Good morning from Augusta, where Gov. Paul LePage is in the twilight of his tenure as an elected official. He said in a recent interview he won’t run for office again, but his move to roll out a two-year budget proposal could loom over his successor’s transition.
The outgoing Republican went over his tenure in an interview with C-SPAN that was released Thursday, saying his greatest accomplishment was paying back more than $183 million in debt to Maine hospitals in 2013 with revenue from a renegotiated liquor contract.
But Maine still has LePage until early January and he has chances to shape future policy as implementation of voter-approved Medicaid expansion sits in the courts. He also on Thursday released a framework of a budget proposalcoming in November that would cut income taxes.
LePage breezily went over his tenure in the C-SPAN interview, saying he’s over politics and he doesn’t mind if he’s not well-liked.The governor took credit for Maine’s low unemployment rate in the C-SPAN interview, attributing it to a climate that his administration helped create by pushing tax cuts. He flirted with a 2018 run for U.S. Senate before ruling it out last year. When asked if he would run for office again, the 70-year-old governor said “politics is out of my life.”
To read the rest of “Looking to shape his legacy, LePage says ‘politics is out of my life’,” an article by contributing Bangor Daily News staff writer Michael Shepherd, please follow this link to the BDN online.
