Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Digg
Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
Bill Beardsley, a Republican, presents himself as a social and fiscal conservative who specializes in three issues — education, energy and the environment.
“Those are areas I have a deep passion for and knowledge of,” Beardsley, of Bangor, said in a telephone interview. “I’m not going to cede one iota of any of those things to the Democratic Party or independents.”
Beardsley believes Maine has not properly understood the different programs of study that should be offered in the University of Maine System and community college system. The University of Maine, he said, is suffering because of it.
“We’ve kind of blurred UMaine with the state college system, and we’ve blurred the state college system with the community college system,” Beardsley said. “The difference between the university system and the community college system is shrinking.”
This lack of difference, he said, is undermining the financial viability of many University of Maine System campuses.
“I think the University of Southern Maine is an example of where students are saying, ‘Well, I’ll just go to Southern Maine Community College, get a liberal arts [associates] degree, then transfer into USM at a junior level,’” Beardsley said. “You’ve seen a tremendous decline in their enrollment as a result of that.”
Beardsley sees UMaine as separate from the much smaller, regional schools in the university system. He believes the university should be governed by its own board, like the University of Vermont, and not by a chancellor’s office.
“I see UMaine as distinctively different, driven by its graduate [programs] and public service missions,” Beardsley said.
Beardsley said Maine spends more on higher education than New Hampshire and Vermont do.
“Is some of that due to geography, like everybody says? Or does some of it have to do with the smaller size of the institutions?” Beardsley asked. “Or are they inefficiencies?”
Beardsley said one of the reasons he was running for governor was the lack of job opportunities in Maine for graduating students — a problem he saw firsthand as president and chief executive officer at Husson University from 1987 to 2009.
“For 23 years, I’ve been turning out Maine students with professional degrees,” he said. “It just absolutely kills me that so many of them want to go home and have to leave to find a paying wage.”
Beardsley didn’t commit to advocating tax cuts to new Maine businesses, but wants to “get rid of the regulatory uncertainty and delay” that he says deter businesses from setting up in Maine.
Beardsley also expressed disbelief that Maine, a state with rich natural resources, could have such a struggling economy.
“You’ve got 3,500 miles of shore frontage. It’s the best sailing west of the Aegean Sea, the best lobstering in the world and you say to yourself … all that. What’s stopping us?” Beardsley said. “It’s inept government. It’s 20 years of monopolistic rule by the Democrats that don’t seem to understand how the economy works.”
Beardsley chastised state government for offering too many social welfare programs, but not offering enough in the medical care of lifelong Maine residents.
“We’ll give welfare and things like that the day a person gets off the bus, but there’s not enough for Granny, who is sitting in the nursing home and they just reduced her reimbursement because we have all these other things,” Beardsley said.
According to a Feb. 16 article in The Los Angeles Times, President Obama announced “$8 billion in loan guarantees needed to build the first U.S. nuclear reactors in nearly three decades.” Beardsley said Maine is “far and away” the best place in the northeast for nuclear power plants and other economic drivers.
“We have a [3,500] mile coastline. If all you took was one one-thousandth of that coastline … you put a nuclear power plant on one of those miles, you put a [liquefied natural gas] plant on one of those miles, and you put a deep-water port on one of those miles … you would put in three major industries,” Beardsley said. “My attitude is we can have both conservation and development at the same time if we commit ourselves to that and raise the standard of living.”
He was the vice president of Bangor Hydro from 1976 to 1981. He worked for the Alaskan state government in economic development in the mid 1980s. There, he focused on areas such as forestry and power development.
He has a Ph.D. in environmental studies from Johns Hopkins University and was an associate professor of natural resources at Alaska Pacific University.
Beardsley expressed respect for the other Republican gubernatorial candidates and their private sector experience. He said virtually all of the Democratic candidates have worked in state government already, and Mainers want to see a political outsider in office.
“I think it’s a Republican campaign to lose. In other words, they should be winning it,” Beardsley said. “Thirty percent of the voters are independent, so you can’t run as a Republican. You’ve got to run with confidence, with a vision.”
Beardsley said as governor he would veto a bill legalizing same-sex marriage but supports a referendum on the “very personal” subject.
