Area Candidates Air Views at Machias Forum

School Law, Taxes, Economic Issues Among Topics

By Will Tuell

[July 15-21 issue of the Down East Coastal Press]

Education, the economy, taxes, and Washington County's need for a more politically viable position in Augusta dominated a candidates forum hosted by the Machias Bay Area Chamber of Commerce (MBACC) July 10 in Machias. The forum, part of the Chamber's Eggs & Issues series of presentations, featured House District 30 candidates Rep. Howard McFadden (R-Dennysville) and Dennis Mahar (D-Pembroke), District 32 candidates Katherine Cassidy (D-Machias) and David C Burns (R-Whiting), and District 33 candidates Dianne Tilton (R-Harrington) and Marie Emerson (D-Addison). The forum also featured County Commissioner Chris Gardner (R-Edmunds), who will be squaring off against Pembroke Democrat Al Goodwin for his second term. Goodwin did not attend.

Quality of Education, School Consolidation Discussed

When asked by Roque Bluffs resident Gail Peters what the candidates would do to improve the quality of education in rural Maine, each of the seven sought to distance themselves from Gov. John Baldacci’s controversial school consolidation law, passed as part of his budget during the previous legislative session and amended this past April.

“Our schools problem is an illness,” said Gardner, director of the Eastport Port Authority, referring to dwindling enrollments in rural Maine schools. “In the short term, we have to find some tax relief for property tax payers and small communities so we can grow these communities back up. If we can find ways to streamline administration, we should. Streamlining administration is not education. That is administration. If we can find cost-saving measures there, we must and we have to do that. We have to make sure the state realizes that we're in this together. As much as Portland says that it would rather not pay for Washington County, I'm sure New York City would rather not pay for Portland. We have to be real careful on how far we split that hair.”

“I dare submit to you now that our schools don't cost too much money,” said Gardner. “They cost too much money per student. The fact is that our enrollment has been dwindling and dropping. And we find ourselves with schools built with great intentions 10, 15, 20 years ago to house 150 students now have 75. And we wonder why we can't afford our schools.

“I dare submit to you,” said Gardner, “that consolidation isn't the answer. To consolidate means running a white flag up the pole and saying we surrender, we give up. Our communities are dying and they're never coming back. That's what you're saying: We'll never have the children again to support our communities.  I'm not willing to say that. We can weather the storm.

“Will we have to have some cutbacks in education? I'm sure we will,” said Gardner. “We'll have to tighten our belt, but education is just a calling card to what is really facing us: that if we don't fix what is wrong with our communities—the fact that we are aging, we are not repopulating, we are not marketing ourselves to the next generation. If we don't do that, everything else we're doing is window dressing, because eventually it's all going to be gone.”

Loss of Local Control Discourages Parental Involvement

Burns, a retired state trooper, argued that the loss of local control—the right of a municipality or a group of municipalities to run their own school systems—only discourages parental involvement in schools that equates to a lower level of educational attainment.

“We've lost interest in our schools and education,” said Burns. “It's all, in my opinion, come about with the loss of local control. And that's what happened in this past Legislature. As consolidation increased, administration increased, [enrollment] decreased, and parental involvement decreased proportionally. A lot of people know their kids have to be educated, but they're not involved in their education. The only thing they know is how bad the picture is. They're not involved daily. Until they get involved in that, I don't think we're going to solve the problem.

“The big problem I have with the governor's law,” said Burns, “is that when you take away local control, you're taking away local interest in education. Until you get moms and dads back on board, we're not going to fix this problem.”

McFadden, a retired educator who has been strongly opposed to the state's efforts to consolidate Maine's 290 school districts into 80 since the idea first was floated in February 2007, called for the school law's repeal and a more “bottom-up” approach to school consolidation, should it prove necessary at the local level.

“I'm not for the new [consolidation] legislation, and I'm not for EPS [Essential Programs and Services, the state’s new school-funding formula],” said McFadden. “The state's saving money but you're paying more locally. They're not talking about educational excellence in this law. They're talking about saving money. They're not going to save money because the state doesn't have any money. All their money comes from you people through taxes.”

Cassidy, a former reporter for the Bangor Daily News, distanced herself from the law while stressing the need for a reduction in the number of school administrations across the state.

“We have 5,000 students between 5-18 in Washington County,” said Cassidy. “These students go to 40 separate school administrative units. Each has about 126 students. Each employs 34 people.That makes for a student-to-staff ratio of 9:1. Those overheads produce an average cost of educating our students at $9,300 within Washington County and that compares with an average cost of educating other students in Maine of $7,200. We can see that all these costs give us higher taxes. That's the problem. We don't need more state laws to tell us we've got a problem. I'd like to consider this locally.”

Mahar, an attorney, also voiced his displeasure with the law: “It doesn't need to be done with the RSUs. I did a paper when I was in college—that's now 25-26 years ago—that shows that school administrative districts (SADs) did not save money. The school unions that we use in this area actually cost less, and they still do. I think we're pretty well unanimous amongst us here in Washington County that it does not serve Washington County to have the consolidation law as it stands. I think we need to repeal it, and, as Howard pointed out, start from the ground up.”

Mahar said he would like to see a reduction in the number of superintendents and central office administrations. “We have, at last count, 11 superintendents serving schools in Washington County, at a cost of $125,000 by the time you figure in benefits and salaries. That's a lot of administration for very few students. There is some opportunity for consolidation there, in those functions, but we still need to have the teachers in the classroom no matter whether it's a small classroom or a big one. There are opportunities for savings while still having control on the local level. Washington Academy has been doing it with 30 of these units forever. It can be done.”

Emerson, a culinary arts teacher at Washington County Community College, said, “I agree with what everyone said. Our educational system is too top heavy. We can streamline by using technology, by getting parents involved. We can do it. We have done it in the past. For some reason in the last 15 years, administration has grown by leaps and bounds. We've allowed it to happen. We need to back it off and put funds back into the classroom. We can do this with technology.”

Tilton, a former executive director of the Sunrise County Economic Council and today a private consultant, singled out McFadden for his stance on Essential Programs and Services funding, seeing that issue as a major piece of the puzzle.

“The problem with that model is that it doesn't take into account people's incomes or their ability to pay,” said Tilton. “The value of their property is what the next buyer is willing to pay, not what the current resident can now afford. The median income in Jonesport is 65 percent of what the state median income is. Something needs to change. [We need to] acknowledge that high property value does not equal high ability to pay. This just shifts the costs onto the local property taxes. The local people know they can't pay. So something's got to give, and unfortunately, it's usually what's happening with the schools.”

Too Many Tax Takers Rather than Tax Payers

The candidates were asked what each would do to reduce Maine's “onerous” tax commitment and how doing so could help mitigate population shifts away from Washington County.

“Taxes are killing the state,” said Gardner, who argued that the state is an “inverted pyramid” in which there are too few people paying for services and too many receiving them. “It's not just in state government, it's in our social programs. We don't have enough payers into the system. We need to turn that around. We need to broaden our base. We're going to reduce costs at a certain level, but I'm sorry, this state for the past 30 years has not shown its appetite to control its spending. If we've spent 30 years walking into this perilous dark woods that is overtaxation, I daresay that it's going to take 30 years to walk back out. In the meantime, as we try to get control of the drunkard spending out of Augusta, we have to look at broadening our base. If we don't turn the corner, all we're doing is walking deeper and deeper in [to the woods].”

Burns suggested that if he were elected, he would work with community leaders and legislators to address the county's economic development issues in order to alleviate high taxes. “The people we send to Augusta have to improve this tax situation,” he said. “We are the second highest-taxed state in the nation. We are one of the two worst business climates in the country. Why would anyone want to come here and start a business? The state of Maine is looking to pick your bones when you come here.

“Workers' comp insurance—it's killing small business,” said Burns. “If anybody comes up with a good idea there's a dozen bureaucrats to kill the idea. You can't afford to do business here unless you've got a lot of guts. For the past 30 years they've been spending us right into the ground. If we don't change it, I don't know what's going happen to this state. As many have said, they'll put a fence around it and call it a park. Let's work together.”

“I have personally observed [that for some] in Augusta profitable businesses are a bad thing,” said Tilton. “This state suffers from being of two minds. We really like to help people, but the same [effort] that we're putting into helping people isn't going into broadening the tax base. A great deal of the employment in Washington County derives its revenue from the public. When we talk about cutting taxes, reducing spending, we're putting a huge number of jobs at risk. Not only do we need economic development to broaden the tax base to support the programs we have, we need to diversify our economy in Washington County so that we're not the victim of cuts in government spending.”

Cassidy suggested that instead of “waiting for a big developer to come in and save us,” Washington County should develop small businesses with help from state and federal grants. “Let's do this ourselves,” she said. “We've spent four years anticipating LNG [liquefied natural gas] coming. It's not here. I don't believe it's coming. When people raise that as an issue in this election, what they're really talking about is jobs. Let's go to Lubec's Main Street and ask companies what they need to expand. How can they give us five more jobs? If four companies gave us five jobs each, that's 20 jobs for the town of Lubec. What do they need from the state? How can we help? Do they need state and federal grants? What do they need? Let's ask them? That's the way to grow jobs in the county,” said Cassidy.

When a member of the audience observed that Washington County's greatest economic asset was natural resources, and that candidates should encourage “value adding” at the state level, Emerson answered: “I'm very proud of my husband who started the first fresh-packed blueberry co-op in the state of Maine. Together, we can hit a market order for any big supermarket chain. But it's working together. The same kind of situation has to happen for the lobstermen. It also pains me to drive to Eastport to see the wood stacked up and shipped out. That's horrible. … You would think that we could save these natural resources. We could utilize half of them and the local people could make twice the money if they added value to them. It would extend their resources so much further. Our fishing, our lobsters, all of that, will be overfished because they're trying so hard and getting so little for those products.

“We need to add value,” said Emerson. “We need to be training more of our students to think in terms of value added. I do it at [WCCC] all the time. The students have to create new products using Washington County resources. That can be done. We can add the value to our wonderful products and keep the money local.”

Tilton said that much of the growth in manufacturing during the past 10 years has come as a result of very focused target marketing and not huge industrial production.

“The thing that has been curious to me is that when the officials in the state talk about the state's economy, they talk about manufacturing dying. We're losing traditional manufacturing jobs, but there is relative growth in high-end manufacturing. What is the state doing to beef up these kinds of jobs? In my experience they need money for marketing, expertise, resources. The state is stingy when it comes to lending money, and impossible to deal with when it comes to giving money. We need to find a balance between the government's role in supporting small business, and especially manufacturing.”