What the election meant

Now that November’s electoral dust has (almost) settled, we might ask ourselves the question, what do the recent elections mean for the Maine coast and islands?

On a national level at first glance, many Maine coast interests appear to come out winners in Washington. Senator Collins’ victory gives her the Chair of the powerful Government Operations Committee that will control, among other lucrative initiatives, the newly created Department of Homeland Security with its billions of dollars of budget spending. Also with Republicans reclaiming the Senate, Olympia Snowe regains her Chair at the important Oceans and Fisheries Subcommittee that will control legislation regulating fisheries off the Maine coast.

Snowe may be able to help GoMOOS, which has become a national model for monitoring the pulse of the coastal ocean. In the short run Snowe’s ascension to the Chair could delay the decision on whether to institute even tougher restrictions over groundfish harvests in the Gulf of Maine. This is good or bad, depending on your point of view. Delaying hard decisions on stock rebuilding is hard to argue with, because the National Marine Fisheries Service has so completely compromised the results of its “scientific” trawl survey by mismatching the cables on its research vessel ALBATROSS. Delay may be the only wise choice in order to understand the impacts of the incident fishermen in the region are calling the “Alb atrocity.”

Senator Snowe’s subcommittee will also likely also take up the reports of two national ocean policy reviews – one conducted by the U.S. Oceans Commission under Retired Admiral James Watkins, the other financed privately by the Pew Charitable Trust, chaired by Leon Panetta, White House Chief of Staff in the Clinton Administration. The U.S. Oceans Commission, perhaps with the support of the Pew Oceans Commission, appears to be getting ready to recommend that NOAA be elevated to a Cabinet-level agency apart from the Commerce Department. The rationale in Washington is simple – in order to tackle the mounting problems of managing the nation’s ocean resources, you need money and clout. But it’s easy to predict that the Bush Administration’s enthusiasm for a more powerful and influential NOAA will be limited – if it smells like an environmental agenda, it’s an ola podrida, no matter how important it might otherwise be.

Back in Augusta, the Democrats are ascendant. But Governor-elect Baldacci is staring down the barrel of a shortfall of $1 billion-$1.5 billion in revenues during the next biennium that will make the current bitterness in electoral politics in Augusta seem like child’s play. It’s not just that there will be no new spending for community development and environmental priorities, but small towns are inevitably going to come out losers in the political game, just as small boats come out losers in fisheries politics.

What this all will mean for island and working waterfront communities is really nothing new. If our small communities and those small parts of what makes Maine Maine are to survive in this lean and mean economic and political climate, we will have to do it with local resources and the help of close friends. Washington and Augusta are simply not going to be much help to small towns at the expense of losing support from places where there are big votes – that is, big towns. If these new political realities create a climate where every town or every island simply fends for itself (which is usually what we do), then we’ll all go down with the ship. All small towns and working waterfronts are in the same boat – a lifeboat – and we need to develop a set of practical lifeboat ethics to help each other survive. But we also need support from where the votes are – in the big town. As Peter Mills said at a recent conference at the Institute that examined tax reform initiatives, “anything you come up with should be helpful and useful for the Abbots (a lakefront town in northern Maine) as well the Portlands.” We’ll either hang together or fall apart.