PORTLAND – Contrasting campaign styles and divergent messages were served up with croissants and coffee Tuesday during a breakfast meeting of Maine’s gubernatorial candidates at the Eastland Park Hotel.

Sponsored by the Portland Chamber of Commerce and the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine, the event was attended by about 400 people and featured Republican candidate Peter Cianchette of South Portland; Green Independent Party candidate Jonathan Carter of Lexington Township; and independent candidate David Flanagan of Manchester.

Also attending the event were three other independent gubernatorial candidates who are scrambling to meet a June 3 deadline for submitting petitions to qualify with the Maine Secretary of State’s Office or the state’s ethics commission for public funding. The trio are Steve Kenney of Scarborough, John Jenkins of Lewiston and Phillip NaPier of Portland.

Missing from the breakfast get-together were GOP candidate Jim Libby of Buxton and Democratic 2nd District Rep. John Baldacci of Bangor, who was in Washington, D.C., while Congress was in session.

Although Baldacci’s absence was conspicuous, the congressman can probably afford to miss a few opportunities at this early point in the campaign, according to a poll released Tuesday.

The survey conducted by Strategic Marketing Services of Portland showed that 48 percent of the randomly selected, likely registered voters were voting or leaning toward voting for Baldacci in November. The poll, which carried a margin of error of 4.9 percent, placed Cianchette in a distant second place at 11.5 percent, followed by Flanagan with 7 percent, Carter with 4.1 percent and Jenkins with 4 percent.Patrick Murphy, president of the 21-year-old polling company, said none of the other gubernatorial candidates was included in the survey because they were not perceived as attracting a significant number of voters.

During the Portland meeting, the candidates offered some thoughtful responses to the dilemma posed by Maine’s low per-capita income and high tax burden, which rated in some studies as either the highest or second-highest in the country.

Carter said tax reform would be the first priority of his administration and that salaries would increase when the state was able to increase the number of college graduates and the state’s investment in research and development programs. Carter said the best way to acquire money for those two purposes would be through tax reform.

“I want to eliminate completely the personal property tax and business equipment tax for every single business in this state whether you’re buying pizza machines or paper machines,” he said. “I believe that will send a strong signal to the business community around the country to start looking at Maine and locate here as a business-friendly climate. Clearly that will increase wages, better-paying jobs and more tax dollars that can be used to fuel research and development.”

Jenkins suggested creating a dedicated educational fund to help pay for local education costs and lower the local property tax burden, which he described as one of the state’s most regressive taxes.

“If you do well and make improvements to your home, the assessor comes by, and bing, your taxes go up,” Jenkins said. “I say there’s something wrong with this picture. If people are actually doing things to improve their community, we should be giving them a tax credit and not penalize them with more property taxes.”

NaPier, a self-described “people’s hero,” said the best solution to the state’s tax problems would be to eliminate Maine’s personal income tax and instead raise the sales tax, which he said would be shouldered by tourists who come to the state and “clog up the highways.” Taxes could also be reduced, he said, by decreasing the state’s investment in the Maine correctional system and making prisons self-supporting.

“There’s no reason why anyone should sit around for years with people expecting them to be better for some reason after years of doing nothing,” NaPier said. “The other thing I want to do is bring real gambling into Maine and not just the lottery, but with a casino … a big casino. In addition to making Maine geographically beautiful, we can make it economically nice.”

Until Maine state government reins in its appetite for spending, Flanagan said, little or nothing can be accomplished since lawmakers craft their tax policies to address spending priorities. Warning that at current spending levels the next Legislature will face a revenue shortfall of $600 million over 2003 to 2005, Flanagan said tax reform is an inevitability rather than an option for the next governor.

“We need to set some goals and some objectives and communicate that throughout the organization,” he said. “To me the goal ought to be holding government expenditures to the rate of inflation unless there’s some compelling reason or some particular circumstance requiring us to do something differently.”

Cianchette said his top goal as governor would be to move Maine back to the “middle of the pack” of states from its current No. 1 position in overall tax burden. The quickest way to accomplish that objective, he said, was to roll back the cost of state government at a rate faster than the growth of personal income in the state.

“We’ve had 53 percent growth in the state budget in the last eight years, yet personal incomes have only grown by 41 percent,” he said. “I would also attack the problem of Maine’s reputation as a high-cost state to do business in. I would do that by stabilizing workers’ compensation costs and making sure we have an affordable system. We need to look at our regulatory climate.”

A year before he decided to run for governor, Steve Kenney founded the Maine Taxpayers Equity Alliance to reduce the tax burden in the state and promote government efficiency. As governor, Kenney said, he would appoint a tax panel to scrutinize the current system and advance programs that would provide “human tax relief” not just business equipment tax relief.

“That way we could offer tax credits to employers who provide living wages and who provide benefits for employees that will enable them to get out of the line for public handouts,” he said.