Maine
Shying from Trump, ex-Maine Gov. Paul LePage seeks job back
![Shying from Trump, ex-Maine Gov. Paul LePage seeks job back](https://storage.googleapis.com/afs-prod/media/66b1b3431aaa4e0ca15756e673717196/2065.jpeg)
YARMOUTH, Maine (AP) — When then-Maine Gov. Paul LePage endorsed Donald Trump in 2016, he credited himself as a prototype for the rebel presidential candidate.
“I used to be Donald Trump earlier than Donald Trump grew to become well-liked, so I believe I ought to assist him since we’re one of many similar material,” stated LePage, whose two phrases in workplace have been punctuated by brash habits and continuously offensive feedback.
Now, as LePage is operating for a 3rd time period after a quick retirement to Florida, he hardly ever talks about Trump in public, and his advisers say LePage’s hiatus from politics modified him. He’s keen to point out he’s smoothed over a few of his personal tough edges, although flashes of his fiery persona broke by way of lately at an occasion at a riverfront boatyard in Yarmouth, the place he pledged to tackle Democratic “elitists.”
“I got here from the streets. I used to be a fighter all my life,” LePage advised staff. “I needed to scrimp and save to eat and survive. I’m a fighter.”
As LePage seeks to unseat Democratic Gov. Janet Mills and grow to be the longest-serving governor in Maine historical past, he’s banking on an method acquainted to different Republican candidates in liberal- and moderate-leaning states who’re making an attempt to not alienate swing voters they would wish to win a normal election. LePage’s efforts at placing distancing from Trump are notably notable given LePage as soon as invited comparisons to Trump — and made them himself.
Democrats aren’t going to let voters neglect LePage’s tumultuous time in workplace, when he sometimes acted and sounded lots like Trump. LePage attracted nationwide headlines when he advised the Portland chapter of the NAACP to “kiss my butt,” made racist remarks about drug sellers who impregnate “white” women and accused a lawmaker of screwing over state taxpayers “with out offering Vaseline.”
His critics level to a current marketing campaign occasion during which LePage threatened to “deck” a Democratic staffer who received too near him — an incident, they are saying, that illustrates LePage hasn’t modified in any respect.
The race is shaping as much as be amongst a dozen or so aggressive contests for governor this election yr. The best way during which the marketing campaign performs out with voters weary of political ugliness could also be a harbinger for Trump’s White Home aspirations in 2024.
LePage and Mills’ adversarial relationship goes again years.
Mills, a 74-year-old reasonable and the primary girl elected governor of Maine, is a former two-term legal professional normal whose stint because the state’s prime prosecutor coincided with LePage’s time as governor. The 2 clashed publicly, with Mills declining to symbolize LePage’s administration on some issues, forcing LePage to hunt outdoors counsel to symbolize his pursuits in litigation.
Her supporters painting her as a gradual chief whose cautious COVID-19 insurance policies helped information the state by way of the worst pandemic in a century, with fewer coronavirus deaths per capita than most others. She expanded Medicaid — one thing LePage had blocked — and presided over the most important funds surplus in Maine historical past, which allowed the state to ship $850 reduction checks to most residents.
Raised in poverty and homeless for a time as a boy, LePage, 73, is an unabashed conservative whose previous controversies typically overshadowed his political achievements, reminiscent of decreasing the tax burden, shrinking welfare rolls, overhauling the pension system and paying again hundreds of thousands of {dollars} of hospital debt.
He attacked Mills’ government orders through the pandemic, together with obligatory vaccines for well being care staff, calling it a “reign of terror.” He’s known as for a parental invoice of rights in training, claimed Mill has allowed crime and medicines to proliferate and accused her of budgetary gimmicks that may trigger issues sooner or later. He has promised to attempt once more to get rid of the state’s revenue tax.
When LePage left workplace in 2019, prevented from searching for a 3rd consecutive time period by the Maine Structure, he declared he was decamping for Florida, the place the taxes have been decrease, and leaving politics behind.
He didn’t keep away lengthy. Quickly, he was headed again to Maine for what supporters described as “LePage 2.0.”
LePage’s senior adviser Brent Littlefield stated LePage was astounded when Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and that LePage fears the nation is in peril of tearing itself aside. LePage issued an announcement amid the violence supporting legislation enforcement and telling these concerned within the riot “to go away and go house.”
LePage served as Trump’s honorary state chairman and as soon as sought a job in his administration, however he now gained’t say whether or not he would vote for Trump for president if Trump runs once more in 2024. Regardless of any personal misgivings, nevertheless, LePage hasn’t condemned Trump. He declined an Related Press interview request.
The previous governor made no reference to Trump whereas touring Yankee Marina & Boatyard, regardless that Trump stays well-liked in rural Maine, the place he twice gained an electoral vote whereas shedding the statewide vote.
Boatyard president Deborah Delp stated LePage is required at a time when her staff are affected by excessive inflation and apprehensive in regards to the future.
She stated she will be able to “deal with some tough language” from LePage if he places the financial system on monitor. “Politicians are politicians. And he’s not a politician. He’s a businessman. He says what he thinks,” Delp stated.
Maria Testa, a Democrat from Portland, disagrees. “He’s bombastic and has a merciless mood. He’s such a giant no for me,” Testa stated.
Whereas campaigning, LePage largely tries to avoid Trump’s lies of a rigged 2020 election. LePage acknowledges that Biden is president however declines to deal with whether or not he thinks the election was legit. LePage additionally avoids the problem of abortion after the U.S. Supreme Courtroom overturned the constitutional proper to an abortion.
Mills has pledged to struggle to make sure girls proceed to have a proper to a authorized abortion in Maine.
A 3rd candidate for governor, impartial Sam Hunkler, isn’t anticipated to play a lot of a task within the race, in contrast to deep-pocketed impartial Eliot Cutler, who did in 2010 and 2014, when LePage gained every election with no majority.
Maine’s ranked-choice voting system gained’t be an element. It’s utilized in federal congressional races however not within the governor’s contest as a result of it runs afoul of the Maine Structure.
Betsy Martin, a retired well being care administrator from Biddeford, stated residents are feeling drained by the corrosive partisanship in a rural state with a convention of reasonable politics and impartial voters. Some are tuning out altogether, she stated.
“They’re exhausted. They’re extraordinarily fatigued. We’re worn out,” she stated.
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Comply with David Sharp on Twitter @David_Sharp_AP
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Comply with AP for full protection of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter, https://twitter.com/ap_politics
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Maine
Maine announces resource center to aid opioid settlement spending
![Maine announces resource center to aid opioid settlement spending](https://themainemonitor.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/statehouse-062024.jpg)
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.
![A man holds a sample vial of fentanyl.](https://cdn-lbpkl.nitrocdn.com/BFclrdUmyxSNLIfnNKxkPYZLQzHFdlTk/assets/images/optimized/rev-bf6e933/themainemonitor.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/fentanyl-sample-771x939.jpg)
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.
Maine
Who Remembers The Nateva Music Festival in Oxford, Maine in 2010?
![Who Remembers The Nateva Music Festival in Oxford, Maine in 2010?](https://townsquare.media/site/698/files/2024/06/attachment-Untitled-design-42.jpg?w=1200&q=75&format=natural)
It was 4th of July weekend 14 years back and the sun was throwing a tantrum. Temperatures were soaring, but nothing stopped the flow of Mainers and out-of-towners pouring into the Oxford Fairgrounds in Oxford, Maine. They were armed with tents, sunscreen, and a thirst for some serious live music.
Rob Riccitelli
The Oxford Fairgrounds transformed into a bustling campground for the first and only Nateva Festival. Looking like Woodstock’s smaller but more organized cousin, tents were popping up and campers had everything from plush air mattresses to the good ol’ sleeping bags that are only slightly better than sleeping on a rock.
The Nateva Festival boasted a killer lineup with a wide variety of performers. Headliners included my favorite performance of the weekend, The Flaming Lips. The air had slightly cooled and a sea of people were gathered around with their glow sticks, necklaces and any other bright neon object that you could think of. If you’ve ever seen Flaming Lips live, you know that it’s like a trippy circus with confetti cannons, giant hamster balls, and enough weirdness to make you question your reality. If you have not seen them, they will be at Thompson’s Point this summer on Thursday, July 25th.
They were joined by Furthur, featuring former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir and Phil Lesh. If you didn’t know, Furthur’s jam sessions are so long and winding, you could probably leave to grab a snack, take a bathroom break and come back to catch the same song. Then there was moe. with their jam band vibes and electrifying solos.
Rob Riccitelli
Although leaning towards jam bands, there was something for everyone at Nateva. Whether you were vibing to the reggae beats of George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic or losing yourself in the psychedelic sounds of Lotus, there was never a dull moment.
Other performers included Passion Pit, Umphrey’s McGee, Sound Tribe Sector 9 and local favorites Rustic Overtones and the Mallet Brothers. The weekend also featured local food vendors serving up everything from lobster rolls (because Maine) to vegan dishes and even a ferris wheel.
The scorching sun had everyone seeking shade, chugging water and sunburns were the unofficial festival accessory, with many learning the hard way that a little SPF would have been a great thing to use.
Rob Riccitelli
As the weekend wound down, exhausted yet exhilarated campers packed up, leaving the fairgrounds covered in dirt with broken or lost flip flops. The Nateva Festival 2010 was one for the books—a perfect blend of music, good vibes and memories under the blazing Maine sun.
Despite its high attendance, the festival faced significant challenges that prevented it from becoming an annual event. Financial difficulties, logistical challenges, local regulatory issues, were just a few challenges that contributed to the Nateva Festival being a one time deal.
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Maine
Maine Man Who Killed 4, Shot at Cars Pleads Guilty
![Maine Man Who Killed 4, Shot at Cars Pleads Guilty](https://img1-azrcdn.newser.com/image/1543714-12-20240701191702.jpeg)
A man who confessed to killing his parents and two of their friends and wounding three people in a highway shooting pleaded guilty to murder and other charges on Monday, and a judge sentenced him to the maximum term of life in prison. Joseph Eaton has never provided an explanation for the crimes he admitted to committing in Maine last year, and police have not publicly announced any motive, the AP reports. Eaton withdrew an insanity defense late last year.
- Defense lawyer Andrew Wright said Eaton chose to plead guilty to take responsibility, believing it was the “reasonable and moral” thing to do.
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