In Less than 10 Minutes

In a brief, yet informative podcast, Rebecca Lambert and Amanda Campbell highlight several municipal issues moving toward final action as legislative committees conclude their work. With the April 15 adjournment date approaching, committees are finalizing amendments to bills affecting county jail funding, the Essential Programs & Services formula, interim recommendations from the Real Estate Property Tax Relief Task Force, and housing.  These, and other proposals, will soon advance to the House and Senate for debate and final votes.  

Transcript

 Welcome everyone to Potholes & Politics, Local Maine Issues from A to Z. I'm your co-host Rebecca Lambert, and with me as always is my amazing colleague, Amanda Campbell. 

Good morning, Rebecca, and thanks everybody for listening. 

So, things are winding down at the legislature in anticipation of adjournment and rumor has it that all bills were supposed to be reported out of committee by the end of last week unless they were given specific permission by leadership to meet this week.

On our last episode, we provided an update on the budget items we are watching and a variety of other bills that are moving through the process. We also had the whole team on for the past couple episodes, which was a real treat for us and hopefully for our listeners too. If you haven't listened to it yet, please consider checking it out and while you're there, also think about liking and subscribing to our podcast. This is a great way to ensure you never miss one of these updates. 

And as always, our legislative bulletin is published every Friday during the legislative session. Another great way to stay on top of what our team is working on. And now that committee work is pretty much over and things are coming to a close, the legislative bulletin will also be put on hold. 

But for this week, let's get started. 

The Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee held a public hearing on LD 2232, An Act to Increase County Jail Funding, which was sponsored by Representative Hasenfus. This was a committee bill, representing the recommendations that were included in the report presented by the County Corrections Professional Standards Council back in February.

We talked about that LD 719 report a couple of episodes ago, and the February 6th bulletin discussed it in detail. So, we'll drop a link to both of those in the transcript if listeners wanna catch up. Essentially, LD 2232 proposes to increase the baseline funding for the jail operations fund, tie that funding to an inflationary index, change the way funds are allocated for community corrections and prevent any leftover funds from being swept into the general fund at the end of the state's fiscal year. There were lots of folks who testified and supported the bill, including MMA. And our interest in jail funding has everything to do with property taxes. There were no people in opposition, and after the public hearing, the committee went directly into a work session, which surprised me. The ought to pass as amended report increased the baseline to $30 million up from $20.4, which is currently in statute, tied that amount to CPI, or the consumer price index, and reduced the required allocation of funds for community corrections from 25% to 20%.

And while that ought to pass as amended report was not voted out unanimously, it did receive all but two committee member votes, which stakeholders are considering a success. So now the bill will go to the chambers and then to the appropriations table. 

Well, that's exciting news. Jails have been notoriously underfunded, so I hope this initiative makes it over the finish line.

So do we. 

In the Education and Cultural Affairs Committee, they held a work session on LD 2226, An Act to Amend the Essential Programs and Services School Funding Formula, reported by Representative Murphy of Scarborough. This is the bill that would make significant changes to the EPS formula based on the report that MEPRI did as a result of LD 318.

So, the analyst provided her bill summary to the committee and without a lot of discussion an amendment was offered, that would include several of the recommendations in the MEPRI report. During the bill summary, the analyst mentioned that there were some parts of the recommended special education changes that could cause some districts to fall out of compliance with the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Based on that fact, and also from testimony at the public hearing raising concerns with the special education changes, the committee didn't show much of an appetite to make any revisions to those sections except for the section that would raise the special education prevalence threshold from 15% to 17%.

Included in the amendment was updating the regional labor market adjustment to better reflect today's labor markets. This would add approximately $40 million to the formula to be sure that it adequately covers minimum teacher's salaries. The amendment also modifies the “ability to pay” formula to incorporate a poverty indicator into the existing property valuation calculation.

There were a couple different ratios discussed, but the committee landed on a 90/10 ratio, which is described in detail in the MEPRI report, and we will link that to you in the transcript for your convenience. Also included in the amendment, there was an update to the transportation cost model and would move to a variable weight for economically disadvantaged students, which would range from 0.15 to 0.35.

MEPRI will also continue to study the EPS formula, including studying other potential poverty indicators that wouldn't rely just on economically disadvantaged students to assess a community's ability to pay, but somehow include a factor that would reflect all community members, like those without students and the senior population.

I just wanna point out to our members that if you go back through the last couple of Town and City magazines, there are some really great articles that Rebecca has written about the EPS formula that makes it a lot easier to understand than a soundbite in a podcast. I really encourage people to go back and read those.

But back to this bill, there was a talk about adding a hold harmless provision in this bill as well? 

Oh yes. Thanks for asking about that. I was initially concerned about how the revisions would affect some of our members. For example, as mentioned in the March 13th legislative bulletin article, the Town of Scarborough stands to lose $1 million as a result of these proposed changes. To mitigate that, also included in the amendment, is a hold harmless provision so that no district would lose any state subsidy because of the changes for three years through fiscal year 2030.

Any negative changes after that period of time would be gradually phased in through fiscal year 2033. 

I know you were in the tax committee. Is there an update to share there? 

There is. The taxation committee reported out their committee bill, that considered the recommendations of the Real Estate Property Tax Relief Task Force, which I can finally say without flubbing up now that it's, you know, six months later, focusing on three items from the task force's report.

The bill authorizes a total of eight interim meetings, which will likely begin in May. The bill proposes an increase to the Property Tax Fairness Credit program for individuals under 65 by increasing the credit from $1,000 to $1,500, and establishes a group directed by Maine Revenue Services to survey local assessors regarding the tree growth current use program.

And the piece about tree growth was a bit contentious. The Maine Forest Service and forestry stakeholders felt like the program has been studied enough, and if it was gonna be studied again, it should be done in a way that any information gathered now could be compared to information gathered in the past, like an audit that the Forest Service has done previously.

The tax committee circled around the concept of whether good forestry policy is also good tax policy and eventually landed on directing MRS to convene the group and lead the survey since the tax committee is asking questions specific to tax policy and program implementation pieces at the assessor level. The tree growth program is a successful and important piece of the business landscape for the heritage forest industry.

However, the task force and the tax committee have heard lots of anecdotal reports about ways that the program is being abused, from assessors. This survey will give the assessors an official outlet to provide data to back up their anecdotal information. MRS will create a report that will be presented to the tax committee in January of 2027.

And this committee bill did not have a public hearing or a work session. It was more of a wordsmithing workshop, and as such, it will go straight to the chambers. 

Do you know why there wasn't a public hearing? 

Well, when a task force or a working group has the authority to report out legislation, they have the option of having it come back to the committee of jurisdiction for a public hearing and a work session. Or it can just be reported directly to the floor for debate. And in this case, the task force chose to report it directly to the floors. 

The last thing we wanna share with our listeners is an update on LD 2173. This is the bill aimed at fixing issues from last year's LD 1829. We like to call it the fix bill.

This initiative is still evolving after its fifth work session in the Housing and Economic Development Committee. A new amendment offered makes several key improvements including easing density limits in rural areas, refining sewer system definitions, allowing more flexibility in local growth ordinances and giving municipalities until July 1st, 2027, to implement the law.

Lawmakers also addressed concerns about development in sensitive natural areas and clarified when planning board review is required. The bill was voted unanimously out of the committee last week. However, given the emergency preamble, it's critical that the legislature has a two-thirds majority to pass the bill.

Local officials should contact their legislators to ensure they will support passage of the fix bill with the emergency preamble intact, so the state can proceed directly into rulemaking. 

Wow, five work sessions seems like a lot. It'll be interesting to see what happens when this bill makes it to the floor.

This is a super short and sweet episode of Potholes & Politics. Don't forget one of the last issues of the legislative bulletin will be coming this Friday. And as always, feel free to reach out to any of us on the team with any questions, comments, or fan mail. 

And we love fan mail. But most of all, we hope you found this information helpful and we appreciate you all.

So, thank you so much for listening. Have a great week everybody. Thanks so much. Have a great week.    

CCPSC LD 719 Report 

MEPRI EPS Study Report 

Maine Town & City 
EPS School Funding Articles in February 2026, January 2026, November 2025 & October 2026 

MMA Legislative Bulletin