Lighten legislative workload for best and brightest

During 27 years of building a fairly large environmental services business with operations in Bangor, Hampden, Waterville, Ellsworth and Portland, it became painfully apparent that there was little to dislike about my home state that couldn’t be laid at the feet of the Maine Legislature. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, I ran for the Maine Senate, taking the position that change could only take place from the inside. Merely bellyaching about Augusta would do little to bring about the changes those of us who’d dedicated our careers to providing quality employment opportunities thought necessary. While many will focus on what’s right or wrong with state policy, I’d like to focus instead on the policy-makers.

During a stint on the Maine Community Foundation Board we were exposed to an insightful book by Dr. Peter Senge, “The Fifth Discipline.” In it, Senge makes the extraordinary case, and counter-intuitive to most politicians, that the “Key to economic development is not via the addition incentives … but more appropriately by the removal of impediments.” I won’t bore you with all the details during this prose with just how Senge’s notion could truly revolutionize historical theories of increasing economic development – actually, I’d like to apply reducing impediments to the notion of attracting our “best and brightest” to legislative service. We’re certainly immersed in a great tax debate over the apparent failure to do so.

In a recent editorial, John Cole remarked, “Maine is having a problem recruiting the best and the brightest to help run the public’s business.” Where I beg to differ with Cole is in the hypothecation that to attract “better and brighter” candidates, we need to “dole out a few perks.” Au contraire. Legislators are not underpaid – they just work too hard. I propose to you by applying Senge’s Reduced Impediments theorem that we could do a better job on focusing on the “pediment removal” part, not the “additional perks” part. For instance, most other state legislatures’ employment mode, the most frequent vocation, is lawyering. While not always my favorite folks, with all that income redistribution stuff, at least lawyers are trained in critical thinking, unlike your average Maine Legislator. Remember the Cigarette butt bill? In Maine’s case, I believe the employment mode is teachers – and that too is for another day’s commentary with four teachers in my family.

Why don’t we have more lawyers serving in the Legislature? For that matter, why don’t we have more retired business types like John Cole, Ralph Leonard or Galen Cole? While I’ve not done a comprehensive analysis of the lower 48’s ability to attract those best and brightest folks, I propose to you that we should not make this a job, per se. I agree with our Founding Fathers that would be a mistake. We should attempt to see this level of public service as temporary, populated by a citizen legislature. But, you see, we don’t offer enough to make all that time and effort worthwhile.

Yet spending six months in Augusta in one year, and three months in “short session” the other year strikes me as excessive. Like a pro basketball game, all the excitement happens in the last part of the game – Parkinson’s Law? I propose we should reduce the time burden – remove the impediment of time – to three months each year. Texas, with its larger land mass, its greater population and its higher budget is able to do the people’s

business every other year.

Other states have tried differing tactics to increase efficacy: fewer legislators? New Hampshire has 400, yet is head and shoulders ahead of both Maine and Vermont in most categories of quality of life. I also fear further reduction in the influence of Aroostook County by increasing district size. A unicameral body? There may be something to that one. Do we really need state senators? However, every senator has at least one large employer in their district. Not so with House members. I’d hate to see a further diminishment of job creators in setting public policy any more than we’re seeing right now.

No, the more I think about it, reducing the workload is the most practical way to make legislative service more attractive to those “best and brightest” folks we need to apply their talents to guide Maine out of this hole we’ve dug. Justice Louis Brandeis observed that, “The greatest threat to democracy lies in the minds of men, well meaning, but unknowing.” Maine can do better. Maine must do better.

W. Tom Sawyer Jr. is a Republican who represents Senate District 9, serving Bangor and Veazie.