Gov. Paul LePage said Maine needs reduced energy costs, more effective education spending and a more restrictive fiscal policy that pays bills before issuing bonds.

Speaking at a Southern Maine Midcoast Chamber business luncheon Wednesday, LePage also delivered a stump speech that criticized — but did not name — policies espoused by likely 2014 challengers for the governorship. He called for improving Maine’s business climate, lowering corporate taxes, changing Maine’s educational practices and positioning the state to retain its youth and its “safe” quality of life.

All of it, he said, rests on making the state cheaper to live in and more attractive to industry.

“You have to identify and understand where your problems are,” LePage said. “Until we admit to ourselves that we have the 10th-highest energy costs in the country, we cannot be competitive.”

LePage cited information from HydroQuebec which places average monthly household electrical expenses of its customers at $34.

“How many of you in this room are averaging $34 a month? Case closed,” he said.

He also exhorted attendees to support a version of meritbased teacher pay that would drastically reduce the number of school administrators in favor of paying for classroom based expenses and teacher salaries.

Some Maine schools spend “as much as $38,000 per student,” he said, “and we get very poor performance.”

LePage compared what he described as Maine’s educational “stagnancy” to that of Florida’s, which has improved during the past 10 years under a reform plan established by former Gov. Jeb Bush, the son of former President George H.W. Bush and brother of former President George W. Bush.

Under guidance of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, Florida’s national ranking in numerous subjects, such as youth reading and comprehension, has improved while Maine’s has remained the same.

“That doesn’t mean that our school systems have gone way downhill,” LePage said. “In the last 20 years, the state of Maine’s scores have stayed stagnant. Twenty years ago Florida was doing really bad, but … today they’re third and we’ve gone way down.”

However, Bush’s not-forprofit foundation recently has come under scrutiny for aligning its philosophy with the financial interests of its donors.

In March, a story in the Tampa Tribune explained that FEE took “donations from for-profit companies to lobby for state education laws that could benefit those companies.”

jtleonard@timesrecord.com