There was an article in the Sun Journal recently noting that Maine is ranked near the bottom of the country in job creation. Then there was a story about a Brunswick health center having to close its doors, costing 170 good jobs, because of the governor’s cuts in MaineCare — at a time when there is 100-percent funding for health care from the federal government.
The people voted for bonds — offered at the lowest interest rates in many years — to repair roads and bridges, but the governor didn’t want to spend the money and actually put people to work.
The paper industry is hemorrhaging jobs as paper mills close, and the Legislature has a chance to include funding in the spending package for lots of clean, non-polluting energy jobs — the jobs of the future — but the fossil-fuel-Koch-brothers-funded Republicans, like the governor, don’t like clean energy. The governor even chased out an offshore wind company that, instead, invested $2.5 billion in England — a lot of good-paying Maine technical jobs lost.
And he and his PUC allies are risking good existing jobs and small businesses while working to kill LD1649, a solar policy bill, that could create as many as 800 new jobs.
All I hear from the governor is that he wants to create a better business climate for jobs, yet his record is pathetically dismal when it comes to the number of jobs sacrificed while he has ruled in Augusta.
Richard Fochtmann, Leeds
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