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GEORGE SMITH: Brookings report, recommendations good places for LePage to start work

It’s time to revisit the exceptional 2006 Brookings report and recommendations.

When GrowSmart Maine brought the Brookings Institution here to figure out what the state’s problems are and tell us how to fix them, the group probably didn’t anticipate just how insightful these folks would be.

“Charting Maine’s Future: An Action Plan for Promoting Sustainable Prosperity and Quality Places,” is the unwieldy title of this 144-page plan.

For the record, the folks from Brookings got it dead right. Their findings and recommendations are especially important as the LePage administration seeks to bring serious change to Maine.

At a 2006 Portland press conference, I found Bruce Katz’s speech to be amazing, with an astonishing depth of understanding of what makes Mainers tick — and ticked off.

Katz, one of the authors of the Brookings report, said he was surprised, as he traveled the state to gather information and ideas from Mainers, how discouraged and pessimistic we are. Perhaps, I told him, it’s a character flaw, a collective lack of self-esteem. Or maybe we’re just realists.

Nothing that’s happened since has been encouraging. In fact, the state of our state has gotten worse.

The in-depth analysis of Maine’s demographics, economy, taxes and government spending, was well worth the $500,000 GrowSmart (on whose board I sit) spent on the study — but only if we use it wisely.

The report noted, “Maine is neither what it once was nor quite what it thinks it is.”

In 2006, after a period of stagnation, Maine’s population was growing again. Since 2000, our annualized growth rate had jumped 20 places from 46th to 26th — by far the greatest acceleration among the 50 states. During that period, we had the nation’s fifth-highest domestic in-migration rate.

This was driven by the arrival of newcomers with relatively higher household incomes and more young adults — a category where we’d been especially lacking throughout the 1990s.

While we were wringing our hands about the loss of manufacturing jobs, Brookings reported that we’d become a diverse, innovation-oriented services economy. The downside: Many high-paying manufacturing and forest jobs have been replaced by lower-paying consumer services positions.

The study was very candid about the pluses and minuses. While noting that “quality of place” is our principle asset, Brookings reported that 77 percent of Maine’s post-2000 population growth came in rural areas, resulting in conversion of “extraordinary quantities of rural fields and woodlots to resident uses.”

Brookings quantified something that has been bothering me for a long time. I’ve seen it as I hunted and fished in the backlands of our state. From 1980 to 2000, Mainers altered the character of 869,000 acres, or more than 1,300 square miles of rural land — an area about equal to the state of Rhode Island.

In the 1990s, only Virginia lost a greater share of its rural land than Maine.

The report demonstrated the high costs — in government and a degraded environment — of this rural development trend. It’s more personal to me. I’ve lost a lot of access to land and water, and the critters I enjoy have lost a lot of critical habitat.

The report presented “three serious state-level policy challenges,” all of them clear and compelling:

First, we learned that “an inconsistent economic-development stance over many years has weakened the state’s efforts to improve its economy.”  Like a kitten, we’ve chased our economic tail, never quite getting hold of it. We never met a new economic idea we didn’t like — for a year or two. But “the state has frequently failed to stick to and sustain its ideas.”

Challenge number two was no surprise. “Maine’s often-high costs of government and the unbalanced revenue system that supports them hinder the state’s ability to promote sustainable prosperity.”

This problem drove the 2010 ballot and brought Maine Republicans to power in Augusta for the first time in three decades. But Brookings told us this in 2006. Its analysis of our tax burden — and its terribly negative impacts — is the best I’ve ever read.

The third challenge is one we have not focused on in the past. “Barriers to development in traditional regional hubs, combined with weak local and regional growth management, are eroding the state’s unique character and contributing to sprawl.”

From ineffective state and local planning to “convoluted state and local construction rules,” Brookings illuminated a serious problem that contributes to the loss of traditional down towns and rural landscapes.

That one hits close to my rural home and heart. Let’s hope Gov.-elect Paul LePage has the Brookings report on his desk.



George Smith is a writer and TV talk show host. He can be reached at 34 Blake Hill Road, Mount Vernon 04352, or georgesmithmaine@gmail.com. You can read more of Smith’s writings at www.georgesmithmaine.com.

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