ROCKLAND — Tomorrow, March 10, voters in Owls Head and Rockland will go to the polls to choose a new representative to serve their towns in Augusta. The seat had been vacated by Elizabeth Dickerson, who moved to Colorado. Three of the four candidates talked about their reasons for running for office on the radio, with Chris Wolf. Present were Pinny Beebe-Center, D-Rockland;  James M. Kalloch, R-Rockland; and Libetarian Shawn Levasseur. Green Independent Ronald Calvin Huber did not participate.

What follows is the transcript of the forum, with each candidate discussing their reasons for seeking the seat and issues confronting legislatures in Augusta. To watch the show, click here.

PBP: Why are you running for this District 93 seat?

Lavasseur: So many people want to go to Augusta to see what they can do with the power of the state. I want to be there as a buffer to say, maybe that’s not such a good idea. Sometimes, often in my opinion, government is not the proper solution for any given topic.

Beebe-Center: I want the voices of Owls Head and Rockland and the coast to be heard in Augusta. I don’t want Augusta working in a vacuum and putting mandates and rules and passing laws that are going to harm the people of the Midcoast.

Kalloch: I want to go because I have a 10-year-old grandson and I want something left here in Owls Head and Rockland that isn’t financed for the next 40 years because someone had as bright idea. We have to slow down spending.

PBP: Governor Paul LePage wants to do away with revenue sharing and that is money that’s returned to municipalities to help ease the tax rate and the mil rates. Do you think the towns can absorb the loss?

Beebe-Center: I think if the governor follows through with this it’s going to raise the property taxes. And I don’t think the people here can afford to have their property taxes raised. It may be appropriate to have the revenue sharing go away, but not in one fell swoop, not within a month of everyone having to come up with their budgets. I think that is completely unfair.

Levasseur: I agree that the amount of revenue sharing should be reduced. I believe that the level of government that spends the money should be the level of government that raises the money. I’m more disturbed that so much about what we’re hearing about the budget is about reducing the sharing with municipalities and there are not enough cuts with the state’s own budget and they are not being responsible there with the money they are spending.

Kalloch: Revenue sharing needs to be phased out. I think the governor is hasty in cutting it all at once. He has been slowly decreasing it and I would like to see it decrease over a couple of years, or three years, not just all at once. I think it’s going to be a hell of a shock when we don’t have that $503,000. I think in his long-term plan to get rid of income tax and do away with revenue sharing, I think it’s a good plan, but needs to be phased out.

PBP: Part of the governor’s plan to offset the loss of revenue sharing is to raise the sales tax and let people who visit the state pick up a larger share of the cost to replace those funds. Is that a good idea?

Kalloch: I do think it’s a good idea. We have 29 million people come here and visit every year. You add one or two percent and they don’t even see it. When our income tax comes due, we see that instantly. We should be able to raise more money for the state and give more money back to the people who pay their income taxes and do away with it, that’s a lot of money back in their pockets.

PBP: Is the mil rate that Rockland residents pay now fair or on the high side?

Beebe-Center: I think it’s on the high side. Rockland has a little over 7,000 people and it swells to 18 to 20 thousand. All the people who work here and all the people who shop here and we have to maintain that infrastructure for people who don’t live here. I would like to see some of the sales tax stay in the service centers. A few years ago we talked about that and we had it, a half a cent stay in the service centers and I would like to see something like that offset the stopping of the revenue sharing. I think there are creative ways we can deal with the cost of the services and the infrastructure. I would like to have those real conversations and not just slashing and burning money for the short term and incurring amazing, long term consequences.

Kalloch: We have been doing the same old thing for 40 years and it’s not working. It is not working. How we finance the state government is not working. And where we spend the money is not working. The whole thing needs a top to bottom review, how the money comes in and where the money goes.

PBP: One of the things the governor wants to do is flat fund schools. Does this make sense in a time of budget constraints?

Beebe-Center: I think the biggest investment the state can make is in the education of our kids. To fool around with the funding, to offer flat funding, to never even come up with the 55 percent that was voted in years ago; I think it’s unfair. I think the governor can represent himself as wanting to boost our economy, but if we don’t deal with our kids, if we don’t deal with the education, if we don’t train the kids, if we don’t offer the opportunities for skill building and trades and further education; we’re not going to have an economy.

PBP: Should the state help build a new vocational school?

Beebe-Center: We have nine vocational schools. That was a huge backbone to our economy. That’s where the trades came in. It was the opportunity for all kids to have an education and a future and we knew ten years ago that the voc. school was outdated and they were just barely making the programs work. I think we need vocational training and I think that’s a huge piece of our economy.

Kalloch: That’s one of the things I want to push for when I get there, that the state get involved. They do a great job with the kids they have, but we do need to update it for today’s technology, bring in new machines and if they need a new building the state should be involved in that. That was part of the premise. We took these programs out of the schools and we built nine vo-techs around the state that kids would funnel into and the state was very much behind that and we need to get back behind it. Vocational education is the heart of what we do. Not everyone of our kids is going to go to college, but they all need to be able to make a living.

Lavesseur: I think it kind of illustrates the problem with the state running so much of the education system. We all have different ideas on how to go about it and what programs are important and we’re all fighting each other over each others tax dollars. I believe it’s done better when it’s all handled privately. When we voluntarily get together to work on projects, you see this on a micro level with the ever growing homeschooling movement. They’re not waiting on government to get a better school, their kids need a better education now, so people go about doing that outside the system. I think we need ways to expand the outside of government. Education sources, and easier way to form more formale institutions outside of government.

PBP: How do you  feel about some of the ways our natural resources are protected? Fishing grounds, lobstering grounds for examples. Is it too much? Is it not enough?

Lavasseur: I think one of the things we can do is treat the licensing as more of a property for the fishermen to hold. They have concerns about the viability not only of fishing grounds today, but in the future. The value will return to them if they pass down the license to kids or sell it.  My only fear is that the state might say we are putting up for auction immediately without concern to the fisherman’s day.

Kalloch: The federal lobster licenses were transferred with the boat. You could buy a boat that had a federal license with it and you could transfer to your boat. TheMainestate license is one of the few licenses you can build. For fishermen, he has three quarters of a million dollars invested, but when he gets done, he can’t transfer that to his son. He can’t sell that as a business. He has to dissect it because the license doesn’t belong to him. He pays for it every year, but in the state’s eyes it doesn’t belong to him. It needs to belong to him. Yes, you buy it from the state, you pay for it every year, but it belongs to him.

Beebe-Center: They need to get involved in the conversations. I think that what happens is that many of the fishermen get marginalized. They don’t get involved in the conversations, they don’t know what’s coming down, they’re not brought in and it winds up being a mandate on them and it changes their lives and it basically ties their hands. I think we need to do more to reach out to the fishermen to bring them into the conversation. Now for the first time they have health insurance. I think the fishermen are incredibly important to this area. I also think that the tourism industry pays mostly minimum wage jobs and going back to the trade schools, we have a lot of people who are looking out of state to bring people in who are trained to do a lot of the jobs that we do have that are not just in tourism. Especially in the summertime, but I think we need to look at the marine industry and make sure we have people who are trained for that and make sure the rules are fair and the laws are fair to them.

PBP: Give us some ideas about job creations. What can we do to create more jobs?

Lavasseur: Certainly finding more ways to reduce government spending and thereby being able to reduce the taxes. And by reducing the size of government you’re reducing the regulatory burden on business. It’s hard to build a business in Maine and part of the reason is that so many people go away. The hardest thing to do is start a business and we focus on jobs as something you go and get from someone else. The hardest working people are the people that work for themselves because it’s all on the line and you can’t jump ship and say let’s try something else. You are locked in and committed, and all to often we ignore the small business owner looking to attract the big businesses, the big boxes. Big businesses are good, too, but they get a disproportional amount of the attention because smaller businesses don’t always trumpet themselves.

PBP: So a good way to stimulate jobs is to make it easier for people to go into business.

Beebe-Center: I have a small business. One of the things that we have learned through the years is that we have a large proportion of people that single handedly are sole proprietorships, so they have one person. One of the things that we have tried to do and organize to some degree through several agencies and several nonprofits is how can we get someone one who as a successful business, how can we get them to hire someone else? How do we get them to bring in more people so it’s more of a cottage industry then a single person, since we have so many sole proprietorships that would be a great way to create jobs.

PBP: Do you believe the minimum wage be raised?

Beebe-Center: I do.

Kalloch: I don’t. It’s a starting wage and it was never intended to become a living wage. It’s where you start and you go from there. If you try to make every wage a living wage you are going to bankrupt the country.

Beebe-Center: I don’t think we can afford not to do it because if you look at the consequences of a non-livable wage; if you look at the health difficulties, if you look at the economic difficulties, the transportation difficulties of not being able to get to your job and you look at all the things we incur by not having enough to live on, I think it will cost us a lot more money in the long term, then it will in the short term to pay a minimum wage. 

Lavesseur: The best way to raise wages is to make it a more competitive market for labor, meaning more jobs. What we been talking about before is hopefully raise wages. Minimum wage should not be mandated by the state, but more of what do we have to pay before someone is willing to work for us and realistically we’re close to that because the minimum wage has been low. Try hiring someone at minimum wage today. Outside of a teenager trying to get his first job, not many people are going to take jobs that low.

Beebe-Center: But a lot of them are forced to take jobs that low.

Kalloch: There have been nine studies since 1995 and none of them have proven that raising minimum wage fixes poverty. There are 8,000 machinists’ jobs inNew Englandthat can’t be filled because we don’t have trained machinists. Fisher Engineering cannot find welders, so we need to find the right jobs and people to fill those jobs and not start them out at minimum wage.

Caller: I came to Maine more than 40 years ago. If someone decided they would like to go into lobstering as a career they could do it. Lobstering was one of the most important industries in Maine and anybody could do if they were determined to do it. Today, it’s a hereditary thing. There is a 30-year waiting list and there is no chance for somebody to become a lobsterman unless they inherit that position, so it has become hereditary. So I’m wondering how the candidates feel about that and if anybody would have the courage to say that’s not a good thing.

Beebe-Center: There actually is another way that people can get into lobstering and it starts in high school. The have to be a certain age and they get a certain amount of traps and they have to demonstrate their ability to manage those traps, they have to send a certain amount of time learning how to do it. I can’t remember the name of the program, but it’s an apprentice program and by the time that they are 18 they do get a license and they do get a certain amount of traps and they are in business. As an adult I don’t now of any other way other then inheriting, but as a teenager there is access to becoming a lobsterman.

Caller: I understand that, but that’s the way it’s hereditary, because in order to be that teenager who gets to do that, you have to be sponsored and typically that sponsor is your dad or your uncle, so this is a closed system.

Kalloch: You are very right, it is a closed system and as Pinny said the kids of fishermen can come up, go through their apprentiship, get their training, start out with 50 to 150 traps and work their way up. If you came here as an adult and decided you wanted to go lobstering, you would be on a list for probably 30 years. They are trying to get five fishermen out for every fishermen going in, or 4,000 traps out of the water before a new fisherman can come in.

This is something the state mandated because they were afraid of overfishing and the Maine Lobstering Association and Downeast Lobstering Association have bought into it, so it keeps anyone out except their kids. I think the whole thing needs to be looked at. Not throw the baby out with the bath water, but figure out a way so that the young men who went away to college and let their licenses expire can come back and start fishing.

Lavesseur:  No matter what system, whether it be straight licensing, fishing rights verses property rights, the limited ability for someone to get into a business is restricted just because it is a limited resource. At some point you just have to shrug your shoulders, but you have to make sure that whatever systems are fair and reasonable. I sympathize with people who are trying to get into the business. What I advocate is more of fishing rights being property rights could lend itself with being a little more hereditary, but still have the ability to sell outside of the loop of existing fishermen.

For a full simulcast of the candidates forum go to mainecoast.tv and select the candidates forum show.