maine, we started first in Washington County. More recently, through a partnership with GrowSmart Maine, we’ve completed analysis of zoning in and around Portland.
Well, mostly completed. Of the 123 jurisdictions we have reviewed so far (of Maine’s 496 total with zoning authority), 17 never provided a full copy of their zoning text, map or both.
The texts we could find — totaling 17,500 pages — revealed that Maine appears to have some of the longest zoning codes in the country. New Hampshire, with roughly the same population, has half the number of jurisdictions exercising zoning, and zoning codes half as long as Maine’s.
And when we located maps, some existed only as grainy, pixelated PDFs with faded lines and unclear boundaries. Others existed only in paper copy, not online.
What’s worse, Maine piles “shoreland zoning” on top of zoning. Shoreland zoning was created to protect water quality, but it’s hard to see how it achieves this goal. Zoning maps and shoreland zoning maps often conflict or don’t match up, and too often codes refer to outdated or inconsistent data about wetlands and watercourses. Even analysts who had handled notoriously complicated coastal zoning in California struggled to make sense of Maine’s regime.
When we had questions about interpreting texts and maps, we often had nowhere to turn. That’s because many of the 123 jurisdictions were very small towns, with part-time staff, or no staff at all. If our trained analysts cannot make sense of the rules, and no one’s on the other end of the line, it’s unrealistic to expect homeowners, builders or neighbors to do so. We imagine that many well-intentioned local officials feel caught administering systems that no one fully understands.
State legislators have taken action on zoning — primarily to promote more housing. They recently expanded opportunities for multifamily housing and made it easier to build accessory dwelling units. These are laudable and necessary reforms. Our analysis so far shows that only 15% of residential land allows multi-family housing by right, and more than half of single-family land bans accessory dwellings.
But legislators have not tackled a more fundamental need exposed by our Maine Zoning Atlas: to simplify and clarify the state’s land use regulatory framework. Property owners and policymakers alike experience zoning as a maze, where they must navigate missing information, conflicting requirements and procedural runaround.
To provide a way out, next legislative session, state lawmakers should consider requiring zoning codes to be available to the public online. Or requiring maps to be legible, with shoreland zoning clearly mapped. How can people be bound by rules they cannot find, or understand?
Legislators should also consider legalizing — and providing incentives for — local governments to share resources in land use administration. Small towns might be more empowered to achieve their land use goals if they have the tools and manpower they need to interpret and enforce their own zoning codes. Legislators might also rethink shoreland zoning altogether.
I’d like to say our nonprofit is eager to find funding to finish our analysis in Maine. But honestly, it’s been a bit of a nightmare.
For the sake of our team — and anyone else trying to make sense of zoning in Maine — I urge people in power to take action to streamline the state’s regulatory framework. There’s just no reason Maine’s land use rules should be the most complicated in the country.
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