Good morning from Augusta, where concern is growing that the Maine Clean Election Fund won’t be able to make payments to legislative and gubernatorial candidates — or even pay the Maine Ethics Commission’s rent — after July 1, even though there is enough funding.
Jonathan Wayne, executive director of the Maine Ethics Commission, said Wednesday that there’s a “really serious problem” that “amounts to changing the rules of the game in the middle of an election.”
At issue is one of the dozens of bills left unfinished last month when House Republicans in the Legislature voted to adjourn instead of extend the session to complete unfinished work. The bill in question would clarify or correct a number of errors and inconsistencies in Maine’s laws, including one involving the state’s public campaign financing program that results from an amendment to last year’s state biennial budget bill.
The amendment was meant to help, by changing the schedule of payments from the state’s General Fund to the Maine Clean Election Fund so there would be enough money to cover all of the publicly financed campaigns this year. Instead, it mistakenly included language that bars the commission from paying for anything at all from the fund after July 1, including payments to candidates and overhead expenses such as rent and reimbursements for services from the Department of Administrative and Financial Services.
The County is pleased to feature content from our sister company, Bangor Daily News. To read the rest of “Maine is edging closer to a public campaign financing crisis,” an article by contributing Bangor Daily News staff writer Christopher Cousins, please follow this link to the BDN online.
