My Plan

I. Our Starting Points: Candor and Confidence

Our Strategy for Maine is built on candor and confidence.

We will face Maine’s problems head-on. We will be straightforward and open about the tough choices we are going to have to make together. And we will be innovative and bold about the new directions in which we need to take our state.

We will cast off worn-out assumptions about Maine – artificial barriers that together with partisanship and special interests are standing in the way of progress.

We are certain about the soundness of our strategy, and we are confident that it will succeed.

This kind of fresh approach to politics and government is the only way to make Maine work again, and Maine people should expect nothing less from their next governor.

Our Strategy for Maine begins by acknowledging these harsh truths about life in Maine today:

• Our economy is not producing enough jobs. Too many Maine people are out of work, and too many Maine families are struggling just to get by.
• The cost of living and the cost of doing business in Maine are simply too high – beyond high taxes and burdensome regulation, our high electricity and health care costs make it hard for families to survive and businesses to prosper.
• Our state government spends more than we can afford. Most Maine families and businesses already have made lots of tough choices; state government has barely begun to do so. That has to change.
• We are a rapidly aging state. We can’t afford to continue losing young people. We have to provide high quality education to all our children and to develop new opportunities for them to live and work here.
• Decision making in Maine has become hopelessly bogged down by partisan politics. The same partisan politics that got us into this mess will not get us out of it.

The next decade will be the most challenging in Maine’s history. We need to increase jobs and incomes, cut hidden taxes and government costs, and make needed investments in our competitive advantages – all at the same time.

But, there are good reasons for us to be filled with confidence, to know that we can do this.

Good state government can maximize opportunity for everyone who lives in Maine, help create conditions in which people can thrive and business can prosper, promote fairness and community, and protect our civic culture, our quality of place and the natural beauty that makes Maine unique. A strong leader with a clear vision and a sound plan can change the character of government in Maine and make it good again, and a state government that does its job well can get Maine working again.

We need to be united as One Maine. Our Strategy for Maine is based on our conviction that “Maine Can Work” for all of us—if we work together as one community.

Here are the important elements of our Plan.

II. Our Most Critical Task: Lowering the Cost of Living and Doing Business in Maine

Maine’s cost structure is too high, period! No matter how many more millions of dollars we spend on economic development efforts, no matter how many state and local officials we send on trips across the country or around the world, we will not attract the kinds of businesses that will provide good jobs and higher incomes for Maine people until Maine becomes a less expensive place to live and to do business.

There are three big levers that we can use to do this – three steps that we can take that together can transform Maine’s economy. We must lower the cost of electricity, lower the cost of healthcare and lower the cost of government.

A. Maine Energy Resources – Lower Cost Electricity for Maine

We have an extraordinary abundance of clean, renewable energy resources in Maine: our forests and croplands, our onshore and offshore wind, our tides and our ample sun. We need to be sure that some of these renewable resources are used to generate electricity for use right here in Maine, to lower electricity costs for Maine businesses and homeowners and to generate jobs and incomes for Maine.

Maine Energy Resources, a publicly-owned business chartered to operate as a public power authority, will use low-cost, tax-exempt capital to generate electricity throughout Maine from our renewable resources and will accelerate the development of clean and low-cost electricity in Maine. Maine Energy Resources will invest in energy efficiency in Maine and will enter into public-private partnerships with energy entrepreneurs. Maine Energy Resources will not export electricity out of state, because an important part of its mission will be to put the electricity to work in Maine.

Lowering the cost of electricity is one of the most important tools we can use to keep jobs in Maine, to expand businesses in Maine and to attract new investment.

B. Maine Wellness – Lower Cost Healthcare for Maine

Maine’s rapidly rising annual expenditures for healthcare are crippling Maine’s working families, who pay too great a portion of their wages for healthcare, and are breaking the backs of Maine employers. High healthcare and insurance costs are one of the most important factors making it difficult to live and do business in Maine.

We can bring healthcare costs under control in Maine by providing essential health-care services for all Maine citizens through Maine Wellness, a new statewide framework within which coverage and care will be provided at a price that Maine businesses and taxpayers can afford, while preserving individual choice and the important relationships between patients and caregivers.

The Maine Wellness framework will be based on these three principles:

1. All Mainers should have access to essential health care services.
2. The program must be financially sound and sustainable.
3. 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.

Our program will borrow from the highly successful efforts undertaken by Cianbro, Hussey and other large Maine employers, who have succeeded dramatically in controlling costs and providing incentives for people to stop smoking, to lose weight and to take better care of themselves. Maine Wellness will be built on the foundation of Maine’s strong system of non-profit hospitals and committed physicians and caregivers.

C. Maine Change – Lower Cost Government for Maine

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.

It is time to set priorities and make hard decisions about what we can, and cannot, afford. No more tinkering around the edges. No more “patching and praying” every month when falling revenues need to be balanced against expensive obligations. Getting government spending under control won’t be easy, but we have to do it if we are going to survive and prosper as a state.

More than three-quarters of our $6 billion, two-year state budget is spent in education and health and human services, and in those areas we must find real savings and efficiencies and establish firm priorities among many competing programs.

Our education system from kindergarten through college and beyond is fragmented, uncoordinated and filled with duplication. We will measure performance and efficiency in our K-12 public education system and then use those measures to incentivize and reward excellence and creativity that can be achieved most cost-effectively.

We will work to reduce inequities among systems and eliminate educational dead ends. We will authorize charter schools and explore the potential of charter school districts, where all schools in a district can take advantage of innovation. We will make underutilized assets available for charter schools and additional magnet schools so that investments we already have made continue to yield returns for our students. We will seek out innovation and loosen rules and requirements where appropriate in order to foster better education at lower costs so that every Maine child has an equal opportunity to succeed.

Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services serves many thousands of Maine people who need our help and assistance. We need to be compassionate to those in need, but there also are limits to what is appropriate and what we can afford. Our Medicaid program, MaineCare, offers one of the broadest and most generous set of services among the 50 states, and we will shrink that program cost as a part of our Maine Wellness initiative.

Further, we need to be certain that we are delivering public assistance services in ways that best serve the interests of both taxpayers and service recipients. When the Department of Health and Human Services delivers services through 7,000 provider organizations in a state with a population of 1,300,000, it is clear that the delivery system needs to be reexamined and excessive overhead and administration costs need to be squeezed out of it.

As governor, I personally will chair a commission similar to the Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC), which the federal government uses to determine which military bases to keep or to close. This commission will review all state programs and agencies, and within a year will make a series of recommendations to make state government more innovative, more efficient and less costly. I will present those recommendations to the Legislature as a single package, and on behalf of the taxpayers of Maine I will ask the Legislature for a simple “yes or no” vote.

III. Rebuilding: Investing in Maine’s Competitive Assets

For decades in Maine, our economic development efforts have been uncoordinated, duplicative, wrongheaded and unproductive. Cities and towns in Maine with the same fundamental interests in economic development have been competing against each other in exhausting, expensive and fruitless efforts to build their individual commercial tax bases. Literally hundreds of state, regional, local and non-profit agencies in Maine spend millions upon millions of dollars every year chasing jobs and industries that have little cause to move to Maine, while paying scant attention to the needs of businesses that already are in Maine and want to expand.

Our high cost structure has built a wall around the State of Maine, one that discourages new businesses from moving to Maine and investing here, while behind that wall we have failed to invest in a focused way in our competitive assets. Cutting our cost structure – lowering the cost of living and doing business in Maine – is our most urgent and immediate challenge, but at the same time we also need to bring a new, strategic and far more focused approach to investing in Maine’s competitive advantages – our young people, our quality places, our natural resources and our strategic location.

A. Investing in a Trained and Educated Workforce

Ultimately, the shortcomings in Maine’s job market and the deterioration in our incomes won’t be fixed until we invest in post-secondary education – both academic and vocational – in a strategic, focused, consistent and sustained way. We need to stop putting the cart before the horse. Knowledge economy jobs haven’t come to Maine, because the knowledge base isn’t here. A weakened public system of post-secondary education has driven more high school seniors to colleges and universities outside Maine, taking knowledge and innovation with them.

Maine already is the oldest state in the U.S. In only Maine and three other states will the annual number of high school graduates drop by more than 15% between 2006 and 2016.

As it is, not enough of Maine’s high school graduates go on to college, underperforming four of the five other New England states by a considerable margin. And to make matters worse, too many Maine kids who do go on to college leave Maine to do it, attracted by better, albeit often more expensive alternatives, outside our state. The average percentage of out-of-state matriculation climbed from 37% during the 15 years between 1975 and 1989 to 50% for the period between 1990 and 2005.

Our kids are voting with their feet, and we are suffering the consequences. Because college graduates tend to stay to live and work where they go to college, these patterns are leaving Maine with a misshapen work force. Among our important younger age groups, Maine now lags behind the New England average for the percentage of workers with college degrees by staggering percentages of more than 30%. An undereducated workforce will have an overwhelming, negative impact on incomes in Maine – individually and on a statewide basis.

At a time when the states in America with the best systems – and, not incidentally, the strongest economies – are moving quickly in the direction of pre- kindergarten-20 strategies, or at least serious integration of the PK-16 management of education, we in Maine have stuck to a fragmented model that virtually guarantees duplication of effort, misallocation of resources and ultimately poorer performance. In a country that is now lagging behind the rest of the world in educating our children for jobs in the knowledge economy, Maine is falling even further behind the rest of the country. This is a full-blown crisis.

It’s clear that we haven’t had a strategy for keeping kids in Maine and educating them here for jobs in the knowledge economy. Indeed, we haven’t even put in place an organizational framework that promotes strategic decision-making, coordination and the disciplined allocation of resources. In a small state that is by almost any measure one of the most fiscally challenged in America, we are trying to maintain quality post-secondary education programs on 14 different college and university campuses, at 17 outreach centers and in 75 other learning sites.

We will merge our two college and university systems into one that costs less to operate and makes available more to invest in education. We will make the best use of all of Maine’s post-secondary assets, by creating a Center for Professional Graduate Education, by achieving closer coordination with Maine’s K-12 systems and instituting additional magnet high schools on or near college campuses. And once we have made the kinds of changes that are necessary to bring the size and shape of our system of public post-secondary education into line with what Maine needs and what Maine can afford – but not before – we will commence a 10-year program of sustained reinvestment in that system.

B. Investing in Maine’s Natural Resources

Maine is blessed with abundant resources of farmland, mighty forests, clean waters and the Gulf of Maine. Farming, forestry and fishing were the cornerstones of our state’s economy in our beginnings. These remain keystone industries. In a world increasingly desperate for the products that we can harvest, investment in the sustainable development of our natural resources can drive Maine incomes higher.

Lowering Maine’s cost structure in the ways that our Strategy suggests will have a discernible impact in short order. Lower electricity and healthcare costs can extend the growing season throughout our state, revitalize our pulp and paper industry and promote more efficient and more profitable lumber and wood products mills. Research and development efforts in composites and bio-fuels also hold great promise for using Maine’s resources in new and innovative ways.

While Maine’s traditional fishing industries face many challenges, our coastal waters and the Gulf of Maine represent an amazingly diverse resource that will continue to be a bountiful source of food and protein that the world needs. The same is true for Maine’s agricultural lands, as demand for locally sourced foods increases and the issue of food security becomes more prominent.

All of these efforts to use Maine‘s natural resources in innovative and sustainable ways benefit from something else that has incredible value: Maine’s legendary reputation for quality. That’s our brand, and we must continue to safeguard it, invest in it, and promote it.

C. Investing in Tourism, Recreation and Maine’s Places of Character

We call ourselves Vacationland, and tourism is our largest industry, but it also is an industry that for too long has been taken for granted and underappreciated. We will change that. People come to Maine from all over the world because of what we have to offer: a beautiful coast, pristine lakes and ponds and miles of rivers for fishing and recreation. We also have vast tracts of wilderness areas, majestic mountains, and communities filled with history, culture and warm and friendly people. In addition to our great outdoors, we have vast creative and cultural assets that are equally important magnets.

People come here to hunt and fish, to go sailing, kayaking, canoeing, bicycling, hiking, skiing, snowmobiling and a host of other outdoor pursuits. Many people own second homes in Maine. And Maine is an increasingly popular place for people to retire, bringing with them disposable incomes and valuable skills, while placing few demands on our schools and state services. What draws these tourists and permanent settlers alike is not only our pristine natural resources, however.

In addition to our traditional sources of tourism dollars, Maine is now host to burgeoning year-round cultural tourism that attracts visitors from around the globe to our outstanding museums, galleries, performance venues and historical landmarks, as well as to our statewide festivals and fairs. Our local farms are themselves becoming destinations and our farmers’ markets, as well as our artisanal local food products, wines and beers, all figure prominently in the success of our nationally recognized restaurants. People are coming to Maine and spending money to take advantage of these diverse cultural assets, but we have so far failed to promote them as effectively or aggressively as we should.

Like any industry, tourism requires investment. We are competing for visitors with other places around the country and throughout the world. We cannot simply take it for granted that people will come here because they always have; we must promote ourselves aggressively, continually search out new markets and find ways to help our tourism, recreation and sporting businesses invest in the kind of infrastructure and amenities that will keep people coming back to Maine.

Lowering the cost of doing business in Maine will help our tourism-related businesses, just as it will all other businesses, and investing in education, especially arts, technology, hospitality and recreation management programs, will make sure that the industry has trained workers and is developing the next generation of industry leaders.

Finally, people come here because Maine is special – what has come to be called quality of place. Maintaining that quality experience is the most important investment we can make. That means respecting and protecting our natural environment and our wild and scenic places. It means preserving farmland, forests, working harbors and downtowns. It means reinvigorating those historic downtowns by attracting creative entrepreneurs with favorable living and working conditions. It means welcoming investment in our state, but doing so on our terms, not someone else’s.

D. Investing in our strategic location

For too long we have thought of ourselves as being at the end of the line. That is a shortsighted view. Instead of just looking south to the rest of the United States, we should look north to Canada, our largest trading partner, east to Europe, and over the North Pole to Asia.

In a world that is increasingly interconnected, Maine is strategically located to provide access to population centers in the Northeast and Midwest U.S. As Canada develops its energy resources and a major international deepwater port in Halifax, Maine can position itself as a critical link in moving energy and goods through our state. However, we need to invest in our seaports, rail lines, roads and airports. We need to support the responsible development of LNG terminals and energy corridors and to undertake a public-private partnership to build an East-West highway.

Great opportunities to create new jobs, increase incomes and develop new revenue sources lie before us if we take full advantage of our location and invest in the infrastructure that will put us in the center of the action, instead of at the end of the line or sitting on the sidelines.

IV. Maine Can Work.

Maine Can Work. But it must work for all of us, because unless it works for all of us, it can never really work for any of us. Our future is filled with challenge, but it also is brimming with opportunity. With strong, independent leadership, a sound strategy and plain hard work, we can make tough choices and share with our children a future of expanded opportunity and higher incomes.

Dirigo is our state motto. It means, I Lead. I want Dirigo to mean something again in Augusta and to be a source of pride for every citizen throughout the great State of Maine.

If you have the pride in Maine that I have, if you love Maine as I do, then I hope you will stand with us and work with us.

Together, we will prove that Maine Can Work.

Eliot Cutler
Independent Candidate for Governor