🎤 Maine's departing health official will hear the president speak tonight.
◉ President Joe Biden's State of the Union address comes Tuesday night in Washington and the Maine guests are headlined by Nirav Shah, the outgoing head of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, who is getting his ticket from Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Democrat from Maine's 1st District.
◉ Shah will be spending much more time in Washington soon, as he is set to depart Maine in March to become the No. 2 official at the U.S. CDC.
◉ Sen. Susan Collins' guest will be former intern Jillian Haggerty of Houlton. Other members of the delegation had not released their guests as of Tuesday morning.
🔑 Portland landlords want the ability to reset rents when tenants leave.
◉ A landlord group is gathering signatures to change rent control rules in Maine's largest city, eliminating a 5 percent cap on rent hikes when a tenant voluntarily leaves a unit. Read the text.
◉ The effort is being proposed by the Rental Housing Alliance of Southern Maine, led by broker and developer Brit Vitalius. His group has a tight Feb. 17 deadline to submit the 1,500 signatures needed to qualify for the June ballot.
◉ “It’s not the way we wanted to do this, but we realized this is a simple and obvious fix,” Vitalius told the Portland Press Herald.
◉ “This is exactly the opposite direction we want to go in,” former Mayor Ethan Strimling, a leading progressive voice, told the newspaper. “Our city right now is becoming more and more economically stratified." | 