SANFORD — What’s up with the U.S. Senate and why can’t the parties seem to find common ground?

Ask U.S. Senator Angus King, I-Maine. King will tell you that he believes, in part at least, it is  because of the Senate schedules that see them all head for home on Thursday afternoons. It is because the political parties caucus weekdays at lunch. It is because they can’t seem to get to know one another.

“Senators don’t live in Washington, D.C.,” said King Friday at a Sanford Springvale Chamber of Commerce lunch meeting where he gave folks a glimpse of how things happen — or don’t — in the nation’s capital.

King said 40 years ago, when he was a staffer for Sen. William Hathaway, senators worked Monday through Friday. These days, he said the first senate vote is 5 p.m. on Monday and the last at 1 or 2 on Thursday. Then, no matter where they hail from, senators head home for the weekend.

“So we really don’t know each other,” he said. That lack of knowledge breeds a lack of confidence and trust that makes solving complicated, contentious issues more difficult, he added.

The affable senator said he’s made a habit of trying to get to know his fellow senators better, so he invites them to his D.C. home, six blocks from the Senate Office Building, for ribs, beans and cole slaw he picks up on the way. So far, about half of the senators have dined with King and his wife Mary Herman, he estimated.

King was in Sanford on a swing through York County, first stopping at the Eggs and Issues breakfast hosted by York County Community College in Wells, where he was scheduled to talk about broadband, workforce development and job growth.

In Sanford, he talked about the effort to reverse the Federal Communications Commission vote against net neutrality — and said he and Sen. Susan Collins are among 50 senators looking for the reversal.

“If the public gets riled up, I think we have a chance to turn it over,” he said. 

After leaving Wells, King stopped in south Sanford to tour the new Sanford High School and Regional Technical Center, under construction and scheduled to open in August —  “you’ll like it,” he told the Chamber of Commerce guests. At the luncheon presented a Congressional Record statement to the community, marking Sanford’s  250th anniversary of incorporation.

He was later scheduled to go on to Sanford’s Genest Concrete to present a Senatorial Certificate to honor its 90 years in business and then it was on to Biddeford, to present Biddeford Savings Bank with a Congressional Record statement to honor its 150 years in business.

As to doing the Senate’s business, King used a banking bill and a line from a Rolling Stones song to illustrate his point about gridlock and compromise.

King said the bill would help community banks and credit unions subject to what he described as unnecessary regulation under the Frank-Dodd law that went into effect a few years ago. There was a negotiation that would have resulted in some regulations on mid-sized banks being diminished, he said — and the senator  said he is getting heat for his support of the bill as currently proposed.

“I don’t like parts of this bill, but the alternate to compromise is gridlock,” King said. “Solving any problem involves compromise.”

Then he went on to quote the Stones’ Mick Jagger.

“You can’t always get what you want,” King said of the value of compromise. “But if you try, sometimes you find you get what you need.”

— Senior Staff Writer Tammy Wells can be contacted at 324-4444 (local call in Sanford) or 282-1535, ext. 327 or twells@journaltribune.com.