Legislative test ahead for East-West highway study
Legislative committees continue to pick apart specific portions of Gov. Paul LePage's $6.3 billion budget proposal, making recommendations to the appropriations committee, which will craft the final spending plan. By press time, lawmakers had recommended against proposals to suspend revenue sharing with municipalities for two years, scale back property tax relief programs and require school districts to pick up half of teacher pensions.
A bill to raise the state's minimum wage to $9 per hour by 2016 has also hit a snag on the way to the governor's desk as it awaits review on the Special Appropriations Table. Democrats, who supported and passed the bill in the House and Senate, are considering how to move the bill forward.
In other news around the capital:
East-west test
The Legislature's Transportation Committee will turn its focus this week to Cianbro chief Peter Vigue's proposal for an east-west highway traversing the state. Critics of the highway plan have taken issue with the project's level of public involvement, including a proposed $300,000 feasibility study by the state Department of Transportation. A number of bills the committee will review in public hearings April 30 take aim at that public-private relationship, seeking to ban the use of public funds for the feasibility study, ensure the inclusion of those documents in the public record and create a special review agency to oversee the feasibility study.
More gas
Legislators will hear testimony May 2 on a proposal to tap the state's existing, but unused, natural gas pipelines to serve customers in a given area. The bill, LD 827, before the state's Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee, would require a gas utility that has not served or does not plan to serve customers in an area for which it has already been approved by the state, to open its existing pipes and sell gas wholesale to other utilities that wish to build connections to serve customers in the area.
Private money, public office
For the first time in over a decade, a Maine Citizens for Clean Elections analysis found that private campaign expenditures outpaced campaign spending with Maine Clean Election Act funds. For the 2012 election cycle, MCCE reported that public fund spending totaled under $2 million, while private contributions to candidates and independent expenditures totaled nearly $5 million. Businesses made up about $2 million of those private contributions with financial, real estate and insurance sectors contributing nearly 20% of that amount.
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