Strategic Planning Office

So much of government spends so much time reacting to today’s crisis and trying to fend off tomorrow’s that planning often seems like a luxury it cannot afford. But Maine can, and wisely has an agency devoted to the task. In his comments Tuesday introducing his choice to lead the State Planning Office, Gov. John Baldacci indicated he understood both the necessity and the opportunity the agency represented. It is an understanding that too often gets lost in the rush from one issue to the next.

The governor is hoping that his choice for director, Martha Freeman, currently deputy chief of staff, “will help revitalize State Planning so they can play a more prominent role ensuring better collaboration among state departments and assistance to local communities and regions while becoming a pivotal resource for me and the Legislature.” Revitalization, and a restoration of trust, will be needed after the confusing rounds of economic analysis and forecasting last year that helped lead to months of uncertainty about what programs would be funded and at what level.

State Planning will be crucial, as well, in helping shape the coming debate over competing property-tax questions on the November ballot. Laurie Lachance, the state economist and a member of the Planning Office, has been a champion of improving the stability of tax revenue, removing the extreme highs and lows of the current system. Identifying stable reforms while lowering the overall tax burden will be the test for each of the ballot questions and State Planning’s analysis will be important.

More than this, Maine currently has a State Planning Office that spends much of its time overseeing, measuring, chronicling the state’s demise. The problems are known well enough: Maine has a high tax burden and subsequently a brain drain and aging population, which creates costs that move increasingly toward being unmanageable. It has uneven population growth, coastal vs. inland, and a discouraging cost of doing business that, for most of the state, cannot be overcome by proximity to major markets. It must invest more in education and training, in safely moving goods and people and in attracting new businesses to the state. And it must do this while restraining spending.

The governor has done well to start digging Maine out of its fiscal hole from last year, but he will need help to develop longer term strategies for moving Maine from its lowly rankings for income, education attainment, productivity, etc. Ms. Freeman must already have the confidence of the governor to earn his nomination; her challenge will be to persuade lawmakers and the public that her office would once again become a center for collaboration and thinking that will offer a better quality of life for all Mainers.