Although Maine’s legislature is not in session, some of its committees are meeting. According to this story, recently the Legal and Veterans Affairs Committee wrote a bill to abolish Maine’s public funding program for candidates for state office. In Maine, legislative committees are Joint committees, composed of members of each of the two houses.
Hello my understanding is the proposal is just to repeal the matching funds portion of the law. Leaving the initial allocation intact. However many people consider the initial funding levels too low, having been cut by 5% at least twice by the legislature rather then growing in reaction to actual spending as the law originally intended.
the amounts would be as follows
2012 Initial Distributions
Candidate Primary General
State Representative, Contested $1,429 $3,937
State Representative, Uncontested $486 $1,299
State Senate, Contested $7,359 $18,124
State Senate, Uncontested $1,831 $5,981
Governor $400,000 $600,000
This is considered barly adequate for the house, assuming not too much outside money and an active candidate willing to knock on doors and meet voters, but inadequate for the State Senate, and completely unrealistic for the Governorship.
Of course others have different opinions, especially some of the Republicans
Truth in advertising
Im a Democrat and i serve as Parliamentarian of the Maine Democratic State Committee
Carl Pease is right. It won’t abolish public funding, but it will effectively stop candidates in competitive races from seeking public funds, regardless of their stance on the use of public/private funds for elections.
I understand what #1 and #2 are saying, but the first paragraph of the story says the bill would strike all references to public funding from the law. That seems to me to mean that there would be no more public funding.
Just the matching funds portion, and perhaps the Governor part, but not the Legislative initial allocation