Candidate Cutler Proposes Adding More Magnet Schools (Bangor Daily News)

Maine Wellness – Lower Cost Healthcare for Maine

March 24th, 2010

Maine’s rapidly rising annual expenditures for healthcare are crippling Maine’s working families, who pay too great a portion of their wages for healthcare, and are breaking the backs of Maine employers. High healthcare and insurance costs are one of the most important factors making it difficult to live and do business in Maine.

We can bring healthcare costs under control in Maine by providing essential health-care services for all Maine citizens through Maine Wellness, a new statewide framework within which coverage and care will be provided at a price that Maine businesses and taxpayers can afford, while preserving individual choice and the important relationships between patients and caregivers.

The Maine Wellness framework will be based on these three principles:

All Mainers should have access to essential health care services.
The program must be financially sound and sustainable.
We will reward healthy behaviors and pay for healthy outcomes, de-emphasizing payments for procedures as much as possible, because many of the diseases we pay to treat are preventable.

Our program will borrow from the highly successful efforts undertaken by Cianbro, Hussey and other large Maine employers, who have succeeded dramatically in controlling costs and providing incentives for people to stop smoking, to lose weight and to take better care of themselves. Maine Wellness will be built on the foundation of Maine’s strong system of non-profit hospitals and committed physicians and caregivers.

Maine Energy Resources – Lower Cost Electricity for Maine

March 24th, 2010

We have an extraordinary abundance of clean, renewable energy resources in Maine: our forests and croplands, our onshore and offshore wind, our tides and our ample sun. We need to be sure that some of these renewable resources are used to generate electricity for use right here in Maine, to lower electricity costs for Maine businesses and homeowners and to generate jobs and incomes for Maine.

Maine Energy Resources, a publicly-owned business chartered to operate as a public power authority, will use low-cost, tax-exempt capital to generate electricity throughout Maine from our renewable resources and will accelerate the development of clean and low-cost electricity in Maine. Maine Energy Resources will invest in energy efficiency in Maine and will enter into public-private partnerships with energy entrepreneurs. Maine Energy Resources will not export electricity out of state, because an important part of its mission will be to put the electricity to work in Maine.

Lowering the cost of electricity is one of the most important tools we can use to keep jobs in Maine, to expand businesses in Maine and to attract new investment.

Rebuilding: Investing in Maine’s Competitive Assets

March 23rd, 2010

For decades in Maine, our economic development efforts have been uncoordinated, duplicative, wrongheaded and unproductive. Cities and towns in Maine with the same fundamental interests in economic development have been competing against each other in exhausting, expensive and fruitless efforts to build their individual commercial tax bases. Literally hundreds of state, regional, local and non-profit agencies in Maine spend millions upon millions of dollars every year chasing jobs and industries that have little cause to move to Maine, while paying scant attention to the needs of businesses that already are in Maine and want to expand.

Our high cost structure has built a wall around the State of Maine, one that discourages new businesses from moving to Maine and investing here, while behind that wall we have failed to invest in a focused way in our competitive assets. Cutting our cost structure – lowering the cost of living and doing business in Maine – is our most urgent and immediate challenge, but at the same time we also need to bring a new, strategic and far more focused approach to investing in Maine’s competitive advantages – our young people, our quality places, our natural resources and our strategic location.

Investing in Maine’s Natural Resources

March 23rd, 2010

Maine is blessed with abundant resources of farmland, mighty forests, clean waters and the Gulf of Maine. Farming, forestry and fishing were the cornerstones of our state’s economy in our beginnings. These remain keystone industries. In a world increasingly desperate for the products that we can harvest, investment in the sustainable development of our natural resources can drive Maine incomes higher.

Lowering Maine’s cost structure in the ways that our Strategy suggests will have a discernible impact in short order. Lower electricity and healthcare costs can extend the growing season throughout our state, revitalize our pulp and paper industry and promote more efficient and more profitable lumber and wood products mills. Research and development efforts in composites and bio-fuels also hold great promise for using Maine’s resources in new and innovative ways.

While Maine’s traditional fishing industries face many challenges, our coastal waters and the Gulf of Maine represent an amazingly diverse resource that will continue to be a bountiful source of food and protein that the world needs. The same is true for Maine’s agricultural lands, as demand for locally sourced foods increases and the issue of food security becomes more prominent.

All of these efforts to use Maine‘s natural resources in innovative and sustainable ways benefit from something else that has incredible value: Maine’s legendary reputation for quality. That’s our brand, and we must continue to safeguard it, invest in it, and promote it.

Investing in Tourism, Recreation and Maine’s Places of Character

March 23rd, 2010

We call ourselves Vacationland, and tourism is our largest industry, but it also is an industry that for too long has been taken for granted and underappreciated. We will change that. People come to Maine from all over the world because of what we have to offer: a beautiful coast, pristine lakes and ponds and miles of rivers for fishing and recreation. We also have vast tracts of wilderness areas, majestic mountains, and communities filled with history, culture and warm and friendly people.

People come here to hunt and fish, to go sailing, kayaking, canoeing, bicycling, hiking, skiing, snowmobiling and a host of other outdoor pursuits. Many people own second homes in Maine. And Maine is an increasingly popular place for people to retire, bringing with them disposable incomes and valuable skills, while placing few demands on our schools and state services.

But like any industry, tourism requires investment. We are competing for visitors with other places around the country and throughout the world. We cannot simply take it for granted that people will come here because they always have; we must promote ourselves aggressively, continually search out new markets and find ways to help our tourism, recreation and sporting businesses invest in the kind of infrastructure and amenities that will keep people coming back to Maine.

Lowering the cost of doing business in Maine will help our tourism-related businesses, just as it will all other businesses, and investing in education, especially hospitality and recreation management programs, will make sure that the industry has trained workers and is developing the next generation of industry leaders.

Finally, people come here because Maine is special – what has come to be called quality of place. Maintaining that quality experience is the most important investment we can make. That means respecting and protecting our natural environment and our wild and scenic places. It means preserving farmland, forests, working harbors and downtowns. It means welcoming investment in our state, but doing so on our terms, not someone else’s.

Investing in Maine’s Strategic Location

March 19th, 2010

For too long we have thought of ourselves as being at the end of the line. That is a shortsighted view. Instead of just looking south to the rest of the United States, we should look north to Canada, our largest trading partner, east to Europe, and over the North Pole to Asia.

In a world that is increasingly interconnected, Maine is strategically located to provide access to population centers in the Northeast and Midwest U.S. As Canada develops its energy resources and a major international deepwater port in Halifax, Maine can position itself as a critical link in moving energy and goods through our state. However, we need to invest in our seaports, rail lines, roads and airports. We need to support the responsible development of LNG terminals and energy corridors and to undertake a public-private partnership to build an East-West highway.

Great opportunities to create new jobs, increase incomes and develop new revenue sources lie before us if we take full advantage of our location and invest in the infrastructure that will put us in the center of the action, instead of at the end of the line or sitting on the sidelines.

Background Checks on the Purchase of Guns & Firearms

March 15th, 2010

“I support the current law requiring background checks on firearms purchases from licensed dealers and would support extending background checks to private sales (except between family members) and sales at gun shows if this could be accomplished in ways that don’t add additional costs or burdens on sellers and buyers. For example, there might be a toll-free number that sellers could call to get verification immediately over the phone.”

VIDEO: Fixing Maine’s Financial Problems

March 14th, 2010

Eliot has been spending a lot time talking about Maine’s financial and budget problems. Maine needs to re-start economic activity — investment, jobs, and incomes — and Mainers need to start mapping out a strategy works toward shared goals.

Here are three, separate YouTube videos in which Eliot discusses Maine’s financial problems and how we can go about solving them.

PART I

PART II

PART III

Eliot Offers Positions on Maine’s Natural Resources (Kennebec Journal)

March 12th, 2010

George Smith, executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, posted a review of the gubernatorial forum sponsored by the Natural Resources Network. The article appeared in The Kennebec Journal.

Below is the coverage of Eliot’s answers:

ENERGY

Cutler sees natural gas as an important ingredient in lowering costs, and he supports an LNG plant in Maine. He would shift home heating from oil to electricity. His most innovative idea — and it’s really an old one — is to create a public power authority.

NORTH WOODS

Cutler called for changes in the way we do easements, citing landowners’ concerns about liability and value. He said resolving these concerns is “centrally important to continuing uses in the North Woods.”

CONSOLIDATION OF STATE AGENCIES

Cutler elaborated on his opposition to consolidation, saying, “I’ve done government reorganizations at the federal level; some worked, some didn’t. Moving boxes around is not smart business. When you have agencies that relate directly to what centrally defines our state and manage our resources, mergers don’t make sense. What does make sense is changing the way we do business to reduce costs and tear down the wall of ‘no.’”

I really like that “wall of ‘no’” concept, but I would expand it to say no harm should be done to our environment as we use it to expand our economy.

Please click here to read the complete article here.

VIDEO: ‘Shoulders to the Wheel’ at Fishermen’s Forum

March 12th, 2010

Eliot spoke at the Fishermen’s Forum on March 5th, 2010, in Rockport, ME. He discussed the critical importance of working together — as One Maine — to address and beat the critical challenges facing Maine today.

SHOULDERS TO THE WHEEL

Eliot's Blog

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