Good morning.
During the past several months, I have traveled to all corners of Maine – from South Berwick to Eastport; from Presque Isle, Greenville and Rangeley to the coast; to Maine’s largest cities and to some of our smallest towns. I have visited with Maine voters in all 16 counties.
Mainers are worried and discouraged and angry. They don’t believe that their state government is on their side. They believe it is too big, too remote, leaderless and broken.
Maine people want Maine to work again, for all of us, and I know that Maine can work.
Mainers want strong, experienced and independent leadership in the Blaine House, and I am ready to provide it.
Today, I am proud to announce that I am a candidate to be Maine’s next governor… and I intend to be elected our governor in November, 2010.
As I have traveled the state, people have told me, over and over, that more than anything they want a candid assessment of Maine’s problems and a smart and focused strategy for fixing them.
Let’s begin with candor.
Maine is a wonderful place to live, but only if you can make a living. You can’t eat the view.
For thousands of our neighbors, Maine just doesn’t work. There aren’t enough jobs, and too many of those that we have don’t pay enough to put food on our tables, to put gas in our cars, to heat our homes and to provide real opportunity for our children. Maine families are struggling.
Businesses aren’t coming to Maine in sufficient numbers, and those that are here don’t expand, because the costs of living and doing business in Maine are too high. We already are the oldest state in America, and we are getting older, as more and more of our young people leave.
We need more jobs and higher incomes in Maine. We need to rebuild a thriving and prosperous economy. But what we don’t need is a governor who pulls the wool over our eyes, promises to put on a white lab coat, do some hocus pocus and create jobs out of thin air.
Let’s be honest. Governments can only create the conditions in which people and businesses can succeed; but that is real, that is a lot, and state government in Maine hasn’t done that. What we need to do is to cut the costs of living and doing business in Maine. And we need a state government with a plan to do that and a leader with the independence to see it through. Period.
Maine can work. We can generate jobs and incomes, we can position Maine for an era of sustainable prosperity, and we can keep our kids in Maine.
There are three big levers that we can use to cut the costs of living and doing business in Maine – to transform Maine’s economy. We can:
- lower the cost of electricity
- lower the cost of health care
- lower the cost of government.
First, I am tired of seeing electricity in Maine exported out of state to create jobs and incomes somewhere else. I want to put that electricity to work in Maine, generating jobs and incomes right here, all across our state.
We will create Maine Energy Resources, a public power authority that will use low-cost, tax-exempt capital to generate electricity throughout Maine from our renewable resources, invest in Maine energy efficiency, and enter into public-private partnerships with energy entrepreneurs to build needed energy facilities. Maine Energy Resources will put the electricity to work in Maine, lowering costs for Maine businesses and homeowners.
Second, I don’t want to see another decade like this one, when health insurance premiums in Maine have risen nearly five times faster than our household incomes, as essential health care has been priced out of the reach of thousands of Maine citizens.
We will end taxpayer-supported health care programs that haven’t worked and slim down those that we can’t afford. Rapidly rising health insurance costs are breaking the backs of Maine employers, keeping new businesses away and crippling Maine’s working families, who pay too great a portion of their wages for health care.
We will provide essential health care services for all Maine citizens through Maine Wellness, a new statewide framework where coverage and care will be provided at a price that Maine businesses and taxpayers can afford, preserving individual choice and the important relationships between patients and caregivers.
Maine Wellness will be based on three principles:
- All Mainers should have access to essential health care services.
- The program must be financially sound and sustainable.
- We will reward healthy behaviors and pay for healthy outcomes, de-emphasizing payments for procedures as much as possible, because many of the diseases we pay to treat are preventable.
Like the highly successful efforts undertaken by Cianbro, Hussey and other Maine employers, who have succeeded dramatically in controlling costs, Maine Wellness will provide incentives for people to stop smoking, to lose weight and to take better care of themselves. And Maine Wellness will be built on the foundation of Maine’s strong system of non-profit hospitals and committed physicians and caregivers.
Third, our state government is too remote, too big, too unfriendly and too expensive. We pay for too many things that we don’t need or can’t afford, and we pay too much to deliver what we do need. Customer service isn’t always what it should be, either. We need to make fundamental changes, and we need to cut our costs.
No more tinkering around the edges. No more “patching and praying” every month when falling revenues need to be balanced against expensive obligations. No more expensive consultants to tell us again what we already know. It is time to set priorities and make hard decisions about what we can, and cannot, afford.
I will personally convene and chair the Maine Change task force to do the tough work of deciding what stays and what goes. I will ask the Legislature to support the changes we propose in a BRAC-type process, one up or down vote, so that these needed reforms don’t become the victims of special interests and partisan politics.
If we are honest with ourselves, we will acknowledge that our high cost structure has built a wall around the State of Maine, one that discourages new businesses from investing here. And behind that wall we have failed to invest in a focused way in those assets that give Maine a competitive advantage.
Once we have cut our costs – once we have begun to lower the costs of living and doing business in Maine – we need to bring a new, strategic and far more focused approach to investing in Maine’s competitive advantages – our people, our places of character and our natural resources, and our strategic location.
The most important of those new investments will be in the training and education of our young people.
Public education in Maine today is organized to fail, and we are increasingly failing our children.
Our education system from kindergarten through college and beyond is fragmented, uncoordinated and filled with duplication. We will change that.
I will not rest until every Maine child has an equal opportunity to succeed.
- We will seek out innovation and loosen rules and requirements in order to foster better education at lower costs.
- We will measure performance and efficiency in K-12 public education and use those measures to incentivize and reward excellence and creativity where it is being achieved most cost-effectively.
- We will authorize charter schools and charter districts and will make underutilized assets available for their use and for additional magnet schools, so that investments we already have made continue to yield returns.
- And we will merge our two systems of higher education into one, making sure that we are managing and building that system in ways that will best serve our students and our state.
In November 2010, Maine voters must decide who has the best vision for Maine’s future. The questions they will be asking are important:
- Who has the best strategy to make Maine work again?
- Who will be independent enough to tell the truth and to place the interests of all Mainers above the narrow interests of one political party or another, one interest group or another?
- Who has the business and public service experience, the proven political and leadership skills, and the independence and toughness to get the job done?
I was born and raised in Bangor. My family has lived in Maine for 130 years, since the 1880s. Dad was from Old Town, and my mother was from Bangor.
My grandfather, my mother’s father, came to America at the age of 12 – alone, with no family and unable to speak English. He began his life here as a peddler, walking between Bangor and Calais and selling notions, needles and thread to homes along what is now Route 9, the “Airline.”
I learned in Bangor, from my parents, grandparents and teachers, the values that have served me all my life:
- Honesty and integrity
- Compassion and charity
- Discipline and hard work.
I worked through college and graduate school, learned politics from Ed Muskie and have spent a lifetime as a successful businessman, public official and lawyer. I am an experienced manager and entrepreneur, and I know government. I know how to change policies, reshape priorities, cut budgets and zero out programs that don’t work because I have done all those things.
Now I want to put my skills and experience to work for Maine . . . as Maine’s third Independent governor since 1974.
Most Maine people – whether they are enrolled as a Democrat or Republican or not enrolled in any party – are truly independent voters, and they know that the same tired old partisan politics that got us into this mess will never get us out of it. They know that real change will come only if Maine has a leader who can move beyond the tired rivalries that have left our major parties beholden to narrow interest groups and starved for new ideas.
As an Independent governor, I won’t worry about party bosses or catering to the extreme Left or the far Right. I won’t need to placate any special interest groups. I will work only for the hardworking voters and taxpayers of Maine.
Whatever you do, wherever you live in Maine, I will be your governor.
Most candidates for governor make too many promises to too many interest groups. I will make only three. I make them to every citizen of Maine, and these are what they are:
- One, I will tell the truth about our challenges and spell out the tough choices; I won’t sugarcoat anything.
- Two, I will give you a focused strategy that will fix Maine’s problems and restore opportunity.
- Three, I will inspire you to believe, as I do, in a bright vision of Maine’s future. I will work from dawn until night, every single day, to bring Maine together as One Maine, one community that shares one vision, so that together we can make that vision real.
Maine can work. I wouldn’t be running if I didn’t believe that with all my heart. The challenges before us are great, but the opportunities in front of us are even greater.
We can get Maine people back to work. We can create opportunities for our young people. We can create a government that we can afford, that is innovative and that provides great customer service. Maine can be the smartest, the healthiest, and the most dynamic state in America.
That is why I want to be Maine’s next governor, and that is what we will do together.
Thank you.
