Rooks: Maine's next generation of lawmakers making their mark

If your taste runs to bold initiatives, then a call by Sen. Craig Hickman (D-Winthrop) for a constitutional commission to advance specified policy aims is just what you’re looking for.

Hickman’s bill, LD 1824, heard by the Judiciary Committee earlier this week, is nothing if not ambitious. The commission would study sweeping changes to the state Constitution, putting under one roof proposals that have been debated many times, and others that are new.

Hickman has some credibility here; he was the principal author and backer of the “right to food” amendment that, with crucial support from Republican represenative and now Minority Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham, is one of the few recent substantive additions to the Constitution.

The new commission’s charge would go considerably further.

It would give Maine, like almost every other state, a lieutenant governor, next in line to the governorship. For those who would balk at adding another top new official, in many smaller states, the lieutenant governor is also Senate president, with a president pro tempore equivalent to Maine’s majority leader.

The commission would study electing the constitutional officers, as in most other states, and providing four-year Senate terms, also typical.

And it could reduce the size of the Legislature, a hardy perennial. My own prototype links a 33-member Senate and 99-member House with interlocking districts, so people might finally know both legislators who represent them.

And it would allow constitutional amendments to join the initiated legislation that now burgeons forth almost every November.

About that I have doubts. We’ve just suffered through one unconstitutional referendum being enacted about the power line to Canada, and another half-unconstitutional, on ranked choice voting as it applies to the governor’s race.

We might need a vetting process – also required elsewhere – before questions reach the ballot.

And finally, we could have a unicameral legislature. There is one, in Nebraska, essentially established by Sen. George Norris, an outsized Republican who was a huge supporter of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal public works.

Not coincidentally, the Nebraskans are called senators. Appealing, I suppose, if you’re already a senator.

But my favorite part is this one: “Removing procedural minutiae from the constitution that are better left to statute.”

It’s really, really hard to amend the federal Constitution, but Maine’s is amended all the time, mostly to adjust the “minutiae” that shouldn’t be there.

A recent example: Town clerks, overwhelmed by nominating petitions, wanted more time to check them than provided by the deadlines unwisely placed in the Constitution.

The amendment passed the Legislature, but was narrowly rejected by the voters. The clerks are still frazzled.

Given the bill’s late hearing and its underwhelming reception it probably isn’t going anywhere.

Yet it, like dozens of other reform proposals being floated, represents something quite important: a desire by younger Mainers to shake up state government, to see if it can’t be restructured to better reflect people’s needs in a new century.

Questions such as Sen. Hickman is asking haven’t been seriously addressed since the Ken Curtis administration, way back in the ’60s and early ’70s.

The basic shape of state government and its relationship to counties and municipalities is almost unchanged since then, and the discrepancies are glaring.

Maine counties received a huge windfall from the American Rescue Plan Act because, in most states, counties perform many functions, providing regional services in transportation, health care, education, planning and other areas that small towns – Maine has an abundance – can’t effectively handle.

Maine has 200 school districts even though a Baldacci-era plan aimed at reducing them by two-thirds. Paul LePage abolished the State Planning Office, and now towns can’t figure out how to implement housing mandates the last Legislature prescribed.

And tax policy – tax policy! Mostly, it consists in showering more and more tax breaks on favored classes.

In the 1990s, it was attempted tax caps. After that, business preferences. And now, regardless of income, lifetime breaks for homeowners over 65; the Legislature is struggling to scale back that one.

None of this suggest a state government, or a Legislature, with its eye on the future which, at the moment, seems bright.

For the first time in decades, Maine’s population is growing. It’s an attractive destination for young people, including those working the land – we’re the only state whose farmers are getting younger.

It’s an opportunity to match this rising tide with government reforms that could make Maine more prosperous, and a better place to live. And it starts with finding, and implementing, the best ideas.

Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, columnist and reporter since 1984. His new book, “Calm Command: U.S. Chief Justice Melville Fuller in His Times, 1888-1910, will be published later this year. He welcomes comment at drooks@tds.net

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Rooks: Maine's next generation of lawmakers making their mark