Maine Politics

From the Piscataqua to the St. John

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Bondage

Legislators and lobbyists are meeting feverishly to hammer out the details of a bond package to be voted on this Friday. Back-room negotiations have had some strange results, including the elimination of the bipartisan working-waterfront bond and an attempt to repeal the new paint fees that are meant to fund education on lead poisoning.

The bonds as negotiated currently stand at $83 million with $20 million going to economic development, $34 million for transportation projects, $9 million for education, $10 million for land conservation and $10 million for environmental and health projects. These bonds should draw down about $230 million in additional matching funds from the federal government.

MCLF has more.


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1 Comments:

Thanks Mike.
While we are pushing for the restoration of the $10 million Working Waterfront and Farmland Bond (aka the Surf and Turf bond), we want it to be clear that this should not be at the expense of any other part of the package.

In the last couple of years, we paid off $200 million in bond indebtedness, so we can certainly ADD $10 million to the $83 million currently proposed and still have less debt.

We can not let the Right succeed in their effort to divide and conquer, as they are trying to say that if we put the Surf and Turf back in, we'd have to reduce something else. That's a load of you know what.

Thanks for the link to our blog.

If people are interested, they can e-mail their legislators and the governor via our action center at http://actionstudio.org/?go=1699

--Jon
 

Posted by Jon at MCLF

7/27/2005 10:35:00 AM

 

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