Blaine House 2010 | News

Jacobson touts experience in Maine business

Posted on Feb. 25, 2010, at 2:35 a.m.

Matt Jacobson, a Republican candidate in the 2010 Maine gubernatorial election, turned to his wife in bed one night before the campaign and expressed his frustration over the generational burden of what he sees as irresponsible spending by Maine’s political leaders in Augusta. She groggily told him to run for governor.

“After that, she’s never said I don’t listen to her,” Jacobson said in a telephone interview. “I can’t even describe the feeling when you feel like somebody’s taking something from your kid. It made me so angry I decided to run for governor.”

Jacobson, Cumberland, is an Air Force veteran and U.S. Naval Academy graduate who has lived in Maine nearly 10 years. From 1996-2000, he served as president of the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad. Since 2006, he has been the president of Maine & Company, a nonprofit corporation that helps businesses relocate or expand in Maine.

Jacobson said his experience in placing companies and workers in Maine has led to his deep understanding of the economic issues the state faces. Companies, according to Jacobson, want reduction in the cost of doing business and a consistent regulatory environment — policies he said his administration would address.

The University of Maine System, Jacobson said, “need[s] to see themselves as playing an integral role” in the state’s economic future.

“We’re not producing the right workforce,” Jacobson said. “Twenty-five percent of the kids in Maine don’t graduate from high school and only 25 percent go on and get some post-high school degree. That’s not good enough. I recruit companies every day and nobody has asked me for ignorant workers.”

David Connerty-Marin, director of communications for the Maine Department of Education, said it is true that 75 percent of high school students in Maine graduate, but refuted Jacobsen’s numbers on secondary education. He said nearly 60 percent of Maine high school graduates attend some form of college.

He said the University of Maine System is not doing enough to match academic programs with the state’s economic needs. If the system “funded and designed programs on placement rate” Jacobson said, the system would “look very different.”

Jacobson said tourism, one of Maine’s most important industries, is suffering because of lack of diversity in programs.

“There’s no four-year degree in culinary arts or hotel management or terminal operations. It seems to me there’s a huge disconnect when our largest industry isn’t supported by our university system.”

Jacobson also expressed support for consolidation of the university and community college systems in Maine, citing costs and overlapping in education.

“I don’t think we can sustain that kind of overhead,” Jacobson said. “I don’t think you can be, at once, excellent and inefficient.”

Jacobson said the current push in America and the world for alternative energy reminds him of the Gold Rush of the 1840s. Maine, he said, could have a strong future in the research and development sector, which would require a well-educated workforce.

“The people that got rich in the Gold Rush were Sears and Roebuck and Levi Strauss — the people who serviced the miners, not the people who actually mined the gold,” he said. “For us, if a Frenchman or a Texan wants to buy a windmill, we ought to build it and design it here.”

The Maine Legislature, Jacobson said, is not able to provide leadership in business for a lack of experience in the private sector. He believes he can provide that experience.

“If everything you know you learned in a legislative briefing room, you miss a lot of the nuance,” he said. “We ought to make Maine the easiest place in the world to do business. I don’t think anybody in Augusta focuses on that. Nobody says that. Nobody thinks that. That’s not how they act,” Jacobson said.

Jacobson supported TABOR II, which would have placed caps on public spending and required voter approval of any changes to the state’s tax structure and was defeated as Question 4 in the November 2009 state referendum. But, he said, he supported it out of frustration — not because it was great policy.

“I would prefer leaders to lead rather than algorithms to decide, but by the same token I have zero confidence that this group [in Maine’s Legislature] has any self-control or even understands why they need to have some,” Jacobson said. “We’ve got all kinds of government experience when the problem is that we don’t have enough private sector businesses and jobs here.”

Jacobson, despite his status as a political outsider, said he has run for elected office once and won. He is a former eighth-grade class president.

“My streak is on the line,” Jacobson joked. “I think I ran on the bubble gum at recess platform.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010, 2:35 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.