Last Friday evening I drove to Rockland to meet with leaders of the SEIU, the union that represents most of Maine’s state employees (you can view the video here). I was the first of several candidates who spoke, and I discussed with them some of the challenges that we would face together when I become governor. Among other things, I told them that I think we need to work hard on making customer service part of public service.

Many Mainers, I told them, believe that state government is too remote, too big, too unfriendly, leaderless and just plain broken. They think that we pay for too many things that we don’t need or can’t afford, that we pay too much to deliver what we do need, and that customer service from state employees isn’t always as good as it should be. . . We need to change that, I said.

Well, you’d have thought that I was a traitor to our state! One of my opponents — I won’t name names because I don’t want to embarrass her — took to the podium a few minutes later and positively denounced me. “Maine people aren’t customers of the state government,” she yelled. “We are the owners!”

Well, yes, we are the owners.  We certainly are taxpayers.  But we are also the customers of state government.

When was the last time a state inspector came to your business and apologized to you as a government “owner” for interrupting your workday and asked how he or she could help you?

When was the last time that you walked into a Department of Motor Vehicles office and felt like an owner and not a customer?

Read in the continuation what I had to say to the SEIU.

My name is Eliot Cutler, and I am looking forward to working hand in hand with you as Maine’s next governor.

I will be your governor, your leader, but I also want to be your partner. We will share the toughest assignment state employees have ever had. You know as well as I do that the next 10 years will be the single most challenging decade in Maine’s history.

We need to get Maine people back to work, raise income levels and restore our tax base. To do that, we must focus on strategies that will make a difference everywhere in Maine.

We need to cut the cost of living and cost of doing business in Maine, so that we can make the most of our competitive advantages. We need to lower our energy costs, especially the cost of electricity. We need to lower our healthcare costs, while making essential healthcare services available to everyone in Maine. And we have to invest in education, while doing a much better job of using the education assets we have.

Those tasks would be challenging in the best of circumstances, but this is no ordinary time. While we work to reinvigorate our economy, we also must reduce government spending – maybe by as much as 20 percent on top of the cuts already made. We must make state government more efficient and more innovative. And we will need to do all of this while rebuilding the trust and confidence of Maine citizens in their state government.

I know how hard most of you work, and I know just how dedicated most of you are to your work and to the people whom you serve. But, folks, we have a problem. I have spent the past four months driving all over our state, listening to our customers — Mainers from all walks of life. Let me tell you what I have heard from them:

Many believe that Maine has lost its way. Many believe that state government is too remote, too big, too unfriendly, leaderless and broken. They think that we pay for too many things that we don’t need or can’t afford, that we pay too much to deliver what we do need, and that customer service from our state employees isn’t always as good as it should be.

During the past two weeks alone, I asked three big employers — at a lumber mill, a manufacturer and a large farm — whether anyone from state government had visited them in the past seven or eight years to ask them how they were doing, what they needed, how could Maine help them grow. And from each of them the answer was no.

We need to change that.

We need to work on the customer service part of public service. We need to give every state employee a reason to be proud of being one; every one of you should be respected, liked and admired in your communities and by the people you serve.

Bluntly, the time for tinkering on the margins is over. We need to make fundamental changes in how we deliver state services and how we spend the hard-earned money Maine people pay in taxes. We need to focus on efficiency, performance, customer service and accountability.

The point is this: We need to keep people from wishing that they had voted for Tabor I, stop giving people reasons to vote for Tabor II, and see to it that there is no foundation left for Tabor III.

We need to make Maine work again for Maine people.

We can make it work. Maine can work better for all of us. . . but only if we share a common vision for Maine’s future, if we stick to a focused strategy for making it happen and if we change some of the ways we govern ourselves and deliver public services in Maine.

You folks hold the keys, so here is the bargain that I want to strike with you:

You have the ideas. You know what we need to do. If there are laws that we need to change because they are contributing to our problems, rather than helping to solve them, I want to know. If there are rules we should get rid of because they don’t work, tell me. If there are better ways to do what we need to do, I’ll be all ears.

For my part, I will lead you, I will challenge you, I will empower you and I will figure out how to reward you. I promise you that.

Let’s all remember this:

Dirigo is our state motto. It means, I Lead. The job of leadership belongs to every one of us, every state employee. I want Dirigo to mean something again in Augusta, in the Blaine House, and to be a source of pride for every public servant in the great State of Maine.

I don’t care if you are a Democrat, a Republican, a Green or an Independent. If you have the pride in Maine that I have, if you love Maine as I do, then you can stand with me and work with me. Maine can work again . . . for all of us.