What Wolfe said about home? Pay no mind

Rejection can be painful. All those stories you’ve heard over the years about young professionals fleeing Maine (and us) in pursuit of something better … well, they’re sort of hard on the ego, aren’t they? It’s as if our prom date suddenly disappeared and left us to examine the bunting around the dance hall.

Feel better, because those stories turn out to be not worth the boutonniere in your rented tux. According to recent studies done for an invitation-only conference today in Orono on attracting young professionals, these people are leaving Maine, but not in the numbers you’d expect and maybe not within the age groups either. REALIZE!Maine, Gov. Baldacci’s program behind the conference, reports that between 1995 and 2000, demographically speaking, slightly more 25- to-34-year-olds moved to Maine than moved away.

Those who are moving out substantially more often than their cohorts are moving in are in the 20- to 24-year-old set (a net loss of about 7,600 from 1995 to 2000). This is the group that Maine for the last 20 years, as a matter of policy, has been urging to go off to college. Hard to believe, but apparently they listened and off they went. Their disappearance is in some ways good news, though it would be nice if they would write home a bit more often.

Does this mean that the missing prom date had just gone to freshen up for a couple of minutes? Not really, Maine hasn’t actually been deserted, but parts of it has – the actual number of young adults coming to Maine is small and heavily concentrated in southern Maine.

This is a problem, even if the brain drain Maine has fretted over for years turns out to be not nearly as severe as previously thought. Its population is among the oldest in the nation – behind only Florida and West Virginia – and the implications of that go beyond the danger of lots of drivers leaving their turn signals on for miles. Every age group makes contributions, but working-age people are more likely to start businesses, bring vitality to their communities and contribute more in taxes to keep public services coming. Their children keep towns alive, or they would if they returned there after college.

The shift south and out of Maine could be seen for more than the last decade, in home sales and emptying schools in the early ’90s, and was confirmed by the Census in 2000. What’s new is that REALIZE!Maine has built broad support to do something about it. With the exception of the really irritating capital letters and exclamation mark in its name, the program may be the smartest thing devised yet to address this issue.

The conference has three very good charges before it: It wants participants to figure out what conditions are needed for young adults to find careers here; what can be done to help them advance their careers while remaining here; and what’s needed to help them find whatever they define as a high quality of life while becoming involved in Maine communities. These are important, broad questions and the program’s organizers have backed them up with a lot of research on Maine and, most encouragingly, on what other states and a few other countrieshave done to make themselves more attractive to young professionals.

Here is a fourth charge that a State Planning Office study done for today sums up nicely: “Although expansion and contraction of population over the state have been occurring for decades, as the economy changes and as it becomes more fashionable to live in rural or urban settings, some parts of Maine have struggled, suffering chronically lower income and higher rates of poverty and unemployment. These regions have primarily been geographically remote.”

This is not a two Maines phenomenon. It’s a Maine and a small chunk of real estate just this side of the Piscataqua Bridge phenomenon. There are exceptions, in parts of Hancock County, for instance. While brainstorming how to bring more young adults to Maine, the young adults at the conference should be clear whether they are trying to attract them anywhere in Maine or to the chronically struggling regions throughout the state. This is to ask: Are you trying to get more people to move to Portland or are rural communities also on their dance cards?

If they are trying to revive some of those struggling towns, where there are more deaths than births and the real-estate price guide looks like it was printed in the Ford administration, they should ask some of the recent transplants here why they moved where they did. That was one of several useful suggestions from the computer chat rooms that REALIZE!Maine is hosting. Another was to accept that young adults prefer to live in the state’s small cities and invest much more in them. A third was to offer an entirely tax-free first year to new businesses.

The tax idea is a good reminder that youth migration in Maine is just another part of the larger issue Maine wrestles with almost daily. It is equally tied to the quality of education, the amount of money invested in research and development and the growing cultural economy. All those things for which that tax money is needed.

If the problem were simple, we older folks would have solved it by now.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.