Baldacci tallies accomplishments Governor sees ‘more agreements than disagreements’ as session ends

AUGUSTA – Day to day inside the State House bubble, there’s a lot of maneuvering, cajoling, browbeating and scheming as a governor presses his speaking-with-one-voice advantage and lawmakers try to promote their party’s priorities and their own pet projects.

It’s a complicated world where today’s foe often can be tomorrow’s ally and slow movement forward or back can generate anxiety or thrill.

But from one perspective, looking back on this year’s legislative sessions, complexity gives way to simplicity. From budgetary matters to consolidation efforts affecting jails and schools, Democratic Gov. John Baldacci was able to fend off most of what he didn’t want and achieve most of what he desired.

Majority Democrats who held the House of Representatives by a wide margin and the Senate by a mere one vote generally went along with their titular leader, however unhappily at times such as when it came to cutting human services programs.

Minority Republicans, meanwhile, usually held firm in opposition, sometimes amicably and sometimes with more edge, preparing to take their basic anti-tax, smaller-government message to the voters after yet another two-year term out of power.

As always, there were “more agreements than disagreements,” as Baldacci told the House of Representatives just before Friday’s late-night adjournment.

He counted as the session’s major accomplishments the supplemental budget, muscled through in the end by the Democratic majorities; the corrections system overhaul that mostly discarded his takeover approach to include more county involvement; new investments in roads and bridges; a Democrat-favored increase in the minimum wage; and an addition of a bit more flexibility in school system mergers.

House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, D-North Haven, said she thought legislators responded on target to much of what her constituents told her: “Passing a fix to school consolidation, doing some road work, … and if you keep doing something about health care, that’s helpful.”

Health care – specifically, a financial resuscitation of the static Dirigo Health program – remained a central partisan flash point. Democrats stayed supportive of state-paid coverage while Republicans fumed about its extra-market design, overall cost and the new taxes on beer, wine and soda being raised to bolster it.

Baldacci, who held some of the program’s backers and members of his administration in suspense about his continued Dirigo commitment, ultimately came down again on its side.

“Now, it wasn’t my first choice to use beer and wine to fund this program. … But the compromise was struck, a majority in the Legislature supported the approach, and it came down to a choice of being able to either keep 18,000 Mainers having affordable health care for them and their families, or not,” Baldacci said Saturday in his weekly radio remarks.

As lawmakers went home, the threat of a people’s veto initiative to block the new funding mechanism hung over what House Republican leader Josh Tardy of Newport called “this horrible piece of legislation.”

Freed from their winter and early spring of State House captivity, part-time legislators now may devote themselves full time to election politicking. The Democratic numerical roster is now 90 in the 151-seat House, leaving Republicans with 59 – there are two House independents. In the Senate, Democrats hold an 18-17 edge over Republicans.

A Democratic winning streak in general elections for the House dates to 1974. Republicans have held the Senate outright for only one two-year period since the 1982 elections, although in 2000, statewide voting left the Senate split 17-17, with one independent.

One-party government, as this year’s legislative sessions have shown, may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Democrats hold the Blaine House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, but that hasn’t meant they are of one mind or that they can always work in unison to exert their will.

The path to passage of the Dirigo bill, said Democratic Rep. John Brautigam, an Insurance and Financial Service Committee co-chairman, “was bumpier than Route 9 in April in Falmouth.”

Still, Pingree said enough cohesion produced results.

“I think it was good news how many big things we accomplished given how narrow the numbers are in the Senate,” she said.

From the Republican side, Sen. Peter Mills of Cornville gave grudging credit to the two veteran members of Democratic Senate President Beth Edmonds’ leadership team even as he expressed distaste for “boot camp politics” on the budget.

Sens. Elizabeth Mitchell of Vassalboro and John Martin of Eagle Lake, who both formerly served as House speaker, “knew the workings of party management,” Mills said.