Maine
Rooks: School construction in Maine needs a major overhaul
Before leaving for Norway last week, Gov. Janet Mills announced a new commission to study the state’s school construction program and report to the Legislature by next April, to which one might respond, “It’s about time.”
The state’s existing construction model simply isn’t working, and has left towns and cities, and Maine’s regional school districts, with crumbling and outdated buildings and no clear path to replacing or renovating them.
Mills noted that in her first six years, there’s been $580 million committed, which sounds impressive until one realizes a single new high school often costs $100 million.
With dozens if not hundreds of inadequate buildings, replacing a handful won’t accomplish much, and the backlog of applications keeps growing.
The new commission, chaired by King Administration Labor Commissioner Valerie Landry, has a tall task, and should start with two major flaws in how school projects are financed.
The first is a peculiar compromise by which the state reimburses the local districts that actually borrow the money. Rather than a separate capital construction budget, funding is carved out from the mammoth General Purpose Aid account that goes mostly for operating expenses.
Construction is constrained by a debt ceiling – rarely increased – that limits new projects to debt retired from previous awards. Maine ends up being generous with operating support and stingy for capital spending.
The second flaw was introduced through adoption of the Essential Programs and Services (EPS) system in the late 1990s.
Previously, construction costs were shared between the state and the local district on a sliding scale. Towns and cities with robust tax bases, as in Cumberland County, would pay more, while those in Aroostook and Washington were mostly state-funded – but all districts paid something.
Under the EPS calculations the state pays 100% for almost every project, meaning it can fund even fewer projects than when local districts contributed.
Now, a few lucky districts effectively win the lottery, while everyone else is left out in the cold.
The infrastructure crisis has become so severe that some districts have tried to do without state funding and asked property taxpayers to pick up the entire tab. Even in Cumberland County, the results have been dismal.
While some local bonds have been approved, most have been turned down – not necessarily because voters don’t support schools but because they rightly see this as a state responsibility.
It makes little sense for Maine to provide 55% of all approved school spending but make construction projects wait a decade or longer. Students will have started school and graduated by then.
What can be done? There are other models.
When voters turned down several state prison bond issues during the McKernan administration, lawmakers created the Maine Governmental Facilities Authority, operating “off budget” and apart from General and Highway Fund bonds more familiar to voters.
Later expanded to courthouses, the authority has replaced or renovated nearly the entire state correctional system, and has built impressive judicial centers in several counties.
That’s all well and good, but most parents and taxpayers would place a higher priority on schools. That’s not the way things are working.
A School Facilities Authority may not be the answer, in part because we have an existing system, however flawed – but mostly because the authority has no real accountability to taxpayers and citizens.
One possibility: a robust General Fund bond that voters could approve to jumpstart the process, along with a real capital budget for the first time in decades.
There are other matters for the Landry commission to take up. Current rules require a perhaps excessive amount of acreage, eliminating sites close to urban and village centers and creating sprawl.
Kids can’t walk to school, and schools are increasingly remote from the communities that support them.
Finally, no amount of tinkering with construction funding can ignore Maine’s hopelessly decentralized school districts, well over 200 for fewer than 200,000 students – less than 1,000 per district.
A Baldacci administration initiative to consolidate failed because it ignored the proven formula for success: the Sinclair Act, passed in 1957 during the administration of Gov. Ed Muskie.
Implemented during the 1960s, Sinclair created 68 regional districts with generous support for mergers, and provided the first adequate rural high schools in Maine. The 2007 consolidation plan, by contrast, penalized districts for not merging while provided no state plan to do so.
The next administration could dust off Sinclair and see what will work in a high-tech era where public schools face unprecedented challenges.
Mainers have shown time and again they value public education and are willing to pay. Now the state must make sure they’re getting their money’s worth.
Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter for 40 years. He is the author of four books, most recently a biography of U.S. Chief Justice Melville Fuller, and welcomes comment at drooks@tds.net.
The loons are back and nesting on lakes statewide and we need your help to monitor their population! Every year since 1983, hundreds of volunteers have gone out to lakes and ponds across Maine on the third Saturday in July. These volunteers submit data about the number of loons they observe from 7 to 7:30 am, which gives us an excellent “snapshot” of the loon population. The Annual Loon Count allows us to monitor how the number of adults and chicks has changed over the past 40 years and make sure we know how to best protect their population!
This year, the Loon Count will take place on Saturday, July 18. We encourage you to join a group of over 1,800 volunteers and help us count the number of loons in Maine! The Loon Count occurs on lakes and ponds all across the state and volunteers can survey by boat or shore (you don’t have to have a boat to take part!).
If you’re interested in getting involved, please contact us at conserve@maineaudubon.org and tell us if there’s a specific lake or area you’d like to survey. We are always aiming to expand our coverage across the state and particularly encourage volunteers in northern Maine to get involved!
The deadline to sign up for the Annual Loon Count is July 10, so please reach out as soon as possible.
If you can’t make it on July 18, or if one day just isn’t enough for you, you can monitor loons throughout the summer.Through our Loon Pair Monitoring project, you can submit observations of breeding loon pairs over several months to help us better understand nest and chick success across Maine. Find out more here >
If talking to people and doing outreach appeals to you, and you’d like to help spread the word about loon conservation, check out our Look Out for Loons outreach program.
THOMASTON, Maine (WGME) — The Maine DEA says they arrested two people on Wednesday in connection with drug trafficking out of Vinalhaven.
Mariah Grover, 22, and Jefferson Jazzir Arias, 27, were reportedly arrested following an investigation by the Maine DEA’s Mid-Coast Task Force and the Knox County Sheriff’s Office into suspected drug trafficking from the island of Vinalhaven to Rockland via ferry.
Jefferson Jazzir Arias (Courtesy of Knox County Jail)
Both Grover, a resident of Texas and Maine, and Arias, a resident of Texas and California, were pulled over by authorities in Thomaston in a car that had been identified in that investigation, according to the Maine DEA.
The Maine DEA says a search of the car found 66 grams of suspected cocaine, a .45 caliber handgun, $9,500 in suspected drug money, and other “items indicative of drug trafficking.”
Mariah Grover (Courtesy of Knox County Jail)
Authorities say Arias had two extraditable warrants related to robbery in California and theft in Texas. Arias was reportedly charged with aggravated trafficking in Schedule W drugs, and Grover was charged with unlawful trafficking in Schedule W drugs.
Grover was reportedly taken to Knox County Jail on a $50,000 cash bail and will make a court appearance on May 29th.
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Arias was also taken to Knox County Jail on a $75,000 cash bail and will make a court appearance on the same day, according to authorities.
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Three more women have signed onto a federal lawsuit against the Maine Department of Corrections for allowing transgender prisoners to be housed in facilities that align with their gender identity.
First brought by Katie Mountain in April, the lawsuit now includes Jennifer Albert, Michaela Sargent and Danielle Foster, who say they live in fear at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham because of the department’s policy.
According to the lawsuit, the women have been sexually assaulted, threatened and repeatedly harassed by several transgender prisoners, including Andrea Balcer, who Mountain says caused “extreme physical and psychological distress.”
Balcer is serving a 40-year sentence for the murder of both parents in 2017.
Mountain, who was housed with Balcer when she began serving a 10-month sentence in January, alleges that while bunking together, Balcer subjected her to “graphic sexual stories, trapped her in a bathroom, pushed her against the wall, forcibly kissed her, and made repeated threats of rape and impregnation.”
Sargent describes waking up to Balcer stroking her hair and saying, “if you don’t wake up it’s because I smothered you with a pillow.” She also alleges that Balcer once grabbed her shirt and demanded, “show me your boobs.”
Attorney Cynthia Dill, who represents the plaintiffs, said in a press release that when the women reported the abuse or refused to affirm Balcer’s gender identity, they were met with retaliation by being placed in segregation, being denied hygiene supplies and medication and losing eligibility for early release.
In their lawsuit, the women argue that the policy mandates gender affirmation with “deliberate indifference to the safety, privacy and civil rights of women incarcerated in the State of Maine.” They say “gender identity” first made its way into Maine laws that govern corrections in 2021.
The plaintiffs are seeking a permanent injunction against the gender identity law and related state correctional policies along with damages.
Jill O’Brien, a spokesperson for the Maine Department of Corrections, said in a statement that the department takes residents’ safety concerns very seriously.
“Anytime a resident makes a report of physical or sexual violence or harassment to staff, the Department investigates,” O’Brien said. “If the conduct that occurred rises to the level of a crime, it is referred to the District Attorney for prosecution. If it violates the Department’s disciplinary policy, the residents involved are disciplined.”
O’Brien added that information about specific residents is confidential and information about specific residents is confidential.
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.
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