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Waterville mayor Paul LePage came from a poor Franco-American family in Lewiston. He didn’t master English until he was well into his teens. His SATs were administered in French.
The Republican candidate for governor said the cuts to language majors at the University of Maine proposed by the UMaine Academic Program Prioritization Working Group on March 24 would be disastrous for the cultural future of UMaine and results from state fiscal mismanagement.
“Cutting languages is absurd,” said LePage, who has a master’s degree from UMaine. “They’ll cut their nose to spite their face. They’re just cutting the wrong thing.”
The candidate said offering a breadth of academic programs keeps native Maine students in the state for college, and cutting programs will send them elsewhere.
“The future of Maine and the future of our country is to have a well-educated, very competitive, intelligent people; and if we don’t do it, they’re going to leave and go get it someplace else,” LePage said. “Good people vote with their feet.”
LePage said there are many alternatives to academic cuts. He cited “administrative overhead” in the University of Maine System and an inefficient relationship between the university and community college systems as problems to address.
“What they should be doing is consolidating the community college and the university system into one instead of having two systems,” LePage said. “I think you can do a lot with less if you put your mind to it. I think we have to have our professors teaching [students] rather than teaching the system.”
The candidate said many areas in Maine have more than one college or university in the area — citing the proximity between UMaine and Bangor’s Eastern Maine Community College. He said programs within the two systems could be run more efficiently in the same location.
LePage said the system could be an important partner in Maine’s economic resurgence — a key part of which, he says, is innovation in traditional Maine industries.
“I’d like to bring back the paper companies. I’d like to bring back the family farms, and I’d like to see the restrictions on fishing be removed to a more common-sensical regulatory environment where we can fish,” LePage said. “I think the University of Maine System should be also a research institution to help grow the economy.”
LePage said UMaine students used to be hired for many jobs in the paper industry, but state overregulation has hurt that sector.
“The state is trying to preserve its forests rather than conserve its forests. That’s the problem,” LePage said. “I really believe that there’s room for good, environmental laws. There’s room for harvesting our forests in a good, environmental sense.”
LePage, the oldest of 18 children, was homeless in Lewiston from age 11-13. He currently serves as chairman of the Mid-Maine Homeless Center in Waterville. He said much of Maine’s homeless population is comprised of people who are mentally ill.
Many, he said, are often imprisoned for crimes, not treated for conditions and then released into the community without proper help.
“We need to focus on getting our mentally ill people out of jail and into treatment. What we have done in this state — we’ve abandoned the whole ideal of mental illness. We treat them as prisoners. We put them in jails, we release them and they’re on the street,” LePage said.
By addressing the problem of prisoners who are mentally ill, LePage said, “you would reduce the population of people in the jails, and you would reduce the population of the homeless.”
LePage touted a five-year period in Waterville wherein taxes were not raised. He says this came through “persistence and hard work.” He said he had to work with a Democrat-dominated city council and believes that reputation will follow him to Augusta.
LePage believes Gov. John Baldacci has made mostly “top down” decisions during his two terms — a problem that will not happen in his administration. He advocates further citizen involvement in government.
“I want to represent the one constituent that has been ignored in Augusta and that’s the Maine people,” LePage said. “What I’m going to do as governor is I’m going to have a cabinet meeting in a different county in a different community. And we will invite the public to attend the session. I will allow a session for people to speak up on what they think should be happening.”
LePage lamented President Obama’s March signing of national health care reform legislation, calling it “unconstitutional” and “a recipe for a huge disaster.”
“The United States of America was not built on the control or the strength of the government but the entrepreneurship, intuition, and the hard work of American people,” LePage said.
The candidate is also the general manager of Marden’s Surplus and Salvage, a Maine discount store chain with 14 locations from Sanford to Madawaska.
“What business really brings that government can lack is efficiencies,” LePage said. “From a bureaucrat’s point of view — if we’ve always done it that way, don’t change it. In business, you have to keep changing or you die.”
LePage said he collected signatures to get TABOR II onto the November 2009 referendum ballot. The bill, which would have placed caps on public spending and required voter approval of any changes to the state’s tax structure, lost by over 100,000 votes. LePage said “an enormous amount of out-of-state money” and fear tactics were used by opponents of TABOR II to defeat it.
“Everybody said that everything would fall apart and the budgets would fall apart, communities would fall apart and it was all smoke and mirrors,” LePage said. “People of Maine should not have to worry any longer because as governor, you don’t need TABOR. You have me.”
Bangor Daily News