Published in the Portland Phoenix
This week, we at the Portland Phoenix celebrate 10 years of serving Portland and Maine as your news, arts, and entertainment authority. And we celebrate a decade of you, our readers, giving us your attention in an increasingly jam-packed media world.
Portland is a small place that has a lot packed into it. (We actually kinda like that description of ourselves as well.) And we have managed to cram a lot into this issue — it's our annual Fall Preview issue as well as a celebratory anniversary edition — and we hope you'll check everything out.
But before you get there, let's start with the predictions then-staff writer Alex Irvine made five years ago, in our fifth-anniversary issue. He listed five themes that had been covered throughout the Phoenix's first five years that would still be current in five years' time (that is, now). And he went four-for-five.
GAMBLING Yep. Another proposal is in development now.
WATERFRONT The Maine State Pier mess is no more solved now than then, and statewide, working waterfront is still under serious land-use pressure.
DIRIGO HEALTH Whether as an example of how to reform healthcare, how not to, or something in between, he was right on.
MERCURY The environmental toxin is still an issue, but not much under discussion these days. We'll call Alex wrong on this one.
GAY CIVIL RIGHTS Oh yes, for sure. If you don't know that, plug into a Webtube.
In this issue, we look back at the past 10 years. Shay Stewart-Bouley mulls over how diversity has changed in Maine since 1999, and cartoonist David Kish offers us some ideas for new niche products we at the Portland Phoenix might create.
Then there's Deirdre Fulton's review of selected of stories we've been telling you about for a while, updating them with where they are today.
If you're wondering what life is like if you work at the newspaper, the only person who worked full-time at the Portland Phoenix from 1999 all the way through 2009, Marc Shepard, has graced us with funny tales he claims to remember from our history.
And our arts writers have reviewed what has happened in Portland since the turn of the millennium. Sam Pfeifle tells us about the 10 most influential bands of the past 10 years; Megan Grumbling recounts the losses and the incredible gains Portland's theater community has seen; Ken Greenleaf looks at the state's artistic scene and notes a few changes; Lindsay Sterling explains how Portland became such a foodie center.
And while Al Diamon gives us a peek at what Maine might be like in 2019, we'll take a slightly less dystopic view. Here are five key issues that will occupy us for some significant period of the next 10 years, and our predictions for what might have happened by 2019.
UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE Maybe we'll have solved it by then.
GAY CIVIL RIGHTS Full legal equality will have been in place for some time, nobody will be worse off, and many people will be better off.
GLOBAL WARMING This will be the crisis of the age, requiring political, economic, and social will like no worldwide challenge before. Its effects will reach into every aspect of our lives — transportation, communication, even food — and will require a concerted international effort to address.
GAMBLING Pro-gambling efforts will continue to propose increasingly better deals for Maine, in hopes of getting their mitts on at least some of our cash. Perhaps by 2019 they'll have offered to just give us our money back at the door.
STATE BUDGET CUTS If Maine's budget forecasters don't improve their skills, there might be precious little left to cut from services to the needy, and politicians will have to consider cutting tax breaks for the wealthy.
We recognize that looking forward is largely for entertainment value, but our looks back showed us exactly how much really does change over time. It doesn't always seem like it, we agree, but Portland is a very different city — very much for the better — today than it was in 1999. We'd like to think we've had some small part in that improvement, and we're definitely proud of how we've helped explore and explain it to you.
Thanks to our readers, writers, staff, advertisers, and friends. Thanks for sticking with us for 10 years, Portland. And thanks, in advance, for the next 10, and beyond.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Party Politics: Snowe: A party of one
Published in the Portland Phoenix
US Senator Olympia Snowe has maneuvered herself into a position where she is the only hope Democrats have of getting a "bipartisan" agreement on healthcare reform. But it's really less that she's being bipartisan than that her bloody-minded Republican colleagues have left her as the last remnant of a system in which the two parties disagreed but found middle ground on which to govern together.
As we have told you before, Snowe is seen as politically crucial to President Barack Obama's efforts to fix our nation's broken healthcare system, but has stuck fast to her idea of compromise — in which a public-option plan would only be available if competition did not improve some yet-to-be-specified amount over some yet-to-be-specified period of time after a bill was passed (see "Snowe Misses the Point of Healthcare Reform," by Jeff Inglis, July 10).
Of course, with Snowe's major campaign donors coming from the insurance and medical sectors, it's unclear what specifics would be suitable to her. (And it's worth noting that many of the hardcore public-option Dems are heavily indebted to labor unions.)
Snowe was able to reshape the financial bailout and economic-stimulus package because the Republicans refused to be bipartisan. She is again a party of one on healthcare reform, less by her own doing than because she has been abandoned — not only by the rightmost ideologues in her party but even by fellow "moderate" Republican Senator Susan Collins. Long a fence-sitter, Collins took to CNN Sunday to tell State of the Union viewers that she opposes a public option, even if it were delayed and watered down along the lines of Snowe's proposal.
Now Snowe herself has gone even farther, outright asking Obama to drop the public option, saying on CBS's Face the Nation Sunday that there is "no way" a plan with a public option can pass Congress. And she may be right about the vagaries and perversities of how Congress works. But with that declaration, she made clear that while the Democrats retreated on the public option in hopes of getting a bipartisan agreement, they are likely now to end up with neither.
But in the wake of recent polls showing strong public support for a public option, and even one showing that nearly three-quarters of doctors favor a public option or just outright single-payer healthcare, Democrats are starting to climb back, with many saying it's important to have a public option in some form, specifically because of the need to provide competition to health-insurance companies.
It remains to be seen if Snowe will support a bill with a public-option trigger like the one she originally proposed, or if she will instead stick with her new request that any sort of public option should be "off the table." It also remains to be seen whether anyone else joins what we might as well start calling the Snowepublican Party.
US Senator Olympia Snowe has maneuvered herself into a position where she is the only hope Democrats have of getting a "bipartisan" agreement on healthcare reform. But it's really less that she's being bipartisan than that her bloody-minded Republican colleagues have left her as the last remnant of a system in which the two parties disagreed but found middle ground on which to govern together.
As we have told you before, Snowe is seen as politically crucial to President Barack Obama's efforts to fix our nation's broken healthcare system, but has stuck fast to her idea of compromise — in which a public-option plan would only be available if competition did not improve some yet-to-be-specified amount over some yet-to-be-specified period of time after a bill was passed (see "Snowe Misses the Point of Healthcare Reform," by Jeff Inglis, July 10).
Of course, with Snowe's major campaign donors coming from the insurance and medical sectors, it's unclear what specifics would be suitable to her. (And it's worth noting that many of the hardcore public-option Dems are heavily indebted to labor unions.)
Snowe was able to reshape the financial bailout and economic-stimulus package because the Republicans refused to be bipartisan. She is again a party of one on healthcare reform, less by her own doing than because she has been abandoned — not only by the rightmost ideologues in her party but even by fellow "moderate" Republican Senator Susan Collins. Long a fence-sitter, Collins took to CNN Sunday to tell State of the Union viewers that she opposes a public option, even if it were delayed and watered down along the lines of Snowe's proposal.
Now Snowe herself has gone even farther, outright asking Obama to drop the public option, saying on CBS's Face the Nation Sunday that there is "no way" a plan with a public option can pass Congress. And she may be right about the vagaries and perversities of how Congress works. But with that declaration, she made clear that while the Democrats retreated on the public option in hopes of getting a bipartisan agreement, they are likely now to end up with neither.
But in the wake of recent polls showing strong public support for a public option, and even one showing that nearly three-quarters of doctors favor a public option or just outright single-payer healthcare, Democrats are starting to climb back, with many saying it's important to have a public option in some form, specifically because of the need to provide competition to health-insurance companies.
It remains to be seen if Snowe will support a bill with a public-option trigger like the one she originally proposed, or if she will instead stick with her new request that any sort of public option should be "off the table." It also remains to be seen whether anyone else joins what we might as well start calling the Snowepublican Party.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Your Money: Here comes the FairPoint bailout
Published in the Portland Phoenix
We thought the bailouts were over. They're not. FairPoint Communications, the nightmare that has become northern New England's landline provider, is seeking tax dollars that could help it fulfill the promises made to regulators in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont when the company spent $2.3 billion to buy Verizon's systems here.
FairPoint is in serious trouble. Next week, officials from all three states will hold a rare joint hearing with the company, which has been scheduled for several weeks but is likely to include discussion of an anonymous e-mail sent August 14 to regulators in all three states alleging that FairPoint faked test results regulators relied on to determine that the company was ready to take over from Verizon. (Monday, FairPoint issued a strong denial based on its own internal investigation.)
Vermont is considering revoking the company's license to conduct business. In July the company threatened bankruptcy. Its business model still depends on customers leaving more slowly than they left Verizon — when in fact the company's terrible service has caused a customer-departure rate higher than Verizon's, and incurred $3 million in poor-performance fines from state officials.
But you don't enter the picture until we look at FairPoint's promises, which are enforceable because they are also orders from the three states' utilities regulators. As part of its proof that the Verizon takeover was in the public interest, the company must pay a minimum of $131 million by March 31, 2010, to expand broadband Internet coverage in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont (even if other companies offer better, faster, or cheaper broadband in the same area). And it must pay a further $114 million before March 31, 2013 to do even more.
FairPoint is asking for nearly $38 million in federal economic-stimulus money (out of $7.2 billion approved to broadband expansion) to provide coverage to areas of all three states that the company "otherwise would have been unable to serve within an identifiable timeframe," according to a company press release. Under federal rules, the company will have to contribute $7.5 million of its own in matching funds to those projects.
But because of a loophole between the states' requirements and the federal rules for doling out its money, tax money could be used to meet the company's existing obligations. The states only require that FairPoint spend certain amounts within the timeframe — regardless of how the company gets the money. The feds require that the company prove "that the project would not have been implemented during the grant period without federal grant assistance."
But what the feds call "the grant period" ends three years after the government approves the application, expected to be late this year. FairPoint's commitments to the states don't end for another year beyond that.
FairPoint probably can't get federal money to cover what the states already require be spent before March 31, 2010. But the states' rules allow it to claim it was going to spend all the rest of the money just before the 2013 deadline. And then the company could say it was bringing forward, into the federal "grant period," work originally slated for 2013 — in which case the rules appear to allow federal money to fulfill state demands.
Indeed, Maine and New Hampshire regulators more or less admit that their requirements don't cover this possibility. "It's all in terms of expenditures," says Andrew Hagler of the Maine Public Utilities Commission, adding that the federal rules are the only way to will prevent FairPoint from subverting taxpayer money to meet its prior corporate obligations.
Leave it to Vermont to set the bar. The state that acted first on the e-mailed tip that FairPoint might have faked its test results is taking the hardest line about double-dipping. The money FairPoint promised to Vermont is "a separate, standalone obligation to the state," says Stephen Wark of the Vermont Department of Public Service. He said he would be "surprised" if the feds allowed it, adding that "generally, the rule is you cannot supplant" money already committed, and replace it with federal dollars. "That is what we're going to hold them to," Wark says.
Good thing, too, because if it's up to the feds, they're not talking. Mark Tolbert, spokesman for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is overseeing the broadband stimulus money, referred the Phoenix to "eligibility and matching" documentation that didn't lay out whether double-dipping in this way would be allowed.
We thought the bailouts were over. They're not. FairPoint Communications, the nightmare that has become northern New England's landline provider, is seeking tax dollars that could help it fulfill the promises made to regulators in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont when the company spent $2.3 billion to buy Verizon's systems here.
FairPoint is in serious trouble. Next week, officials from all three states will hold a rare joint hearing with the company, which has been scheduled for several weeks but is likely to include discussion of an anonymous e-mail sent August 14 to regulators in all three states alleging that FairPoint faked test results regulators relied on to determine that the company was ready to take over from Verizon. (Monday, FairPoint issued a strong denial based on its own internal investigation.)
Vermont is considering revoking the company's license to conduct business. In July the company threatened bankruptcy. Its business model still depends on customers leaving more slowly than they left Verizon — when in fact the company's terrible service has caused a customer-departure rate higher than Verizon's, and incurred $3 million in poor-performance fines from state officials.
But you don't enter the picture until we look at FairPoint's promises, which are enforceable because they are also orders from the three states' utilities regulators. As part of its proof that the Verizon takeover was in the public interest, the company must pay a minimum of $131 million by March 31, 2010, to expand broadband Internet coverage in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont (even if other companies offer better, faster, or cheaper broadband in the same area). And it must pay a further $114 million before March 31, 2013 to do even more.
FairPoint is asking for nearly $38 million in federal economic-stimulus money (out of $7.2 billion approved to broadband expansion) to provide coverage to areas of all three states that the company "otherwise would have been unable to serve within an identifiable timeframe," according to a company press release. Under federal rules, the company will have to contribute $7.5 million of its own in matching funds to those projects.
But because of a loophole between the states' requirements and the federal rules for doling out its money, tax money could be used to meet the company's existing obligations. The states only require that FairPoint spend certain amounts within the timeframe — regardless of how the company gets the money. The feds require that the company prove "that the project would not have been implemented during the grant period without federal grant assistance."
But what the feds call "the grant period" ends three years after the government approves the application, expected to be late this year. FairPoint's commitments to the states don't end for another year beyond that.
FairPoint probably can't get federal money to cover what the states already require be spent before March 31, 2010. But the states' rules allow it to claim it was going to spend all the rest of the money just before the 2013 deadline. And then the company could say it was bringing forward, into the federal "grant period," work originally slated for 2013 — in which case the rules appear to allow federal money to fulfill state demands.
Indeed, Maine and New Hampshire regulators more or less admit that their requirements don't cover this possibility. "It's all in terms of expenditures," says Andrew Hagler of the Maine Public Utilities Commission, adding that the federal rules are the only way to will prevent FairPoint from subverting taxpayer money to meet its prior corporate obligations.
Leave it to Vermont to set the bar. The state that acted first on the e-mailed tip that FairPoint might have faked its test results is taking the hardest line about double-dipping. The money FairPoint promised to Vermont is "a separate, standalone obligation to the state," says Stephen Wark of the Vermont Department of Public Service. He said he would be "surprised" if the feds allowed it, adding that "generally, the rule is you cannot supplant" money already committed, and replace it with federal dollars. "That is what we're going to hold them to," Wark says.
Good thing, too, because if it's up to the feds, they're not talking. Mark Tolbert, spokesman for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is overseeing the broadband stimulus money, referred the Phoenix to "eligibility and matching" documentation that didn't lay out whether double-dipping in this way would be allowed.
Labor of Love: No rest for these union activists
Published in the Portland Phoenix
Most of us will sleep in on Labor Day. Not the Southern Maine Labor Council, who will be working hard to remind us what the holiday's actually all about.
They'll start at the ungodly holiday hour of 8 am with a breakfast at the Maine Irish Heritage Center hosted by the Southern Maine Labor Council, the Western Maine Labor Council, and the Metal Trades Council. After 45 minutes of chow, they'll head upstairs for a labor-music performance by Nine to Nine, a singing group with an odd name for union types. There will also be an exhibit of photos by Brunswick-based documentary photographer Guy Saldanha, who has visited and photographed labor sites around the world, and across Maine.
The big attraction, though, will be Wilma Liebman, a woman whose name most of us haven't heard. She's the chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, who will be receiving the "Working Class Heroine Award" for her efforts on behalf of workers' rights.
Liebman, one of only two serving NLRB members (three seats are vacant), has spent 12 years on the board, and was chosen by President Obama to lead it shortly after he was inaugurated.
We caught up with her on the phone from Washington DC last week, just as she was heading to Australia to deliver a keynote address at the 19th World Congress of the International Society for Labor and Social Security Law.
She holds out hope for unions not just in the workplace (and notes that the percentage of organized workers in the private sector is in "obvious decline") but in the nation's public sphere, calling union activism "a political counterweight to the political influence of corporations."
While not taking a stand on the Employee Free Choice Act and other labor-related legislation (the board, as a quasi-judicial body, stays out of legislative debates), Liebman says she hopes "things will not be made worse between labor and management."
As far as general principles, she says seeking a balance between corporate and individual power is "both a matter of democracy and a sound economy." Specifically, "if you address the inequality" that exists in society, then increased purchasing power for workers will help boost the economy out of the recession.
At the moment, she says, she sees a sort of "holding pattern," in which everyone is mostly waiting for the outcome of the legislative process. Key to the success of whatever law is passed, Liebman says, is shared understanding. "If the business community could acknowledge that workers have rights — not just to a voice in the workplace but to a standard of living," and labor can recognize "the terrible competitive pressures" of doing business today, both will be better able to work together.
But as the agency tasked with making sure they do, the NLRB is facing its own "crisis of confidence," she says. Three board members' terms expired in December 2007; George W. Bush made three appointments; the Senate never acted. Obama made three nominations in July, but the Senate has been busy with other business.
In the meantime, Liebman says, "our authority to act as a two-member board has been challenged in several circuit courts." Though she and fellow board member Peter Schaumber have nearly 500 decisions with no other members available, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled in May that the two-person body did not have the power to make rulings. Three other federal appeals courts, including the Boston-based 1st Circuit, have ruled that it does. The matter is likely to go to the Supreme Court to be resolved.
Portland Labor Day Breakfast | September 7 @ 8 am | Maine Irish Heritage Center, 34 Gray St, Portland | $25 | 207.892.4067
Most of us will sleep in on Labor Day. Not the Southern Maine Labor Council, who will be working hard to remind us what the holiday's actually all about.
They'll start at the ungodly holiday hour of 8 am with a breakfast at the Maine Irish Heritage Center hosted by the Southern Maine Labor Council, the Western Maine Labor Council, and the Metal Trades Council. After 45 minutes of chow, they'll head upstairs for a labor-music performance by Nine to Nine, a singing group with an odd name for union types. There will also be an exhibit of photos by Brunswick-based documentary photographer Guy Saldanha, who has visited and photographed labor sites around the world, and across Maine.
The big attraction, though, will be Wilma Liebman, a woman whose name most of us haven't heard. She's the chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, who will be receiving the "Working Class Heroine Award" for her efforts on behalf of workers' rights.
Liebman, one of only two serving NLRB members (three seats are vacant), has spent 12 years on the board, and was chosen by President Obama to lead it shortly after he was inaugurated.
We caught up with her on the phone from Washington DC last week, just as she was heading to Australia to deliver a keynote address at the 19th World Congress of the International Society for Labor and Social Security Law.
She holds out hope for unions not just in the workplace (and notes that the percentage of organized workers in the private sector is in "obvious decline") but in the nation's public sphere, calling union activism "a political counterweight to the political influence of corporations."
While not taking a stand on the Employee Free Choice Act and other labor-related legislation (the board, as a quasi-judicial body, stays out of legislative debates), Liebman says she hopes "things will not be made worse between labor and management."
As far as general principles, she says seeking a balance between corporate and individual power is "both a matter of democracy and a sound economy." Specifically, "if you address the inequality" that exists in society, then increased purchasing power for workers will help boost the economy out of the recession.
At the moment, she says, she sees a sort of "holding pattern," in which everyone is mostly waiting for the outcome of the legislative process. Key to the success of whatever law is passed, Liebman says, is shared understanding. "If the business community could acknowledge that workers have rights — not just to a voice in the workplace but to a standard of living," and labor can recognize "the terrible competitive pressures" of doing business today, both will be better able to work together.
But as the agency tasked with making sure they do, the NLRB is facing its own "crisis of confidence," she says. Three board members' terms expired in December 2007; George W. Bush made three appointments; the Senate never acted. Obama made three nominations in July, but the Senate has been busy with other business.
In the meantime, Liebman says, "our authority to act as a two-member board has been challenged in several circuit courts." Though she and fellow board member Peter Schaumber have nearly 500 decisions with no other members available, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled in May that the two-person body did not have the power to make rulings. Three other federal appeals courts, including the Boston-based 1st Circuit, have ruled that it does. The matter is likely to go to the Supreme Court to be resolved.
Portland Labor Day Breakfast | September 7 @ 8 am | Maine Irish Heritage Center, 34 Gray St, Portland | $25 | 207.892.4067
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