60 percent of Maine’s poor work, study says Of indigent households, 22% headed by mothers

BANGOR – Mainers living in poverty more often than not are earning a paycheck, according to a study released Monday.

“We see these people every day at big retail stores, fast-food restaurants and other low-wage, low-skill jobs,” said Charles Newton, director of the Penquis Community Action Program, a social service agency operating in Penobscot and Piscataquis counties.

The number of working poor in Maine is nearly 10 percentage points higher than the national average of 52 percent, according to the authors of the study, a joint project of the Maine Community Action Association and the Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy.

In all but four counties – Oxford, Penobscot, Piscataquis and Washington – more than 60 percent of poor Maine households had one or more members working full time or part time, according to the report, based largely on Census 2000 data.

The statistic, Newton said, contradicts the popular public perceptions about the makeup of poor households, often associated with single mothers or the elderly.

Included in that 60 percent of working poor households is 27-year-old Keri Alley, a married mother of three young children.

Even when both she and her husband were working full time last year, Alley said, they earned just $14,827 – 22 percent below the federal poverty level at the time, for a family of four, which the family was at the time.

“We got by,” Alley told a group of reporters at Bangor City Hall, where the report’s authors gathered Monday to formally release the 52-page study. “We got by, but it was difficult.”

It was so difficult, in fact, that after Alley’s husband lost his telemarketing job, the family had little choice but to pack up and move 160 miles north to live with Alley’s parents in Winn, just north of Lincoln.

Although grateful for the family support, Alley, now faced with daunting waiting lists for subsidized housing, eagerly awaits the day she and her family can strike back out on their own.

“It eats away at your pride, but you have to keep going,” said Alley, who recently landed a part-time job through a temporary employment agency.

Alley’s situation is not uncommon, the study found, with married couples accounting for 18 percent of poor households in Maine. Just 22 percent of poor households in Maine are headed by single mothers.

Included in that statistic is Norma Towne, a 48-year-old Bangor woman with two teenage children.

Despite suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, Towne, like Alley, works part time, putting in 15 hours a week at Spencer Gifts in the Bangor Mall. Between her modest wages and her disability benefits, Towne estimated she earns less than $13,000 a year, placing her well below the poverty line.

“It’s a running battle,” said Towne who, unlike Alley, was able to find subsidized housing, for which she pays $362 a month for a three-bedroom apartment.

“If it wasn’t for that, I’d be living with my parents or out on the streets,” she said.

Recent studies suggest Maine is average compared to the rest of the nation in the number of poor people. The 2002 Current Population Survey, the government’s official measure of poverty, put Maine’s two-year average poverty rate exactly at the national average of 11.9 percent.

But since 2000, Maine’s poverty rate, along with those in Alabama and Mississippi – the nation’s two poorest states – increased faster, at 1.7 percent, than anywhere else in the country.

Newton said his agency has seen the effects of the recent increase, fueled in part by the loss of hundreds of relatively high-paying jobs at paper mills in the Millinocket area.

“Many of those people once considered affluent are fast becoming our clients,” Newton said.

As part of its findings, the Maine study spawned a checklist aimed at reducing poverty by asking communities if they have adequate access to such things as education, housing and public transportation, all of which, if available, can ease the burden on the state’ s poor.

The report is available online under recent publications on the Margaret Chase Smith Center’s Web site at http://www.umaine.edu/mcsc/.