A man for the ages | A passion for directing young Mainers to bright futures fuels Bangor Savings exec

Yellow Light Breen has been a man to watch ever since he graduated from Harvard University and Harvard Law and went to work for the state Department of Education under Gov. Angus King.

It was there, in a temporary position that grew into a four-year post, that Breen says he “developed a personal passion for equality of educational opportunity as the issue I care most about.”

Now 38 and a resident of Holden, Breen has headed up several initiatives to integrate Maine’s brightest young people into a prosperous state economy, including Realize!Maine, and he now chairs the Maine Coalition for Excellence in Education, an advocacy group.

Locally, he’s also worked with numerous projects, including the Maine Troop Greeters and the acclaimed documentary film, “The Way We Get By;” Fusion: Bangor, a program for young professionals; the American Folk Festival and Collins Center for the Arts.

His day job is senior vice president for strategic development at Bangor Savings Bank, where he also heads the Bangor Savings Bank Foundation, which awards $100,000 in grants through the Community Matters More program.

The following is an edited transcript of a conversation with Breen that focuses on the often touchy subject of the relationship between business and government.

Mainebiz: I unearthed your senior oration at Harvard about thinking locally and acting globally — the reverse of the usual saying. I was struck by the sense of community you evoke, depicting Harvard as the “bastion of polo-playing, caviar-munching, champagne-sipping, world-trotting preppies” contrasted with the “pickup-truck-driving, moose-hunting, tobacco-chewing, lumberjacking Maineiacs.” You were speaking humorously, but these are stereotypes people have. Some years later, how do you see Mainers’ self-image versus the people from away?

Breen: Start with an easy one, huh?

Well, why not?

Maine is a very eclectic state. We have such an interesting constellation of folks who are here by birth, or by choice, or by accident. I’m fond of joking that my parents and their generation — the hippie, back-to-the-landers — were the outsiders in many rural Maine communities, until the people from Massachusetts moved up and bought places on the lake, and then the hippies and rednecks joined forces against the next set of newcomers.

People are always trying to figure out what is the essential character of Maine and of Mainers, and the reality is even within rural Maine, or even southern Maine, it’s such a diverse and eclectic place, to our great benefit. I always get a kick out of driving a road in coastal Maine and seeing the do-it-yourself junkyard next to the multi-million-dollar mansion. People interact much more here. We’re not racially diverse, but diverse in walks of life and ideological temperament. So that leads to communities and politics where people are focused on the substance of things.

There’s an anxiety about rural Maine, though. When you see struggling towns where the last school just closed, you realize these communities are not reproducing themselves. Is there a way to reinvigorate them?

It’s hard to drive across parts of rural Maine without being saddened by the decline of once-great mill towns or rural agricultural hubs. But I’m an optimist by nature. Industries that once were place-bound can now be anywhere, and they’re in places with the lowest cost structures — Indonesia or China or Brazil.

But it also works the other way. Many industries that once could only be in New York and Boston can be conducted from Maine now. But they’re completely different kinds of occupations. They depend heavily on skilled workers with great technological connections. So the piece about rural Maine I worry about is the connectivity to the technological infrastructure. The question is not how much is Maine losing historical industries, but are we winning our fair share of the new opportunities created by these dramatic shifts in technology?

You headed up a project for the Baldacci administration called Realize!Maine, an attempt to address the so-called “brain drain.” Are we losing a significant portion of our talented youth, or are we getting more back?

When we were digging into this, there were a few facts that defied the rural myth. In some years, we have had a modest net immigration of young people 25 to 35. Many people leave Maine for college or a first job, and with a small state located next to a region that has many excellent colleges, that’s always going to happen. And Maine may never have all of the entry-level opportunities you want. If you’re going to cut your teeth in investment banking, you’re not going to do it in Maine. You’re going to Wall Street. Does that mean that you might not come back as an equity investor or business person? You might very well come back.

Despite the myth, we learned that far more people move within Maine than leave the state. That’s slim consolation to rim counties because most people move to the next county over. They leave Piscataquis, Aroostook and Washington counties to move to Bangor. But at least they’re still here in Maine.

The eye-opening thing was that of the young people who did move to Maine, four-fifths were not from Maine originally. This clearly suggested an opportunity to sell the attributes of Maine.

The final piece is that the entire nation is aging, and birthrates are low. There are very few places growing except through immigration or higher birth rates among the Hispanic population.

Another theme of your career so far is education. You started early with the Department of Education.

I went to some of Maine’s most under-funded public schools in communities where there was no tradition of educational aspirations. In college, even the public schools my classmates came from were not the kind of schools we had in rural Maine. That gap in educational opportunity created a deep, gut-level sense of urgency — that we couldn’t have a great democracy and a strong capitalist system without more fundamental equality of opportunity.

Has that changed since you were going to school?

It has in some places. When a community goes through a wrenching economic dislocation, where it’s no longer good-paying, lifelong employment in a local mill, we have seen communities realize that what they want for their kids and grandkids has to be different in education and skills. I think about Dixfield, with Dirigo High School, and the dramatic change in aspirations and college-going. So, yes, in pockets around Maine, where a community as a whole realizes the world has changed.

But it’s not consistent. We’re one state, and it’s important to figure out the challenges of our most urban schools, with diverse populations and really high levels of poverty, and the rural schools, dealing with different but equally steep challenges. We can’t say, “As long as I can move to a district that is high performing, I’m not going to worry.” We need to worry about everyone’s children.

Probably the biggest education initiative of the current administration was consolidation. It had a lot of support from business people who understood this from challenges in the private sector. So how has that worked?

Oh, boy. I’m not sure which end of the balloon to start with, but there are a number of challenges with the district consolidation approach. I think it was done in the wrong way for the wrong reasons. It was primarily done to close a budget shortfall. Savings were booked before the initiative was even implemented.

That didn’t help as far as mobilizing any of the natural supporters. Consolidation was tied to size, as opposed to the real opportunities for efficiency. Even two moderately large districts next to each other might have had considerable efficiency gains. But politically they were exempt. So it quickly became rural Maine vs. the rest of Maine. And that’s really unfortunate.

I was really torn because the system we have is unsustainable. But I know these schools are the heart and the guts of small Maine towns. Even though it was district consolidation, the lack of real or perceived influence over your own local school, and the specter (that) someone else might be able to decide to close it, was wrenching.

I wish we had invested more in trying to figure out new ways of engaging a community around their school, even while we were trying to reduce administrative overhead. It’s crazy to have three bus runs where you could have one. But at the same time, we could have tried to increase parent and community engagement at the individual school level, where it matters most.

Is there a better way to do this?

On consolidation, we needed to go one of two routes, and we chose something in the middle, almost the worst of both worlds. We either needed a highly structured redistricting commission, with some assurances of objectivity, or, as some suggested, incentives.

Do you think we need to leave this alone? Do people need some time off?

Yes, I do. We still have to face the serious challenges that we need dramatically higher education performance. We can’t dodge these questions, but tackling them under the guise of consolidation would just be a continuing disaster with the resistance and fatigue that’s built up.

This ties into your work as head of the Maine Coalition on Excellence in Education. You seem to be trying to refocus it around these issues of performance. Is that your goal?

Yes. We have to figure out how to take education performance in Maine to the next level. We’re conceiving of it as a challenge that we can make serious headway on over the next decade.

Maine has done many great things. On many measures, we’re still better than many other states. But when you look at the numbers in absolute terms, they’re not good enough. Our proficiency numbers are better not because we’re so great, but because so many other places are so lousy. We have serious challenges if we want to have a work force that can feed a more prosperous economy. We’ve got to really dig into this.

Let’s turn to the continuing debate about business climate. You’ve worked in state government and now in the private sector. How do you rate our climate?

Something like business climate is tough because even if we make progress, it takes even longer to change perception than it does to change reality. I step back to observe that Maine is a high-cost state in a high-cost region in a high-cost country. And so our debates are always going to be relative. We have to keep our costs of doing business moderated enough so that they’re in line with who we compete against. Which is not going to be manufacturing in China for commodity items.

But if we keep it moderated so we can be competitive, we have to then be able to attract high value-added industries that can bear those intrinsically high costs.

All the business people I’ve talked to have observed that it’s less about the absolute cost, or the absolute level of regulation, so much as it’s consistency. One of the things that leads to negativity among business people is a feeling that they have to fight so hard to maintain any consistency to regulatory or tax requirements. That constant feeling of playing defense drives a lot of negativity.

Secondly, there is a feeling that elected officials don’t really appreciate what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, to decide to invest capital. The stability of return on long-term investment is pretty critical to convincing people to keep investing here, and either the Legislature doesn’t fully appreciate that, or at least it’s very difficult for them to act on it.

Years ago, Joe Sewall was Senate president while also president of Sewall Co. Would it help to have that perspective inside the Legislature?

It’s tough because running a successful business is a 24/7 proposition. I came to the private sector seven years ago, and I have a newfound appreciation for how all-consuming running a business is. I used to wonder the same thing myself. How come some business executives who could exert powerful influence to change the things that they bellyache about weren’t involved? Recently, Pete Vigue (of Cianbro) has gotten much more involved in public policy. A guy like Pete Vigue should be able to change our focus on higher education. But keeping a successful business running and providing a livelihood for employees is a consuming challenge in its own right.

I’m going back to my early economics classes about the concept of comparative advantage. Clearly, Maine’s not going to go up against some huge manufacturing operation in a huge country. But presumably we have comparative advantages. Are we finding them?

Despite all of the challenges of the forest products industry, there is a future for that industry, and we have to figure out how to make sure private-sector investments continue to be made. We have a tremendous natural resource base, a core competency in our work force and in ancillary businesses that support the industry.

One that is obviously new is the wind power industry, and Maine is not alone in trying to stake out a leadership position. We may be well positioned to be one of the handful of successful states. But it’s not always the new, sexy things. The boat building industry is a great, historical sector that has rightfully gotten some attention around how do we support a combination of high-tech production coupled with niche markets and high-end hand-craftsmanship.

A few years ago, Michael Porter, who studies comparative advantage, did a report on Maine, and he focused on figuring out where you already have an over-concentration. One that he identified that’s below the radar is food processing. The composition might change dramatically. Maybe it was sardines or chicken at one point, and now it’s Stonewall Kitchen or fresh frozen blueberries. Building on that existing comparative advantage is what Michael Porter advises, not always the next sexy thing every other place is going after.

Douglas Rooks, a writer based in West Gardiner, can be reached at editorial@mainebiz.biz.