By Michael Shepherd - March 27, 2023 Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up.
📷 Democratic members of the new Maine Legislature are sworn in on Dec. 7, 2022, in Augusta. (AP photo by Robert F. Bukaty)
Good morning from Augusta. The Daily Brief will be off Tuesday, March 28, while I sneak in a day off. Here are the legislative schedules for Monday and Tuesday to tide you over. Here's your soundtrack.
What we're watching today
Simple-majority budgets are looking like the Legislature's new normal. Discussion of Maine's next state budget ran the emotional gamut in a week. Republicans went into last weekend trying to keep bipartisan talks with Democrats on track. They left Augusta on Friday, meaning Democrats were alone in the appropriations room to push through their spending plan. The likely path has been pretty clear here for weeks, if not months. You could argue that the track for these negotiations began in December, when Senate Republicans broke with their House colleagues to block passage of a heating aid bill. They signed off on the package in January before Gov. Janet Millsreleased her $10.3 billion proposal. This came after Maine Democrats also bypassed Republicans to pass a two-year budget by a simple majority for the first time in 15 years, setting aside the normal consensus process. While work on the budget was progressing in the normal committee channels, the sides had not seriously discussed major sticking points until last week, when it became clear no deal would come. Like they did on heating aid, House and Senate Republicans had different sets of demands. In the lower chamber, Republicans were seeking a relatively small tax cut for lower-income Mainers. Senators had a longer list of demands entering a series of meetings last week with Mills and Democrats. By Friday, Republicans were behind one plan, according to House Minority Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham, R-Winter Harbor. Read it. Their language would have provided a loose framework for a $200 million income tax cut for low- and middle-income Mainers and assemble a task force to look at "public assistance reform" with the idea of boosting workforce participation. A day earlier, Democrats had already begun moving a pared-down version of Mills' budget through the committee with Republicans still at the table trying to win concessions. After a Friday meeting between Mills and Republicans, it was clear that Democrats were against conditioning basic services on a tax cut. When Democrats assembled on Friday to vote Rep. Melanie Sachs of Freeport, the budget panel's co-chair, said those services "cannot and will not be contingent on future negotiation or last-minute amendments." Their budget, which is just above $9.8 billion, will leave at least $400 million in funding for lawmakers to discuss later this spring. "I am deeply disappointed with the end result," Rep. Sawin Millett, R-Waterford, a veteran budget negotiator, said in a statement. "A one-party budget does not protect the best interests of Maine citizens." Democrats vowed that bipartisan talks would continue after the budget is passed. Republicans joined them in 2021 to pass a revised spending plan, so that showed us bipartisanship is not necessarily killed by these sorts of moves. But the State House runs on precedent. One-party rule is already going to lead lawmakers to effectively argue over just the new parts of the budget, not the whole thing. If Republicans ever win back control of Augusta, you can bet they will want to flex their muscles on majority budgets that feel like a new normal.
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News and notes
📷Santiago Rave of Bangor leads the way into the woods in search of wild turkeys during a hunting trip on May 8, 2021. (BDN photo by Pete Warner)
🦌 Refrain from injecting Sunday hunting into other debates, a clerk asks. ◉ The charged debate over Maine's Sunday hunting ban is threatening discussion of another measures before the Legislature's wildlife committee as evidenced by a Friday email plea from the clerk. ◉.It was apparent that many Mainers were trying to submit Sunday hunting-related testimony to the committee as it met on Monday to work on a youth hunting bill, leading Eli Murphy, the clerk, to ask those people to wait for hearings on the Sunday hunting bills to weigh in. ◉ "We appreciate your consideration of this request," Murphy wrote. ◉ Advocates of Sunday hunting are leading a right-to-food lawsuit against the state on the issue as well as championing a bill that would allow bow and crossbow hunting on Sundays in a compromise offer. 📍 Mills will speak at a tourism conference on Tuesday. ◉ The governor will be in Bangor to address the annual state tourism conference at the Cross Insurance Center at noon. ◉ Among the headlines from the event could be the Maine Office of Tourism's release of a new state "destination management plan" ahead of the core tourism season starting just around the corner on Memorial Day.
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