Goodbye from Bizarro Maine, the Glue Gun State

We who grew up reading Superman comic books know all about Bizarro World. It was a place the authors of this great literature would send the Man of Steel on those rare occasions when Lois Lane was not in a jam involving a burning building or a collapsing bridge. It was a parallel universe in which everything was wrong – evil was good, down was up, lasagna was made with tofu.

We who live in Maine have all read about the Two Maines. The two that get the most ink, and that have become unbearably tiresome, are those where one gets rich while the other gets ever poorer, where one grows while the other declines, you know the routine.

There are two other Maines less discussed. There is the Real Maine, a where an obsolete economy, a bloated and ineffective government, and spending and taxation policies that stopped working decades ago have collided with a global economic downturn to produce an enormous budget crisis that only profound changes and real sacrifice can alleviate. Then there’s Bizarro Maine, the spirit of which is best exemplified by…

The photo that ran in this newspaper on Jan. 17, Page B1, of a woman apparently caressing a fir tree. Only upon reading the caption below did we learn that this woman was not caressing the tree. She was gluing needles back on it. As part of a nine-month project to restore those hideous wildlife dioramas at the State House. To go into those absurdly expensive cases ($800,000 at last accounting) built into the walls during a State House restoration project that makes Boston’s Big Dig look like a model of oversight and restraint.

The woman said she’d glued several hundred needles on in the last two weeks. Just wait ’til she gets to the moose fur.

Real Maine has an immediate need to fill a $44 million budget gap left by the last governor and Legislature. A gap of $1 billion, maybe more, is projected for the next two years. State programs vital to the health, education and safety of Maine people are being cut. Young people flee the state at an accelerating pace to find good jobs or lower college tuition. The elderly are increasingly stressed. In Bizarro Maine, a state that is up to its earlobes in perfectly serviceable fir trees, it makes perfect sense to pay someone to glue needles back on one that’s been dead and in a glass box since the 1950s. Nero played his fiddle while Rome burned. Maine uses a glue gun.

In Real Maine, lawmakers would come into the new session with three clear objectives that would bind them together in devoted public service regardless of party affiliation: 1) to fix the budget deficits without instigating a taxpayer revolt or gutting vital programs; 2) to begin a top-to-bottom overhaul of taxation and spending polices to stop this lurching from boom to bust; and 3) lay the groundwork for real and lasting economic development so we don’t go through eight more years of one part of Maine emptying out while the other is buried under unwanted development and sprawl.

In Bizarro Maine, lawmakers may come into session with those three objectives, but it’s hard to find them among the 1,700 other objectives they lugged along as well. Let’s give narrowly targeted tax breaks, plus free hunting and fishing licenses, to anyone who’s got a pal in the Legislature. Let’s put up highway signs denoting a certain town as the birthplace of a certain NASCAR driver. Let’s sell booze from golf carts (three bills on that vital issue). Let’s pay the state poet laureate. Let’s ignore a half-century of federal court decisions upholding the principle of one person, one vote in the composition of state legislatures and elect two state senators from each county, regardless of county population. Let’s – my favorite – require that all state-owned tourist information centers be air conditioned. If nothing else, all those young people fleeing the state will have a more pleasant trip.

In Real Maine, an employee of the state Department of Human Services, upon finding the last fiscal year coming to an end (June 30) with $434,000 of the taxpayers’ money left over and knowing that the state was in a huge fiscal hole and almost certainly aware that both of the major party candidates for governor pledged a thorough review and overhaul of this very large and controversial agency, would return that money to the state treasury. The employee would do this because: it’s what established policy and honesty require; it would be a smallish yet important help in filling the hole; it would endear that honest employee and frugal department to the next governor.

In Bizarro Maine, as we learned this week, the employee, just before the close of the fiscal year, instead sent out checks totaling that amount to DHS service providers to whom DHS did not owe any money. The providers were instructed not to cash the checks, but to return them. The employee held the checks for several months and then deposited them in DHS’s account as revenue in the new fiscal year. Several other DHS employees knew of this check-kiting scam but said nothing – it was exposed only by the diligent work of state Auditor Gail Chase.

Do this sort of thing in the private sector in real life – cooking the books to retain money to which the business in question is not entitled and to avoid financial obligations to others -and you might find yourself on the wrong end of a fraud indictment. Do this in the comic book world of Maine state government and officials say the incident merely points to a need for employees to receive more training in proper financial procedures. After all, they say, this “well-meaning” error resulted in no personal financial gain for the employee (other than, of course, giving the employee’s employer $434,000 worth of protection against the cuts all departments face).

Want to know the name of the employee who took DHS on a shortcut around the budget crisis and the fellow employees who covered it up? Just where do you think you are? Real Maine? The matter is now in the realm of the DHS personnel issue, a fortress of secrecy sealed so tight you’d think they used a glue gun on it.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.