🏃 A former gubernatorial candidate joins Portland's mayoral race.
◉ The open-seat race for mayor of Maine's largest city got more interesting on Thursday, when Portland City Councilor Mark Dion joined fellow Councilor Andrew Zarro and political newcomer Dylan Pugh in running to replace the outgoing Kate Snyder.
◉ Being mayor is a full-time job in Portland, but it comes with little power. The council appoints a city manager that runs day-to-day operations. This has helped make the job into a political morass, with the first mayor losing reelection to the second and Snyder beating Ethan Strimling in 2019.
◉ Dion has an interesting background as a lawyer who formerly served as Cumberland County sheriff and in both houses of the Legislature. He was an also-ran candidate in the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary won by Mills, only mustering 5,200 votes and a fifth-place finish. He was progressive on the statewide level, but he is more of a centrist figure in liberal Portland.
◉ "My work with the council and city staff will focus on serving the best interests of our residents who deserve a city that is safe, affordable, and welcoming of economic opportunities that will inspire our collective vision of what Portland could be," Dion said in a statement.
📣 Groups on the right and left have anxiety about the budget deal.
◉ The Legislature's budget committee averted another Democratic-only spending plan early Wednesday with a deal that included a pension tax change favored by Republicans. But those on both sides of the deal — especially conservatives — have some criticism of the final product.
◉ The tax change, led by House Minority Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham, R-Winter Harbor, moves up a previously agreed-upon shift exempting up to $35,000 in pension income from taxes, then adds to it by indexing the exemption to the maximum Social Security benefit going forward.
◉ It is far short of the party's previous request for $200 million in tax relief. Dealmaking conservatives will say its the best they could do, while Matt Gagnon, the CEO of the conservative Maine Policy Institute, called it a "token" reform in a BDN column and said Republicans should hold out for more.
◉ Democrats are generally happy with the deal in part because of the paid leave funding. But the liberal Maine Center for Economic Policy said lawmakers should tweak language around Mills' souped-up suite of business tax breaks for a "lack of built-in safeguards like a sunset and full transparency from businesses receiving the subsidies." |
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