Maine Legislature must downsize
To the editor:
In almost every legislative session in recent years there has been talk of reducing the size of the Maine Legislature. It has not happened because it would require a change in the Maine Constitution and changing the Constitution requires a two thirds vote of both the House and Senate and then a majority vote of the citizens. I believe that the citizens of Maine would gladly vote to reduce the size of the legislature but the Maine Legislature has never put it out to a vote by the citizens for a variety of reasons.
Another factor that makes change almost impossible is the fact that the Maine Constitution cannot be changed by a Citizen’s Initiative. Citizens of Maine can bypass the legislature on almost every issue but this one. In order to do what is right for the state the 35 Senators and 151 House members need to put personal and other issues aside and make the needed change.
The overall size of the legislature is not the only change that is needed. The way the Maine Senate is structured needs to be changed in order to have fair representation throughout all of Maine. Maine senators should be distributed similar to the distribution of senators in the United States Senate and not by population. This would give Maine’s least populated counties better representation. In Congress, each state has two Senators while house members are distributed by population. This was decided by the framers of our U.S. Constitution on July 16, 1787 at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. This system has worked well for the United States and would work well for Maine.
Currently, York, Cumberland and Androscoggin counties have a total of 16 senators serving all or a part of those counties. Those three counties make up a total of 2,301 square miles in a state that is spread out over 30,861 square miles. In a brisk six-hour walk, some senators in Cumberland County could cover their entire Senate district while in Senate District 34, the district I served during the 122nd legislature, it would require six or seven hours of continuous driving just to drive around the perimeter, not to mention the hundreds of miles of roads and highways in-between.
Maine citizens should contact their State senators and representatives and make their feelings known regarding this very important issue. The time is right.
Dean Clukey,
retired State Senator
Houlton
