LOWER-COST GOVERNMENT
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
- lower the cost of government
Here is my strategy to lower the cost of government:
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.
