In Frenchville, a grant of $3,122 helped catalog and label the entire collection of a local historical society. In Grand Isle, a grant of $15,000 helped pay to renovate the Centre Cultural Du Mont Caramel. In East Millinocket, a $3,750 grant went to teach community-theater skills. Brewer used a $4,000 grant for archive preservation at the Clewley Museum.

On and on, in town after town, hundreds of small grants, each matched by private dollars and all originated from something called the New Century Community approved by the Legislature in 1999 to aid local arts and humanities, libraries and museums. The $3.2 million from the state in turn leveraged another $9.8 million in matching funds and in-kind help. The grants from the New Century Program are a direct and, in most cases, immediate, way to support a community’s most cherished cultural organizations. They recognize that a relatively small amount of money from the state can revitalize an important but cash-strapped town library or museum.

With that in mind, legislators this year properly approved a second round of grants, which would become a permanent part of the budget, although this year’s proposal reflected the state’s own cash limitations, eventually coming in at $1.6 million. Given the usefulness of the projects and the fact that they were spread into almost every legislative district statewide, support for them is not so surprising. But the test for lawmakers will come at the end of the session, when the scramble at the Appropriations table for scarce dollars to pay for an abundance of proposals will result in some good ideas being funded and some left penniless.

Lawmakers from Aroostook, Piscataquis, Penobscot and Washington counties should be aware that, per capita, their communities did unusually well during the last round of grants. That should tell them both that there are plenty of cultural institutions interested in seeing the program continue and plenty of local support to match the state money.

New Century has helped people improve their reading skills, preserved local history, encouraged local artists and, perhaps most importantly, provided a positive way for residents of a town to get together to learn from each other about what is most valuable about their community. It is a program worth defending (and enlarging). Lawmakers should see that it makes its way into Maine’s new budget.