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Most of the us at the University of Maine are Mainers. Many who are not will stay here after they graduate. As such, the future of this state is important for students — we need a Maine we can be proud of.
There are seven questions on next week’s ballot that will affect the future of Maine. We feel that Questions 1 and 4 — the people’s veto of same-sex marriage and TABOR II — will most drastically change the state and university we all call home.
Our support for the same-sex marriage bill passed by the legislature and signed into law by the governor last year is well known (see the April 23, 2009 editorial, “State should support gay marriage”). Simply put, a “yes” on Question 1 will ensure that Maine remain fundamentally unequal. This is a fact regardless of whether you think that form of inequality is right. We feel it would be a great injustice.
But the threat of inequality is not the only one facing Mainers. In the same way a “yes” on 1 is a vote for inequity, a “yes” on Question 4 — the so-called Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights” — is a vote for instability and poor education.
Placing an unrealistic formula on the state’s budget, TABOR will force the legislature to make painful cuts in state spending. As students — or anyone else connected to this university — we should be especially fearful.
State appropriations make up 27.8 percent of UMaine’s 2010 budget — $89.4 million. When the state is unable to raise the money it needs — the state’s budget would have been 17 percent lower last year if TABOR had been in effect — what will happen to the university?
Since Colorado enacted TABOR, spending on higher education has dropped 31 percent. Their K-12 spending dropped from 35th in the country to 49th.
For UMaine, a drop of that size represents a loss of $27.7 million in state funding. That’s teachers and staff who won’t be paid, buildings that won’t be repaired, research that won’t be conducted and financial aid that won’t be awarded. That’s a gap that will need to be covered by a hike in tuition and fees, if it is addressed at all.
So what do we want for Maine? We can have a state that recognizes only one kind of love and can’t provide the services its citizens need, or one that stands for equality and values education and stability.
Vote “no” on Questions 1 and 4.
Bangor Daily News