Moore holds the ticket

Michael Shaw may be an Amtrak conductor, but after Monday night’s recount, Standish Rep. Gary Moore seems to be the one left holding the return ticket to the State House.

While Shaw would have made a fine representative, Moore appears to have the race clinched after a tense recount Monday in Augusta. Moore won by six votes in the recount. That’s a far different result than the one the two candidates got on Election Day when Moore was trailing by 13 votes.

Until Shaw concedes, the recount is not official. He may not concede. With six votes, this may not be over soon. On Monday after Thanksgiving, there will be a meeting in Augusta of both sides and we’ll get some more answers then.

With six votes separating winner and loser, Election Day 2006 will be a constant reminder to Moore that not everyone was happy with his last two years. Perhaps, they, like us, remember his bill to increase the governor’s salary. There will be no time for such frivolity this session.

With the cost of health care insurance getting out of hand and no real property tax relief in sight, there’s a lot of dirty work to be done in Augusta to get Maine’s financial books in order. We don’t want to be listed alongside Louisiana for personal income, do we? We don’t want to be last in the nation for tax burden in relation to income. Moore is a third-term legislator now, and that means he needs to step up and take more of a leadership role. They say incumbents have more power. We want to see him put some of that power to good use.

All the legislators elected this November in the Lakes Region – all of them incumbents, by the way – need to get down to business, not just Moore.

And while there is still a possibility that Mike Shaw will roar back with what would now be a come-from-behind win, it’s more likely that Moore will return for his third term in Augusta. And that third term needs to be spent wisely, since Mainers are looking to their leaders for help and Moore is one of the couple-hundred representatives and senators who can offer it.

Raymond can’t get no respect

It’s been enlightening to watch the Raymond Board of Selectmen struggle to be heard by another governmental entity, Cumberland County.

It seems Raymond officials can’t get no satisfaction when it comes to asking the county to reduce their taxes. Raymond officials argue that they use little in terms of services, and therefore, shouldn’t have to pay so much in taxes. But the county refuses to listen.

There are a few reasons the county isn’t listening. First, Raymond does use its fair share of county services. Unlike Scarborough, South Portland, Brunswick, Windham and other towns in the county, Raymond uses Cumberland County for policing services. That’s a big deal. And they need to pay for it.

Second, the county probably isn’t listening because of something we’ll call the “Frye Island effect.” To explain, the town of Frye Island has in the past tried to get out of paying school taxes to SAD 6. It says it has no students, and shouldn’t have to pay toward SAD 6’s annual education costs. Reacting to the Frye Island threat quickly, neighboring Standish twice lobbied hard in recent years to defeat the islanders’ proposal and won. Standish won because the state Legislature agreed that even though the island community used little in terms of services, it had to stay in the school district and pay, for the good of the education system. We wonder if county officials feel similarly with Raymond. When Raymond leaders say they need only county policing services and little else, county governors probably roll their eyes, just as Standish residents once did when Frye Islanders sought similarly reasoned exemptions.

Thirdly, and probably the main reason the county is unable to respond to Raymond’s wishes, is that the county is backed against a wall. The county budget is driven mostly by the Cumberland County Jail. The cost of housing prisoners is increasing, because as Sheriff Mark Dion is well known for saying, it’s become more of a hospital than a jail, and his people are not trained to deal with the mental disorders and substance abuse problems they encounter.

Dion’s job is probably the least appreciated in the state. The guy has to manage a crowded jailhouse that is operating beyond its capabilities. The Sheriff’s Office is likewise overworked with heavy demands of each deputy and detective. Because of budget restrictions, the county can’t recruit high-caliber candidates for jobs inside the jail, and they can’t build more space to handle what has become an overcrowded jail environment. The county budget as presented, with its 5 percent increase, seems to be a bare-bones budget, but still Dion and County Manager Peter Crichton get blamed for costs that are ultimately out of their control.

Raymond leader are right to complain about high taxes, but they need to remember where to focus their blame. It isn’t toward Dion or Crichton. They are making the best of a dismal and faulty system. It’s Maine’s incarceration, rehabilitation and policing system that should be their target.

It seems like we have three choices, all of which will cost money. The first choice is to continue what we’re doing and manage to get by with a defective county jail where the mentally ill, alcoholics and druggies are tossed in with serious and not-so-serious criminals. We choose this course, and our jail will continue to crumble from the inside out, and our budgets will keep rising.

Our second choice is to separate real criminals from the other inmates. We need to pluck ourselves from politically correct, yet failed ideas and bring back a sort of old-time mental asylum where the ill are gathered together to receive treatment. (But this time, we treat them all with respect and great care.) In addition, we send drug and alcohol abusers to another place where they can get the therapy they need. Only then can the jail go back to being a real jail – for criminals.

There is a third option as well: Get rid of the county jail altogether and go with local police departments and an incarceration system run solely by the state of Maine. Employ the same tactics of dividing the criminals from the mentally ill and chemically dependent classes, and we might have a better and cheaper system. In a word, regionalize.

Raymond leaders should be applauded for disputing the town’s county tax bill. Their protests come from witnessing a crumbling, ineffective system, which gets resuscitated year after year by willing deep-pocketed town governments not wanting to stir the pot. Raymond officials don’t want to contribute their constituents’ hard-earned dollars to continue this downward spiral.

Though their requests for fiscal restraint may fall on deaf ears this year, Raymond leaders’ complaints will, in the long run, benefit the rest of Cumberland County by forcing state and county leaders to come up with a different system.