ONE MAINE OR NOT?

State Sen. Chris Hall’s interesting comments reported last weekend about the way Maine redistributes its tax dollars will cause outrage in northern Maine and a few smug nods to the south. But the overwhelming reaction should be puzzlement with the senator, who questioned whether spending on the state’s rural regions was fair or needed.

Specifically, Sen. Hall of Bristol confirmed to BDN reporter A.J. Higgins he believes northern Maine is a region “full of empty roads that need to be plowed [with] … an aging, poor population who rely on government health care services.” While wealthy counties along the coast provide tax dollars to the state, “the other 11 counties are net takers out, so to speak, or net gainers,” he said. “I think we need a balance in the state that reflects the realities of where our population is today.” That is a not very subtle way of saying rural Maine should be abandoned, in whole or part, by the state.

Unfortunately, Sen. Hall is not alone in feeling this way. In the past, year after year, decade after decade, state politicians have talked about the plight of rural Maine and spent money to maintain the most basic of services, but planned for almost nothing in the way of improvements, so the situation grew worse – population declines, fallen wages, plummeting real estate values.

Comments such as the ones offered by Sen. Hall are wrong on their surface because they make false distinctions between various parts of Maine. For instance, he ignores that wealthier Maine would not be so attractive if it were surrounded by, say, Newark, N.J., rather than being buffered by the rural counties he disparages and his neighbors visit.

They are more importantly wrong because the money being spent in rural Maine is spent in part to change a pattern of rural decline, experienced here and elsewhere, that creates the income disparity he finds irritating. The Baldacci administration has taken the annual report cards from the Maine Economic Growth Council seriously: through investing in its Pine Tree Zones it has created 1,400 jobs in low-income areas around the state. It has approved one of the most important advances for rural Maine in years: the creation of the Community College System. It has established, through a Blaine House Conference, an extended plan to expand natural-resource-based businesses – the backbone of rural Maine.

All of these cost tax dollars and given the long and dismal record of Augusta on this issue, divisive thinking about that money during a campaign isn’t especially surprising. But Sen. Hall and Gov. Baldacci belong to the same party; they are presumably working toward common ends to the betterment of Maine. If a member of the Legislature doesn’t understand the direction Maine is trying to move in, what chance does the public have?

The Baldacci administration has begun the first effort in years to allow rural Maine to succeed by providing it the resources – education, infrastructure, tax breaks – it needs. The alternative is to stand by and watch most of Maine suffer a slow death. You don’t need to run for office to do that.