BY BEN JACKSON
District 37’s Jim Schatz comes up against the eight-year term limit on state legislature seats next year, and a crop of would-be House representatives are declaring their candidacies. District 37 includes Brooksville, Castine, Penobscot, Sedgwick, Surry and Blue Hill. Hopefuls met at Emerson Hall in Castine February 23 in a public forum organized by Castine’s Open Forum Committee.
Candidates answered questions they had been given in advance, prepared by Gunilla Kettis, the event’s moderator, and other committee members, before a question-and-answer session with attendees. Running for office are Ralph Chapman, a Democrat from Brooksville, Gay Leach, a Republican from Castine, who was unable to attend the forum, Jonathan Walden, a Surry Republican and Ben Wootten, a Blue Hill Democrat.
The discussion centered around local education, alternative electricity generation, the state budget, economy and jobs. Also talked about were questions of same-gender marriage, the gambling industry and healthcare.
Chapman works as a science teacher in a Bangor regional technical public high school and serves on Brooksville’s budget and advisory committee. He’s running, he said, “because I think I have some talents useful to the state in trying to deal with its financial and budgetary problems, which are many.”
Walden, a member of the Surry School Board, was the only Republican attending the forum. Walden said he’s running “for my children,” whom he looks after while his wife works as a nurse. He’s less concerned with winning his party’s primary, he said, and more with the “need to come to together and solve some of the issues.”
Wootten is an investment advisor with nearly 30 years on the board of trustees of George Stevens Academy in Blue Hill (eight as chairman), and is serving, as chairman, on the Blue Hill School Board. He has co-chaired the regional planning board and chaired the Maine small business forum. Wootten was at one time the chairman of the Republican party in Blue Hill; he has been a Democrat since 2001. He says he’s hoping to bring the “60 or 70 percent in the middle together” and that it’d be “really fun to try and work on seeing if we could get somewhere [in the legislature].”
Education was an area that all three attending candidates wanted to speak on, and state efforts to consolidate the schools was one education issue they talked about at length. Chapman said the state’s school district consolidation bill “did exactly what it wasn’t supposed to do” by directing more funds to better funded urban areas and less to rural school systems.
Wootten, who has worked on the committee tasked with planning the reorganization of school districts or “regional school unions,” said, “We’ve spent the last three years trying to fix the problems with it.” He has, he said, watched as the state’s “essential programs and services went from the minimum to the maximum” of the government’s commitment to schools. Wootten says consolidation has put “local control and quality of education” at risk, while ignoring “the cost of complying with it...because the big cities don’t care.”
Walden called consolidation “absolute junk...it makes no sense for rural Maine.” What would make sense, he said, would be consolidating some services like bus contracts into region-wide, even state-owned programs.
Talk of education took in several other issues. Chapman said “we’re failing our students...high school graduates should have a marketable skill, relevant to the needs of society and to the student.” He talked about high dropout rates in tertiary and higher education as evidence .
Wootten said he worried about the dropout rate, too, mentioning the usefulness of an “alternative high school” to help keep students within the school system.
Special education, said Wootten, is a huge drain on town resources: “the ball has been dropped more than it should [have]...special ed is an aspect of education that should be paid for 100 percent by the state.”
Walden chose to speak on alternative energy development. Though expressing doubts about human-influenced climate change, Walden came out as an enthusiastic supporter of renewable energy, specifically turbine technologies, which he called “good clean energy.” He cited University of Maine research into new composite materials and Castine’s tidal turbines as moves that might allow Maine to “sell our own electricity.”
Walden also spoke about the current surplus-buying arrangement with private wind turbine owners, indicating he thought that instead of earning “useless credits,” those who feed the grid with their surplus energy “need to be compensated.”
Alternative energy is an area Chapman champions as well. He said he “ran” the 100’ tall wind turbine at G. M. Allen and Son’s Orland site, “until it broke.” Chapman worked in solar energy research at MIT and Tufts, and has become involved in grant writing for local wind and energy auditing projects.
Questioned from the floor about their views on same-gender marriage, Walden responded, “it’s against the law.” Chapman said he had no problem with it and Wootten said “I think it’s a stupid law...I’ll work to change [it].”
The three candidates took different approaches to the question of the economy. Chapman said his philosophy was that “a job is a fundamental human right,” and said his focus would be adequate training programs and “local partnerships” between small businesses: “small businesses give more new jobs than big ones,” he says.
According to Wootten, Maine has seen the bulk of its industries leave or become redundant. “All that’s left is the extractive industries, and they’re dying too,” he said. What we can do, he continued, is to attract more residents (especially retired people) by lowering what he called “a prohibitively expensive estate tax.”
Walden’s idea is to “cut small businesses some slack” with taxes and infrastructure: “without broadband you can’t compete.” He also said he’d like to promote a seafood cannery operation in the state, “instead of shipping them over to Canada and buying at their prices.”
Wootten and Chapman will run against one another in the June Democrat primary, while Walden and Leach will face off in the Republican primary.
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