Maine Policy Matters

S3E3 Winter Roads, Salt, and the Slippery Slope

Today, we will be covering a report by Jonathan Rubin, Shaleen Jain, Ali Shirazi, et al. titled, “Road Salt in Maine: An Assessment of Practices, Impacts and Safety”. In their report, they present the results from a research project by a team from the University of Maine, in cooperation with the Maine Department of Transportation that examines the use of road salt in Maine for winter travel safety. This report was published by Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center in April of 2022.
You can find the article here: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mcspc_transport/11/
Transcript
Eric Miller: A classic public policy dilemma. What do we do to limit the bad impacts of salting our winter roads while keeping the good impacts? Tune into today’s episode to find out. This is the Maine Policy Matters podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. I’m Eric Miller, research associate at the center.
On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine. Today we will be covering a report by Jonathan Rubin, Shalene Jain, Ali Shirazi, et al. titled, “Road Salt and Maine: An Assessment of Practices, Impacts, and Safety.” In their report, they present the results from a research project by a team from the University of Maine in cooperation with the Maine Department of Transportation that examines the use of road salt and Maine for winter travel safety.
This report was published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center in April of 2022. Maine Policy Review is a peer reviewed academic journal published by the Policy Center. We’ll first briefly summarize the article and then speak with Jonathan Rubin and Brian Burne, a highway maintenance and engineer for the state of Maine.
Since 2010, there’s been an increase in accumulation of chlorides and freshwater and groundwater environments due to road salt in Maine, a trend consistent with the rest of the Northeastern United States. The state of Maine has 45,586 miles of public roadway, more miles per person than any other New England state.
This mileage is maintained by the MaineDOT, Maine Turnpike authority, as well as 483 municipalities in 16 counties, as well as three reservations. There are largely three best management practices regarding dealing with snow and ice on the roads. De-icing, pre-treating roads with brine, and pre-wetting the salt as it’s being spread.
The latter two of those options being considered anti-icing. Anti-icing and de-icing are different approaches to achieving the same goal. Anti-icing is different from de-icing largely due to the timing of the treatment. Anti-icing is a pre-treatment of the road before snow and ice start to stick. While de-icing involves removing ice already on the road by plowing snow and applying sand for temporary retraction and salt to melt the ice.
Anti-icing is a principle best management practice by MaineDOT and currently uses this approach on almost all state roads by treating them before ice and snow are able to bond to the. The Maine Turnpike Authority uses this on the entire turnpike. A survey shows that roughly 28% of Maine’s municipalities use anti- icing while the rest use the de-icing approach.
As mentioned earlier, anti-icing is a strategy that utilizes the application of pre-wetted salt early in a storm or by pre-treating the roads with a liquid brine. Pre-treating the roads with a liquid brine before a storm is another best management practice. As mentioned earlier, Maine Turnpike Authority and MaineDOT do not use this method.
12% of municipalities reported pre-treating their roads. However, it is not specified whether a liquid brine was the treatment of choice as opposed to pre-wetted salt. Pre-wetting salt involves the process of wetting solid salts as they’re being applied, which has been shown to reduce the amount of salt that ends up in the ditch off the road.
Pre-wetting can be an anti-icing strategy that the main d o t and main turnpike authority employ statewide. 71% of municipalities surveyed that they never wet their salt before spreading. Ruben et al. report that the most widely used material on winter roads in Maine is rock salt, or sodium chloride because it’s cost effective and easy to handle.
The total bulk salt purchases from distributors in the state in 2019 to 2020 amounts to approximately 535,000 tons. According to the authors’ calculations, they estimate approximately 493,000 tons, about 91% of the 535,000 tons of total bulk salt were used by the MaineDOT, Maine Turnpike Authority, and municipal governments.
This 9% is likely explained by the non-road use of salt on commercial and industrial parking lots and other private uses. This means that Maine uses roughly of 787 pounds of salt for every Maine resident, or about 11 tons per lane mile per year . They also estimate that the cost of clearing winter roads statewide is 155 million dollars , which translates to $114 per resident million.
MaineDOT is obligated to resolve well claims for private water supplies that are destroyed or rendered unfit for human consumption by constructing, reconstructing, or maintaining a highway, including the use of salts for winter road maintenance. This means that MaineDOT has spent an additional 53 million dollars since 2006 to investigate, assess, and resolve well claims.
While winter road maintenance practices allow for high levels of safety and mobility for residents, the consequences of our road salt use can be seen in the reduced water quality of some streams, contaminated wells, infrastructure and vehicle corrosion, and state and municipal budgets. Rubin et al. explained that quote, “as salt use increases, so do its impacts. One way to reduce salt is to change driver’s expectations of travel during a storm” end quote. Much of the impacts from road salt are to the aquatic environments in both the short and long term. Winter road maintenance is a significant source of total chloride loading to fresh waters. The short term effects are directly related to the seasonal timing of salt use with peak levels occurring in Spring and Fall.
Several long-term studies have shown an increase in chloride trend as well . This can be seen in the list of 20 streams the Maine Department of Environmental Protection has made of chloride impaired urban stream watersheds. Just as we discussed in episode one of the season with regard to wind development, Maine can learn from other states regarding how to manage road salt impacts.
For example, Connecticut has followed New Hampshire’s statewide program for training and liability protection to winter contractors. New York has also proposed a road salt applicator training program. They also pilot a program for road salt reduction that is saving the state costs in some Adirondack communities.
The main reason salt is used on our roads is to ensure traffic safety for those who need to travel after a storm . According to the report, approximately 67% of all lane departure crashes from 2010 to 2019 occurred during the winter period. Federal Highway Administration data shows that the winter period accounted for an economic loss value of 618 million dollars on a yearly average during the 2010 through 2019 period.
MaineDOT also reported that the yearly average cost was 309 million dollars from fatalities alone. The authors suggest a few recommendations for mitigating the ongoing concern for road salt use. The first is that the public needs to better understand the fiscal and environmental costs of winter maintenance. They suggest that all levels of government MaineDOT, Maine Turnpike Authority, as well as municipal need to better articulate the tradeoffs for different levels of service .
The second is their recommendation that Maine develop a statewide chloride reduction plan that identifies and prioritizes salt reduction in regions with environmentally sensitive areas on already impacted areas. To accomplish this, they suggest MaineDOT and MaineDEP increase their monitoring of chlorides and water bodies and make this information easily accessible to the public through a data dashboard, which would also contribute to the goal of public awareness.
Funding sources should also be identified to help underfunded municipalities upgrade their equipment training and winter practices. Finally, the authors recommend collaboration. They write, quote, “Maine could benefit from stronger connections between university research, environmental monitoring, and road practitioners.”
An examination of the partnership structures and practice in other states in New England at both state and municipal levels may offer models for collaborative partnerships in Maine. Now that we have covered the report, we’ll hear from Jonathan Rubin, professor at the University of Maine, director of the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center, and contributor to the report. After him, we’ll hear from Brian Burne, a highway maintenance engineer for the MaineDOT.
Thank you for joining us today, Jonathan.
Jonathan Rubin: My pleasure. Thank you, Eric.
Eric Miller: So to start off, what are some of the most significant trends and differences since your last report that was released 10 years ago?
Jonathan Rubin: Well, I think in some senses what’s changed is really what has not changed. What has changed is the weather.
Climate change has made the frequency and intensity of storms greater. We’ve all seen that very recently, and with the changing weather, you do get changing freezing thaw patterns, which changes the way, you want to manage and control your winter maintenance. So, that is a, that physical change is something we have to adapt to in the state in terms of our winter maintenance practices.
Also what’s sort of changed and yet stayed the same is that the costs are still high. About 10 years ago when we did this, it was about a hundred million across the Maine Turnpike Authority, the Maine Department of Transportation and the municipal governments with municipal governments covering about 80% of the roadway in terms of maintenance.
And now we’re at up to about 150 million dollars . So in some senses, what stayed the same is that the costs are still really high, and they’re going high for a number of reasons, including weather, as I mentioned. But also the price of inputs goes up, the price of labor goes up. So our costs are not declining, but in fact rising over that time period.
And that’s something that everybody should care about .
Eric Miller: Yeah. And not every town feels in Maine feels the effects equally as Maine as a, from a biophysical standpoint experiences very different conditions from coastal to mountainous ranges. So the way that you finished the last bit of your answer there about how costs are changing recently do you expect to have winter costs to continue to rise?
Jonathan Rubin: I do. Costs are gonna rise unless we collectively as a state that means main Department of Transportation, main Turnpike, authority, and the towns right. The towns are responsible for 80% of winter road maintenance. So, unless people make changes to the way we maintain our roads, how quickly we clear them, get them down to pavement.
If unless we make changes, why we are not going to expect any changes in the cost. Because materials are not going to get cheaper. Labor’s not going to get cheaper. Equipment’s not going to get cheaper. So there’s no reason to think the costs are going to go down unless we make changes and those are going to be policy changes at the state and local level .
Eric Miller: That makes a lot of sense. So something I found pretty interesting about the report is that many towns spend of like quite a variation of range of costs in terms of maintaining the roads in winter, even if they’re at similar sizes. Would you care to elaborate on why that is?
Jonathan Rubin: Well, some of the cost differences in towns Are due to just where they are. Western Interior is quite a bit different in terms of needs versus southern coastal versus an island community. They have very, they are very different towns in terms of snow impacts, ice impacts, freeze thaw cycles. So part of it is just fate of where people are. But some of it is also policy decisions.
Some towns clear sidewalks, others don’t, and so that clearing sidewalk cost goes into the winter maintenance cost. So those are, again, I’m not saying I love,  I’m a walker. I think we should clear sidewalks. Not saying we shouldn’t, but that is a reason why you have some cost differences in towns. Another major reason you have cost differences in towns, we think because it’s hard to know for sure, but we think it’s because of choices that towns are making, how quickly to get the roads clear. How do we do our secondary or secondary roads brought down to bare pavement or is some standing snow left there for and people are told to slow down and drive more slowly on snow packed roads. Now what you expect for the interstate is not what you’re going to expect coming out your driveway.
And there’s differences in those types of roads and how to maintain them. So some of that is a choice. Another difference is some towns use their own employees, municipal employees for the and other towns contract out to, to to private contractors. Again, those explain some of the differences in the per town costs, but not all. I think a lot of this may come down to and it’s hard to know for sure, but a lot of this may come down to just this policy level choices at the town about how quickly they want snow cleared and how thoroughly I
Eric Miller: see, I see. It’s, I know that me personally driving around in winter particularly after the storm, I was in Hampden recently and I saw a flurry of contractors clearing out all of the, what I believe to be contractors, whether it’s by municipality or individual businesses were putting in a lot of work.
And so it’s interesting to get an idea of how some of these operations vary so much because you think it’s snow clearing. So it seems like a pretty uniform type of approach, but in fact, there are significant differences in how different areas handle their specific situation and decide to go with the route that they do.
Jonathan Rubin: Yeah, that’s correct. So, so some of it’s beyond, so some of it is beyond the controlled towns and some is within is within their control. And these are things that towns should talk about. We talk about school budgets, we talk about police budgets. I think talking about winter maintenance budgets and expectations is a perfectly reasonable thing for towns to talk about because it affects our tax rates .
Eric Miller: Absolutely, and the cost outlined the report which I encourage people to check the executive summary of the report because there are some pretty shocking figures in there. To finish things off what is something you’d like to share that we haven’t covered already?
Jonathan Rubin: I think one thing we know that safety we, why do we clear roads? We clear these roads for mobility and safety and it’s really important. I wouldn’t want anyone to say, Professor Rubin or Jonathan Rubin is advocating we don’t clear our roads. We need clear roads for our economy and for safety. And it’s not an either or. These are choices that we make. But safety is something we really have to pay attention to, especially with younger drivers and older drivers.
And so I think thinking of just remembering. Getting to your destination as fast as possible after snow days may not be the wisest choice.
Eric Miller: Makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much for joining us today professor Rubin and I look forward to having you on again sometime.
Jonathan Rubin: Thanks, Eric.
Eric Miller: Thanks for joining us, Brian.
Brian Burne: Sure. Glad to be here.
Eric Miller: The MaineDOT costs related to winter expenditures have risen from about 30 million to 46 million from fiscal year 2016 to fiscal year 2020. What are the most significant reasons for this increase?
Brian Burne: Well, when you look at two specific winters, like those two, a lot of that is just related to the winter severity.
So we had a little bit more of a mild, or actually it was quite mild winter, back in 15 to 16. And you know, the 19 to 20 winter was a little more severe. But absolutely snow and ice costs have, you know, just been on a continuous increase for the last decade or so, and especially in this past year.
And that’s on pretty much every single line. So when you’re looking at labor all of those costs relating to labor, All the benefits for the labor that’s all increased. Salt increased dramatically this past year it went from $63 a ton on average, that MaineDOT pays up to over $80 a ton.
So that was a very dramatic increase that hit us all at once. Same thing with trucks. Trucks have gotten very expensive. If you can get ’em, they’re very difficult to even get. It’s very difficult to get parts. All the parts have increased. Plow blades, we used to be down around, say $35 a foot, and now you’re up around a hundred.
It’s it’s just been every single thing that you can think of has increased in cost. You know, not only just the regular cost of living increases that you normally see, but there’s just been all the challenges that. That are facing more than just the snow and ice industry right now. They’re facing a lot of industries but they’ve all kind of hit and hopefully they’re gonna, you know, not be quite so bad going forward.
You know, the, we’ve seen the diesel prices spike up and, you know, now they seem like they’re kind of stabilizing a little bit, and hopefully they’ll stay that way, but or maybe even go back down, which will be nice. But yeah it’s been quite an increase over, over time.
Eric Miller: Wow. MaineDOT has, is similarly affected to economic conditions as the rest of us which I, we in the public don’t hear about specifically these things very much. I had no idea, like the price of salt, for instance. Do you mind elaborating on, I’m very curious about why salt prices increased for folks like you.
Brian Burne: Sure. Yeah. Well, Well, I don’t know if many people realize, but there, there’s plenty of salt. There’s no shortage of salt on the on earth. We get most of our salt from Chile.
And but what it relies on, of course, is the availability of ocean freight. And of course, any fuel costs associated with running all of that freight are gonna affect it as well. So it’s based on just supply and demand of the ships that are out there and and on the fuel. So, moving that salt from Chile up to Maine, it’s like a full week process to do that. They come right through the Panama Canal and it’s just you know, that, that becomes more expensive. So that’s been what’s mostly affected that. We also get salt from, you know, mines around the country. Sometimes you can get ’em out of New York, sometimes you get ’em outta Canada.
Northern Maine is supplied from a mine up in Sussex, new Brunswick. That used to be a POTASH mine and salt mining salt was a waste product of that. But they’ve started mining salt only out of that mine in the last couple of years. So we get some out of there, and, but you know, that price went up just as much. In fact that’s our most expensive salt that’s up close to a hundred dollars a ton.
Eric Miller: Wow. Okay. I had no idea. The global supply network of salt fascinating. And the salt, one of those resources that human civilization has been mining and getting in some way or another forever. And the fact that it’s not a scarce resource is kind of amazing, but also makes a ton of sense.
So in the report crashes were demonstrated to have been increased during snow and rain. How can drivers best avoid an accident and make roads safer?
Brian Burne: Yeah, I, that, that is key. It’s, you know, as your, the Margaret Chase Smith Center report calls out, there’s a lot that goes on with snow and ice control.
It’s not just what MaineDOT does, but it’s what we do as a society and you know, what we expect our roads to be like. And how long of a, you know, a disruption can we take with a storm? How long can it take to get back to bare pavement and things like that. But a big part of that, of course, is all of us as individuals taking a look at what our needs are.
And if we are the type of person that lives in Maine and has a need to be out driving in storms, you want to make sure that your vehicle’s prepared for that. Going into the winter you want to take a good look at your tires and if you are someone who has to drive in most storms, you need snow tires.
It’s these all season ones. It’s, that’s really not what an all season tire is best for is running in a Maine winter. There’s a huge difference. To put snow tires on a vehicle. So if you’re going to be running out in storms, do that. If you can avoid storms for the most part, like if you can, you know if you are using vacation or if your business, you know, shuts down during most snow storms, or you can, you know, however you avoid it.
If there’s ways to avoid travel during the storms, then you might be able to get by with an all season type of tire. But if you’re going to be out in it, you’re really gonna want an all season tire. Now a lot of people think of that as. Extra expense. You know, you’re buying two sets of tires, but one of the things that they don’t consider is the fact that when you’re changing to a snow tire in the Fall and changing back to your regular tires in the Spring, you’re rotating those tires.
So the tires, both sets are going to last much longer. And you know, so you really don’t, in the long run, the cost is not that different. It’s actually better for you. And the fact that you are safer in your travels during the winter because you’ve got more appropriate tires for that you know, that’s even more important.
So that’s the first thing is. Just make sure that you think about how you need to drive during the winters in Maine and that your vehicle is prepared for that. Now when you get into a specific storm or you know, just driving in any kind of, you know, problematic weather, it’s just a matter of slowing down.
You know, a lot of times people just kind of get rushing and you know, some of the most dangerous storms are the snow squalls, and I think that’s just because. The day’s bright and clear and people are just trucking along and then they come flying right into a snows squall and they’re just in the middle of a condition that they hadn’t really, it hadn’t built up on ’em, you know, it just was on ’em before they knew it.
And it’s one of the causes of some of the most severe crashes that are out there. So when you see snow, when you drive into snow just slow it down. The slower you can go, the better off you’re going to be. Cause once you get ice between the road and your tires. There’s really not a heck of a lot you can do.
So you just got to make sure that you’re going slow enough that the impacts are lessened.
Eric Miller: Makes a lot of sense. I saw in the report that as speeds increased, as did crashes and
Brian Burne: Absolutely.
Eric Miller: And so, this, if you could avoid the storm, that’s great, but if you can’t, snow tires and slow down. Makes, makes perfect sense to me.
Brian Burne: Yeah, they’ve got a lot of really good snow tires out there now. The technology of snow tires has gotten better and there’s some out there that are just as good as snow tires with studs and they don’t have studs. So there’s a lot of really nice stuff out there. So yeah, you can spend a little bit of time looking up some ratings and things like that. And you know, there’s some good.
Eric Miller: Good to know. Good to know. Looking forward, how does MaineDOT think about climate change and technological development with regard to snow and ice control? Could you speak to how these factors affect infrastructure and budgetary planning? How does it vary across coastal and more populated areas in this state versus northern western Maine. A nice and easy one for you. We warmed up to it.
Brian Burne: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There’s quite a lot there to unpackage. So. I guess what let’s take that in pieces. Snow and ice control it’s kind of unique in that there’s aspects of it that don’t change a whole lot.
And that piece is mostly the fact that you’re using a freeze point depressant of some sort. So that’s typically sodium chloride that we’re using to do that. To battle the snow and ice, and that’s been around for decades and that’s probably gonna be around for, you know, for the foreseeable future basically.
So, that really doesn’t change too much. But a lot of the technology affecting the information that we get you know, the information we use to make decisions, the equipment that we use, all of that changes pretty regularly. And as the technology’s always advancing in that regard. So just as an example that we, these weather stations called Road Weather Information Systems.
And if you’re driving down the interstate, you might see it’s, it looks like a utility pole right behind some guardrail and it’s got a bunch of solar panels and devices on it. And what these devices are is that they’re just weather monitoring devices. There’s a camera on there and there’s pavement, temperature sensors, and you know, just all sorts of things that are gathering information for us.
So we put these in various locations along the highways, and then we can also do a thing that’s called thermal mapping, which is where we drive the corridor, the entire corridor that these RWIS stations are located on, and we get a thermal profile of the roadway surface. And you do this under some different conditions.
So what this does is it shows you your warmer spots and your cooler spots on the highway, but it’ll also relate it to your RWIS so that now you can look at an RWIS and it can now predict, that, okay, this is the information at this one spot where all these sensors are located, but yet four or five miles up the road, you now have an idea of what’s going on up there as well because you have this thermal mapping profile that goes up through there.
So that’s just. One example of tools that, you know, are fairly new in helping us understand what’s going on with the roadways. They’re useful for predicting when your temperatures are dropping down and hitting the dew point and you’re getting moisture coming out of the air and freezing up the road surface.
we can now predict that a little more accurately than we used to be able to in the past. So that’s just one piece of it. Another piece of technology that’s associated with those same stations is what’s called a grip sensor. So this is just a video device that looks at the roadway, but yet it’s able to figure out whether you’ve got water on the road, ice on the road, snow on the road, or a combination thereof.
And it sort of calculates how slippery that road surface is. So this helps us make decisions on when to apply and how much to apply to the roads. So it’s a very useful tool in that regard. It’s also good for providing some metrics. It helps us understand that when we treat a road, how long did it take for that road to recover?
So this is, you know, really useful technology. That same type of technology is now available on mobile devices. So we can now attach this type of device to a truck and drive a corridor and get a profile of the grip along that entire corridor so you can find the areas that are slippery in the areas that are not so slippery.
So then another aspect of technology that comes into play with this, is a process called MDSS, which is a maintenance decision support system where trucks are outfitted with, it’s GPSAVL, there’s a lot of different terms for it, but it’s basically you are tracking where all your vehicles are located throughout your network and you can also see how much salt they’re applying and you’re recording all of that.
So. When you’re looking at your fleet and you’re looking at the salt applications and you’re looking at the coming weather and the past weather and the impacts that your salt applications have had on the corridor, all of this can kind of be combined into these systems that these MD S systems that then helps snow fighters take and make decisions about what their next application might be and when it might be into the future. So there’s just a lot of improvements in technology that take the basic art of applying salts and sands and things of that to a roadway surface with a truck. But also being able to really make sure that there’s a level of accuracy in there that we never had the ability to reach before.
Eric Miller: Wow, that is so fascinating and makes sense. And what a tool to help make more efficient decisions, especially among increasing costs. I imagine that you can make allocation decisions much more informed and that’s, yeah uh, Enraptured by that.
Brian Burne: Yeah.
Eric Miller: Thank you.
Brian Burne: From a, yeah, from a you know, a region sort of a standpoint, the other thing that this has helped us with is, you know, monitoring of more remote locations. A lot of these types of devices come with the ability to send alerts so you can set up alerts that if I see the temperature dropping and it looks like the road’s going to freeze send a text message, you know, or send an email or you know, and we have a transportation management center that’s running 24/7 and they’re getting these alerts and these notifications so that they can call out the crews in a more timely manner than we were able to without these tools.
Eric Miller: Very interesting. So in terms of the technological innovations are fascinating. So in the coastal areas and as opposed to up over into the more mountainous spots we have this freezing thawing happening a lot in the winter. Over the past few years and looking ahead it seems like that’ll be more of the status quo and Maine’s pretty used to ice, so, how have these how have those conditions affected some of the decision making? That might be different if you, if I’m up over in a more mountainous like Somerset County area .
Brian Burne: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. As the temperatures warm we are seeing more icing. We’re seeing later freezing of the ground.
So like you just take a look at this year you know, it’s getting really cold today, but this has been, you know, January it was one of the warmer Januarys and we have a system for tracking our roads for when the frost comes into the ground and when the frost leaves the ground.
Because as you may or may not be aware when you get into the spring months and frost that’s leaving the ground, your roads go into this really vulnerable state that affect how we can truck on those roads. Because we have to start limiting weights, otherwise the pavements get ruined. And we used to count on a fairly lengthy time during the winter of, you know, totally frozen ground that adds extra support and allows you know, extra weight even.
In fact, there’s even a law on the books that looks at axle weights not being enforced through the January February timeframe because the roads were assumed to be not as susceptible. But yet here we are now in a global warming situation where, when January and February was always solidly frozen, it has not been this year.
So, in a lot of areas. So that’s a kind of a challenge for us when you’re looking at, you know, so your question was about comparing the mountains with the coast. Yeah. I mean, we’re certainly going to continue to have the more of the icing right along the coast even more so.
But I think what’s also happening is we’re starting to see more icing than we ever used to see in more of Northern Maine and Western Maine, because, you know, by the time you get far enough away from the ocean you didn’t really have as much. Going on, but we’re seeing more of it with this warming that’s been happening.
So it, it adds a different level of challenges to snow and ice control because certainly as you’re adding more moisture and you’re getting more freezing rain types of events these will dilute your salt products much quicker. And so as they get diluted, they have to be replenished more readily. So that becomes more of an expense.
Eric Miller: Okay. Thank you for indulging the question. Or questions rather.
Brian Burne: Sure.
Eric Miller: The MaineDOT is armed quite a few tools at their disposal. Quite fascinating how these specific technologies can be employed in ways that you never interact with. You just see as an average citizen, you see plows out on the road.
You might see MaineDOT trucks or people on the side of the road taking like traffic measurements. Otherwise you don’t really see what’s going on there. So we get a little peek behind the curtain. I’m really enjoying that. Before we go is there something you’d like to share that we haven’t covered in our few minutes this morning?
Brian Burne: Well, basically I think it’s just good to you know, share that report that the Margaret Chase Smith Center had written. I think it brings up a lot of good points and makes some of these things share some of these concepts with people. So that people understand that snow and ice control is, it’s a choice that we can make we can choose to have a little bit lower level of service end up saving a little bit of money.
You know, it takes a little longer for the roads to come back, but yet you have less of an impact on the environment and things of that nature. But the more that you push for bare pavement quicker, there’s a, there’s repercussions to that. It’s, it requires more materials and there’s going to be more potential impacts resulting from salt on the environment.
So it’s a definitely a balancing act that MaineDOT and all the other public works entities across the state and in any winter climate are constantly wrestling with because you certainly don’t want to see accidents on the road. You want people to be safe to get from point A to point B.
But there are a lot of other factors that all come together to decide how any particular road is treated and handled from a policy basis.
Eric Miller: Always those pesky trade-offs.
Brian Burne: Yeah.
Eric Miller: Thank you for joining us this morning, Brian. It’s really been a pleasure.
Brian Burne: Okay, thanks.
What you just heard was a summary of a report titled “Road Salt and Maine, an Assessment of Practices, Impacts, and Safety” and an interview with Jonathan Rubin and Brian Burne. There is a link to the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center’s website in the description of this episode where the report can be found. Maine Policy Review is a peer reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center.
For all citations for data provided in this episode, please refer to the original article in Maine Policy Review. The editorial team for Maine Policy Review is made up of Joyce Rumery, Linda Silka and Barbara Harrity. Jonathan Rubin directs the Policy Center. Thank you to Jayson Heim and Katherine Swacha, script writers for Maine Policy Matters, and to Daniel Soucier, our production consultant.
In two weeks, we’ll be covering the past, present, and future of race and public policy in Maine. We’d like to thank you for listening to Maine Policy Matters from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. You can find us online by searching Maine Policy Matters on your web browser.
If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your preferred social media platform to stay updated on new episode releases. I’m Eric Miller, thanks for listening and please join us next time on Maine Policy Matters.

S3E2 Maine’s Lobster Industry: What Does The Future Hold?

Today, we will be covering James and Ann Acheson’s article entitled “What Does the Future Hold for Maine’s Lobster Industry?”, which covers problems the industry faces that threaten its future, including shell disease, climate change, increased regulations to protect right whales, and economic uncertainty.
You can find their article here: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mpr/vol29/iss2/11/
After briefly summarizing the article, we will speak with Rick Wahle, Patrice McCarron, and Geoff Irvine about what has been happening in the lobster industry in the two years since the article was published. Rick Wahle is a professor in the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences and the director of the Lobster Institute at University of Maine. Patrice McCarron is the executive director at Maine Lobstermen's Association and the president of Maine Lobstermen's Community Alliance. Geoff Irvine is the Executive Director of The Lobster Council of Canada.
Transcript
Looking for more information about lobster industry issues from the perspective of US and Canadian researchers? Tune in to this episode of Maine Policy Matters to learn more.
This is the Maine Policy Matters podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. I am Eric Miller, research associate at the Center. On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine.
Today, we will be covering James and Ann Acheson’s article entitled “What Does the Future Hold for Maine’s Lobster Industry?”, which covers problems the industry faces that threaten its future, including shell disease, climate change, increased regulations to protect right whales, and economic uncertainty. They also focus on several approaches that could help protect the lobster industry, including enacting lower trap limits, expanding markets for live and processed lobster, and increasing in-state processing capacity. This article was published in volume 29, number 2, of Maine Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Policy Center.
James, who went by “Jim”, was an eminent, internationally recognized scholar, whose work transcended disciplinary boundaries, including anthropology, economics, biology, public policy, and natural resource management. He received three National Science Foundation grants and authored over 90 articles in professional journals, along with five books, including The Lobster Gangs of Maine (1988) and Capturing the Commons: Devising Institutions to Manage the Maine Lobster Industry (2004). This episode is dedicated to Jim’s life and the work he accomplished.
After briefly summarizing the article, we will speak with Rick Wahle, Patrice McCarron, and Geoff Irvine about what has been happening in the lobster industry in the two years since the article was published. Rick Wahle is a professor in the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences and the director of the Lobster Institute at University of Maine. Patrice McCarron is the executive director at Maine Lobstermen’s Association and the president of Maine Lobstermen’s Community Alliance. Geoff Irvine is the Executive Director of The Lobster Council of Canada.
Lobster is the most valuable fishery in the country and most lobsters landed in the United States are caught in Maine. Lobsters have been an important food source for New Englanders since early Colonial times and for Indigenous peoples before.
In more recent years, overall lobster landings were worth $485.4 million dollars in 2019. The Maine lobster fishery is one of the world’s most successful fisheries with a high of 132.5 million pounds being caught in 2016. From 2018-2019, catches declined but still remained over 100 million pounds each year, playing a significant role in Maine’s economy.
Despite the relative success of the industry, it may face increasing problems in the future.
When their article was published in 2020, Jim and Ann Acheson named shell disease; climate change; North Atlantic Right whales; and markets, tariffs, and other economic matters as the four major problems facing the lobster industry.
Epizootic shell disease produces unsightly pits, growths, and lesions so that the affected lobsters cannot be sold as high-quality dinner lobsters. Shell disease has had a small effect on Maine’s lobsters to date, but has had disastrous effects on catches in Rhode Island waters. Between 2008 and 2013, an estimated 30% of Rhode Island fishermen were put out of business and others faced severely reduced incomes.
Climatic change due to an increase in atmospheric warming has led to increased storms, retreating ice, and rising sea levels that have caused lobsters in Maine waters to shift to colder Canadian waters. Lobster industry advocates do say that lobster can be caught all along the Maine coast despite this observation in the general movement north. Changes in herring movements leading to large schools of herring seeking cooler and deeper waters is leading to a scarcity of a major bait source in Maine waters. All of the ecological complexities regarding climatic change in the Gulf of Maine are something that researchers are continuing to understand.
The lobster industry’s problems with right whales began in 1996 when Max Strahan, who had petitioned the federal government to list the spotted owl as an endangered species in the Pacific Northwest, sued the Commonwealth of Massachusetts under the Endangered Species Act to prevent whales from being killed by lobster gear. In a different suit brought to court in 2020 by conservation organizations, the federal judge hearing the case ruled in their favor and found that the federal government was not doing enough to protect right whales from being entangled in lobster fishing gear. Fishermen feel they are being unfairly targeted because most whales are killed by ship strikes, and the proposed rules do nothing to curb ship strikes. Environmentalists argue the law is still not being enforced and that whales are still being killed by lobster gear. The Maine lobster industry believes its whale protection plan is not being given enough credit for reducing risk to the whales. The latest federal omnibus spending bill included a 6 year pause on new whale regulations while funding research as well as innovative fishing gear development which has been celebrated by the lobster industry and criticized by some environmental groups.
Lobster fishermen have faced economic problems for a number of years, which they describe as a cost/price squeeze. Between 2003 and 2013, the cost of bait increased 500 percent in response to reductions in the quota fishermen are allowed to catch. Other costs to fishermen have also skyrocketed. Fuel prices increased from $1.50 per gallon in 2002 to $5.00 per gallon in 2010. Prices declined in 2020, but increased again in May of 2022 to peak at $6.43 per gallon for diesel before lowering to the mid to low $5 per gallon mark later in 2022 according to the US Energy Information Administration. A new 36-foot lobster boat, which might have cost $125,000 in 1998, can cost upwards of $400,000 in 2020. The decline in revenue combined with markedly higher costs has put many fishermen in precarious financial straits. An economic study points out that there have recently been large year-to-year swings in lobster prices, quantities, and revenue. In 2020, the market for lobsters was reduced again by the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only had the Asian market already been shrinking due to the Chinese- American trade wars, but the European market also contracted due to the pandemic.
Jim and Ann Acheson detail hope for the future in the face of these industry problems, including trap limits that would reduce costs for bait, fuel, and traps, while also reducing the number of lines in the water which can aid the right whale problem. Lobster marketing and expansion of local processing capability can also increase lobster sales and increase income to fishermen, dealers, and others in the industry.
Now 2 years after the Achesons’ article, the Maine lobster industry continues to face challenges outlined in this piece and new ones as well. For example, the recent suspension of the lobster industry’s certificate of sustainability from the Marine Stewardship Council led to a pause in purchasing Maine’s lobsters by some major retailers, such as Whole Foods. These retailers use these certificates as a primary guide for informing consumers about the sourcing of their seafood products.  This move to stop buying Maine’s lobsters was criticized by Senators Collins and King, Representatives Pingree and Golden, as well as Governor Mills.
What follows here is a response from “the four members of Maine’s congressional delegation — Senators Susan Collins and Angus King, and Representatives Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden — along with the state’s governor, Janet Mills, sharply criticized the decision to stop buying Maine lobster.
“We are disappointed by Whole Foods’ decision and deeply frustrated that the Marine Stewardship Council’s suspension of the lobster industry’s certificate of sustainability continues to harm the livelihoods of hardworking men and women up and down Maine’s coast,”
Now that we have covered the Achesons’ arguments, we will move into our panel discussion about their article. We have with us today Rick Wahle, Patrice McCarron, and Geoff Irvine about some of these issues and what the future might hold.
Interview
Eric Miller: All righty. Thank you all for joining us today. So to each of you, how does the lobster industry most significantly affect the economic and environmental wellbeing of coastal communities? Our local impacts of Maine s and Atlantic Canada’s lobster industries, similar or quite different? We’ll start with Patrice and Rick to cover Maine and round out with Geoff’s Canadian perspective.
Patrice McCarron: Great. Well, I’ll kick us off from Maine’s perspective. I think it would be impossible to overstate the economic importance of the Maine lobster industry to the state of Maine . We are uniquely structured here in that we have an owner operator business model. So every vessel in Maine is owned and operated by the captain.
So the state license is about 4,800 people, which means those are 4,800 small businesses. They’re located. In our rural communities. So all of the money that we earn which is, you know, between 500 and 750 million a year annually, direct at the dock is spent locally. So in most coastal communities, the first dollar in those communities is often a lobster dollar.
So if we didn’t have those lobster dollars we wouldn’t have economic, economic opportunity. We wouldn’t have a good tax base, we wouldn’t have kids in school. So it really is the foundation of, of the coast for the state of Maine .
Geoff Irvine: Yep– well, I’m delighted to be here with you to have this discussion. We’re so linked in terms of our lobster sector in North America. So we work together on everything. So it’s the same in inland Canada and Quebec, Eastern Canada. There are literally hundreds of communities that rely on the lobster sector. I think I did, I did a bit of research on, there are 329 ports in Atlantic Canada, and 174 of them have the landed value of over a million dollars per port.
So that’s a dramatic impact. that’s on the harvesting side. On the shoreside sector, it’s also extremely important. We have literally hundreds of lobster plants in those hundreds of communities. The landed value in 2021 was over $2 billion. So that’s the money in the pockets of harvesters to pay, you know, to run their businesses, but with some profit at the end of it.
And for the exporters over 3 billion in export value. So by far the most important seafood sector in Canada. And you asked about the environmental well being. It’s a kind of a constant battle between the economic value and the environmental impact of the sector. which we, we all work on every day to try to mitigate, but certainly the seafood sector and the lobster sector, you know, provides some negative environmental impacts.
But I think everybody in the sector works hard to mitigate those.
Richard Wahle: Great. Well, and I’ll just follow on Patrice here too. And first I just want to say this is such a great opportunity to bring Patrice and Geoff together from both sides of the border. And to celebrate Jim Acheson’s contribution to sort of the human side of lobster science and the lobster world.
But to get to your question, Eric you know, Patrice said it well, and I’ll just paraphrase: the American lobster, again, is the most valuable single species fishery for both countries. And you know, 90% of the US harvest value comes from, from the Gulf of Maine, and about 80% comes from Maine itself. So Maine is really sort of the elephant in the room when it comes to the US side. And in any case, you know, while just the landed value of lobsters comprises about 1 to 2% of Maine’s GDP, that’s not counting the number of other industries that really depend on this fishery that would really inflate that GDP contribution. I’m talking about, you know, everything from trap makers, boat builders, the restaurant industry, tourism, and you can go on. It’s just a really important part of Maine ‘s economy, but to our national fisheries, and a really important international trade item as well.
Eric Miller: Yeah. Thank you all for, for your various perspectives on the greater context of the lobster industry in the North Atlantic area. And Jim and Ann in their article do note and comment the yeah, the lobster industry on how they jointly manage sustainable harvesting.
But there have been increasing concerns and, and discussion surrounding the practices. And we’ll get into those a little bit further. And then climate change is on the horizon as well as external environmental threats. So given the recent threat developments in cost of operations and relatively lower market price of lobster, how are fishermen with smaller boats and nearshore operations feeling about the future of the lobster industry and how their long-term business viability compared with fishermen who have larger boats and fish 50 plus miles offshore?
How have relaxing of Covid-19 restrictions and changes in overseas markets changed this?
Patrice McCarron: I guess I can jump in again for Maine. You know, the lobster fisheries are wild-caught fisheries. So anybody who is a commercial fisherman always knows you’re sort of at nature’s whim. You never know how much you’re gonna catch.
Lobster fisheries are not quota based fisheries, so it’s survival of the fittest, you know, the most skilled fishermen is gonna bring in the biggest catch. But like you say, there’s a lot in terms of the cost formula that fishermen cannot control. So, you know, year after year, the boat price might be really low or it might be really high.
In 2021 we had a record boat price. A lot of money. Input costs were high, but boat price was actually higher than that, and it was a profitable year. 2022, just a year later, the boat price has been about half of what we saw in 2021. And input costs for the business have skyrocketed even further.
So it’s a very unpredictable business year to year. I think anybody who fishes is by nature somewhat optimistic because you have to be crafty to make ends meet. You have to be a skilled fisherman and a skilled business person. You have to know when to set out your gear. You have to know when to spend time on the water, when you’re gonna maximize your catch.
And I think, you know, for the harvesters in Maine they’ve, they’ve gotten really good with that. What’s difficult for our fleet is that it’s very diverse. So you’re asking about boats that fish beyond 50 miles from shore. We don’t actually have that in Maine. We’re an area-based fishery, so we have a state waters only fishery that takes place between zero and three miles from shore, and those are our smallest vessels and they can be very vulnerable.
There’s not a lot of wiggle room in that business model. Our larger vessels, you know, we have a handful of boats that would be in the 50 foot range, but we’re typically like 35 to 42, 45 feet long. So again, they’re not super big boats. There’s a lot of unpredictability. Unit costs are high.
But I think over time guys just figure out a way to make it work. They’ll adjust their strategy on the fly, and they learn how to put money in the bank in a year like 2021 too. This year, 2022, where, where profits are lower. So there are a lot of threats, there’s a lot of anxiety, there is a lot of fear about the future, but I would just say fishing’s in their blood and they’re gonna go and they’re gonna hope for the best and they’re just going to be as flexible and innovative as they can to stay in this business.
And so far, so good. People are still here.
Geoff Irvine: Sure. I mean, it’s very much the same here, although we do have a significant number of in certain parts of the area, Southwest New Brunswick and Southwest Nova Scotia, there is a more mid-shore offshore component. But really the profitability and the business model really depends on how old you are when you got in, what your costs are.
So new entrants are finding it very difficult. But, I would argue a bit about low prices. We’ve really, since 2012, even this year, we’ve been on an increase of shore prices for 10 years. And it’s been really very good for many years. 2021, as Patrice said, was an incredible year.
Probably the gilded age of lobster, but also the last part of 2020. As soon as the pandemic started to snap back, and really the first half of 2022, our prices, shore prices didn’t start to change here until the end of June. Last year the fall has been more difficult, but this winter our prices are back up, you know, to fairly decent, decent shore prices.
So, you know, if you look at the 10 year trend, we’ve seen nothing but increasing prices every year. And also in the market we’ve done a lot of research that shows that 75 to 80% of the export value goes back to the harvester. Very consistently, year in and year out, and just shows you how kind of healthy the industry is.
But it’s challenging. And the inputs, I think Jim Acheson calls it the cost price squeeze. And that’s a reality the harvesters have because just because their costs go up doesn’t mean they can charge more because the port price is the port price. And they can’t just say, no, we need more today.
It doesn’t work that way. So it’s kind of unfair. But in terms of covid pandemic for the lobster industry was the best thing that ever happened in terms of economic impact. It’s a crass way of putting it, but we’ve never seen a better market for lobster. And so as it adjusts outta the pandemic we’re getting more back to sort of where we were in 2019, which was a very strong market as well.
I just looked at the export numbers and 22 is gonna be a big year again, so just gotta keep, keep pushing it and and hope we stay on that trajectory.
Richard Wahle: And Eric, I might just add, and I realize this isn’t my wheelhouse, but I’ll only put a little bit of a historical perspective on this.
Pulling from the landings graph that Jim has in his paper there, that just shows, you know, for so long, from the 1880s to the 1980s landings almost rock solid with some, you know, dips  during the 1920s and thirties, you know, at least I’m speaking for Maine here,roughly landing about 20 million pounds a year.
And that started dramatically changing in the late 1980s, 1990s. And by about 2016Maine was harvesting about six times more than it had been in the 1980s. And while we’ve fallen off that a bit, the value has been maintained although there’s been fluctuations we’ve seen with the coming in and out of the covid years.
But I just want to make the point that there’s really a whole generation of fishermen here who’ve known nothing other than a booming fishery. And a lot of their elders have been a lot more conservative about, you know, investing in bigger boats and so forth.
But this younger generation have gone whole hog into big boats and venturing offshore, having a couple sternmen. And so I think there’s a concern out there that if things start falling off and costs start becoming unsustainable and with the new whale regulations, that some of these fishermen may be overcapitalized and unable to sustain their businesses at that scale.
I’d be interested in Patrice’s or Geoff’s perspective on that.
Patrice McCarron: Yeah, I do think that the business model has evolved. I’ve been with the Lobster Men’s Association for 23 years, and from day one I’ve heard from the older lobstermen that the young guys are overcapitalized and they’re in for a rude awakening.
And, you know, at least for this last quarter of a century that hasn’t borne itself out. And there have been some economic investigations that are showing that really the most profitable sector of the industry has been this sort of nearshore. Federal waters fishery where you’re carrying more crew because you’re generating overall a lot more income.
And I think as we broach the new whale regulations, those are the vessels that have more operating capital. They have more of an ability to invest into high tech more expensive gear. And they may actually prove to be more resilient to some of the places where this management model is shifting.
Where you have a small vessel with a single operator, your ability to adapt is pretty limited. Your business model keeps your footprint really small. It keeps you close to shore. You have very small capital flow. And it does really limit your ability to adapt. So that’s one of the things that we’ve really been advocating for through the association, is that we have to recognize that our fleet is very diverse, and it is the combined diversity of that fleet from our small insure boats, our medi and then our larger boats.
That together is what makes this fishery really, really work. And to lose any segment of that would really prove to be devastating. So, you know, I don’t know, the jury’s still out in terms of the history that’s yet to be written, but I guess I’m a little bit skeptical about the fact that people are overcapitalized because I think that they have really created a modern business model that has proven very, very effective for them at least so far.
Geoff Irvine: Yeah, I could add from the Canadian perspective something I forgot to mention, and that is that we have very specific defined seasons here. So in virtually three quarters of the fishery, it’s a two month season. So you’re either fishing May and June, or you’re fishing September and October. and that’s the whole Gulf of St. Lawrence, that’s all of Newfoundland, all of Quebec, all of Cape Bratton, all of Eastern Nova Scotia. so those harvesters that have a lobster license generally have another job or a business. and we have this, the magic in Canada of the employment insurance program that is a part of our social safety network where harvesters have the ability to have two claims per year because they’re harvesters.
So you know, the reality of the business is a little different when you have that kind of support. But, but you know, if you have a two month season, you kind of need it. And we’ve set our fishery up to be that.
Patrice McCarron: Yeah, I think another really noteworthy difference–there’s so many similarities between the US and Canadian lobster fisheries, but there are some divergences on the business model–in Maine there’s no cost to entry.
So the cost to get into the fishery in Maine is you find somebody to apprentice with and then you sort of buy into the fishery at the level that makes sense for how you want to prosecute the fishery. And you start with a low number of traps and you build up. So in Maine , you can get a skiff, you can get used traps, you can build your way through boats. In Canada there’s actually a cost to entry to actually purchase the license. So the barrier of entry in Canada is significantly higher, is a much higher financial output to get in.
We’ve tried to keep Maine sort of more of the traditional model where you can work your way in and kind of not have a model where you need, you know, a big pot of money to actually gain access to the fishery and that that really differentiates some of the profit margins and how the fisheries actually operate.
Geoff Irvine: Yeah. And, and that, I guess, the difference as well is that then you can’t sell your license when you want to get out. So here you do have to buy your license, but then you can sell it when you retire. It’s all part of the business calculation.
Eric Miller: These are fascinating differences in how people approach their industry.
And I am curious about how far offshore are these bigger boats venturing? Because you mentioned, most of them stay with zero to three miles offshore, as well as kind of, if you have an idea of the share of the fishermen that have chosen this more. I don’t know if a more capitalized business model and how noticeable that is compared to 10, 20 years ago.
Patrice McCarron: Yeah, so for Maine, the state actually regulates state waters, which are zero to three miles. So every harvester in Maine has a state permit. So we issue the state of Maine issues about 4,800 of those, of that population. just over 20% also get a federal permit from the federal government. So to cross over the three mile line, that’s federal waters, you need to be permitted by the federal government.
You do actually need to purchase that license. There’s a limited number of those, so they have to be transferred from person to person. And depending on the market, those have been as high as 40, $50,000 for the permit. And they’re sort of sliding back to, you know, $15,000 right now. So we in Maine have about 1300 federal permit holders.
They tend to fish through the winter months. They tend to be on the boats that would be over 40 feet edging up 50 feet or above. Definitely a higher operating cost, but that allows them to kind of nudge over a little bit into the Canadian model where you’re getting to land lobster during the wintertime when it’s a harder shell lobster, a higher yield lobster, typically a higher price lobster.
So, the fewer boats were operating offshore, although it costs more to do that, the cost that you’re earning for each lobster that you land tends to be higher and does support that business. I think the big difference between 20 years ago and now is that most of those boats would come in for the summer and then go offshore in the winter.Now a lot of boats strictly fish in federal waters, and if they do come into state waters, they bring a smaller proportion of their gear, so they’ve just sort of shifted away and there’s more of a separation. It’s not, you know, exclusive but less crossover between those federal vessels and those state vessels because the state only tend to be smaller, smaller traps, smaller gangs of gear.
And the big boats would have the chance to sort of overwhelm their traps, their boats, their gear. So they’ve been able to make their living by staying more exclusively in federal waters, which is a big shift.
Eric Miller: All right. This is an excellent transition into the next question, which is more environmental and climate related.
And this change in behavior I find fascinating among lobstermen. How has warming waters and ocean acidification due to climate change affected current lobster stock and longer term confidence in the fishery? Is there increasing concern regarding the ecological condition and changing patterns of the Gulf of Maine in general?
Rick, if you don’t mind starting us off.
Richard Wahle: Sure, I’d be happy to start that off. And it’s a big question. Well, you know climate change has certainly played a really important role in the past decades. And we’re really seeing its signature on the shifting lobster stocks. and just to sort of set the stage, it’s important to realize that there’s a really,striking temperature gradient from the northeast to the southwest along our coastline. So, you know, Bay of Fundy and eastern Maine are much colder during the summer than say, southern New England. But all these areas have been warming at about roughly the same rate as a result of climate change. But whereas the southern New England was sort of well into the lobster comfort zone, temperature-wise, if you will, early in that time, as things got warmer, the adverse effects of warmer temperatures were really taking their toll.
We started to see it in the form of mass mortalities in Long Island Sound that knocked the stock down by 75%. It’s never really recovered from that. We saw shell disease rear its ugly head. Back in the late nineties, early 2000s, prevalence levels went up to like 35% and have just pretty much stayed there ever since and started spreading to the north. And that really knocked back the southern New England stock seriously.
But at the other end of the range, in the Bay of Fundy and eastern Maine, we saw that that same warming was starting to bring the lobster nursery habitats into the comfort zone of the lobster. And it started to trigger this wave of larval settlement into nursery areas that were otherwise at very low population densities, or virtually vacant great looking habitat, but nobody’s home. That all changed in the early 2000s, and on up to, to now. And it elevated, it ended up elevating the fishery to its current status now as the most valuable single fishery in New England.
In the US we’re really seeing that eastern Maine area, that boom that we saw there really accounted for that dramatic shift. But I should also say it’s not just climate change. We also have been seeing the effects of depleting groundfish, and groundfish are an important predator in this system. This has been seen, you know, throughout the range, whether you’re talking Atlantic Canada or the US. People point their finger to the depletion of cod and certainly cod are an important predator. But really it’s the entire assemblage of groundfish that include flatfish, you know, flounder, halibut, goose fish or monk fish as they’re usually called, other bottom dwelling or near bottom fish that have been widely depleted since the 1970s, eighties.
And so that predator release only acted to favor lobsters. And in fact, you know, I remember talking to fishermen back in the nineties already who were saying, you know, we’re catching lobsters in places we’ve never seen ’em before. Way out in the wide open. Well, there weren’t any predators there anymore, or at least the big ones that really take their toll on the small lobsters.
Groundfish were severely depleted, so it’s a combination I think we can say the boom was the result of the joint effects of both the favorable effects of warming temperatures, but also the depletion of ground fish. And of course, taking the bigger geographic perspective and including Atlantic Canada, you know, we’re seeing this eastward shift of the center of the population.
And definitely southern Gulf of St. Lawrence has been seeing an increasing wave of lobsters and even Nova Scotia and the Northern Gulf of St. Lawrence is seeing higher landings than they’ve ever seen before. So there’s definitely this northward shift as a consequence of warming climate and depleted pressure, predators.
Eric Miller: It’s fascinating how ecological systems function in that way and how connections ecologically just move in this truly dynamic manner. I mean, you often hear warming waters, you hear moving lobster so you kind of scratch your head when you see the stocks being caught at this level.
But there you have it. The predation being decreased because this was happening due to climate change. So we’ve got some almost increasing foot Northern fishery news. And are there reasons that those of us in the southern part of the fishery are people more nervous?
Patrice McCarron: Yeah, so, so I can jump in. , you know, I think overall from a fisherman’s perspective, climate change has been positive, whether you fish in downeast Maine or southern Maine, I think one of the confusing things about the center of abundance shifting north doesn’t necessarily mean that things have crashed below.
So, you know, as Rick described in southern New England, that sort of a different oceanographic regime south of Cape Cod, a different system. And, we did see a crash, and that is concerning. But the Gulf of Maine is its own sort of semi enclosed system and we have not seen that crash. We’ve seen landings in southern Maine on a very, very slow increase, above flat, but certainly not on a decline other than the inter-annual variability.
We saw in the late nineties and the early 2000s, mid-coast Maine is where the center of abundance had really blossomed, where it had been in Casco Bay prior to that, and then more recently in downeast Maine. And we’re seeing those rises in Canada. But nobody should think that we’re not landing lobster in southern Maine or mid-coast Maine anymore.
The landings have really been robust and steady, and the resource remains very strong and people are optimistic about that. I think the other really encouraging thing that came out of the literature on climate change was a study that compared southern New England with the Gulf of Maine, and it found very specifically that the sustainability measures the stewardship practices that we have in the Gulf of Maine fishery, had they been implemented in southern New England, would’ve lessened that decline significantly.
So we can’t prevent climate change. We can’t prevent the impacts on the resource, but we certainly have a very robust conservation plan in place, which has provided a buffer. So if Mother Nature is going to provide conditions that are gonna see the lobster stock contract somewhat, we have sort of built in all the protections and that decline is going to be a lot less severe of a drop off than what they experienced in the southern Maine because we are protecting our baby lobsters and our oversized lobsters and our bycatch goes back alive.
And we just have a lot of really practical measures that I think really honor sort of the biology of the resource in a really practical way. And a lot of that stuff obviously translates up to Canada as well, so I think fishermen remain very optimistic. I think everybody is sort of bracing for some sort of softening of the landings over time.
You know, how severe those are gonna be. The jury’s out; models say different things, but everything is basically saying, you’re not gonna continue up here forever. But we feel like there is a business model if the landings do start to start to soften a little bit in the next few years. And we’ve seen little bits of that so far, but I don’t know, Geoff, probably you’re seeing similar but different things up in Canada, right?
Geoff Irvine: Yeah, no, very, very much similar. I mean, I was in Newfoundland a few months ago and I was, this is the first live lobster holding facility in Newfoundland. There hadn’t been one there. So that shows you how much more they’re landing in Newfoundland and Labrador than ever. The landings in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Cape Breton, eastern Nova Scotia all trending up. and in the southern part of the rain, southwest New Brunswick and southwest Nova. You know, there’s still a wonderful business model there, there’s still a great catch. But I mean, we’re seeing that the peak landings were 2016 and we’re seeing them kind of weaken off.
I mean, that’s a very recent history. but I think there’s, there’s definitely some concern about what the future holds. And as we talked about earlier, when you’re paying a million dollars for a license in LFA 34 and 500 grand for a boat that’s a big investment. And so this kind of thing keeps people up at night at times, thinking about what the future will hold.
So, I mean, it’s like Patrice said, it’s hard to know what it’s gonna look like, but I think there’s absolutely some concern in the southern part of the range and in the northern part sort of great enthusiasm and, and optimism. but as Patrice said, we also have very, very good harvest control rules in place.
And every LFA, if the stock goes down a certain amount. We have things that the harvesters can implement to adjust their catch, to adjust their effort to ensure that we keep the everything sustain.
Eric Miller: Fascinating. Rick, would you mind elaborating on for, for our listeners, the how vulnerable lobsters are to acidification where the science is there for that aspect of this issue?
Richard Wahle: Yeah. Well, the story on acidification is a relatively new and, and short one compared to our understanding of temperature effects. But, you know, it’s a topic that really only has gained some traction in, you know, 10, 15 years ago. And we’re starting to learn a lot across different species and taxa.
And with respect to lobsters and crabs some of the literature showing that, you know, these crustaceans are relatively resistant to acidification effects compared to, say, oysters and clams and so forth that are very vulnerable, especially at their earliest life stages when, you know, shells dissolve when on the mud flats, just as they’re settling.
So the concern is less for the American lobster in any case, is less focused on acidification effects or their adverse effects, as they are on the direct and indirect effects of warming temperatures. And, you know, even among crustaceans, that varies a bit because, as we look west to some of the Alaska crab fisheries, and their early life stages seem to be more vulnerable to those changes.
So but our American lobster for now looks like from the work,and the literature and some of the work that has been done by my colleagues suggest that there are mechanisms in place, physiological mechanisms, that can cope with these changes in acidification.
Eric Miller: Fascinating.
Thank you for that elaboration to go a little deeper on a notable consequence of climate change, mentioned by Jim and Ann Acheson in their article. As lobstermen south of Maine experienced economic hardships largely due to things like episodic shell disease. How much concern is there along the Maine coast about this specifically?
Are there any preventative or mitigating measures for this disease? And these two separate kind of larger capitalized federal waters, fishing, lobstermen, lobstering operations, and the smaller boats is one group more vulnerable to their share of lobster being affected by epizootic shell disease?
Patrice McCarron: I, yeah, I guess I. Yeah. so it’s not reached a crisis point for the Maine fishery. I mean, certainly that southern New England fishery that had pretty extreme warm water temperatures, I mean temperatures measured on bottom that were really outside a temperature where you would expect a lobster to survive at all is where we really saw that disease kick off.
And as Rick said, we saw it migrate into Maine. The state of Maine puts samplers on boats from May through the end of the year. They do the state waters fishery as well as the offshore fishery. And one of the things that they do record is the presence of epizootic shell disease. So we will, on a year to year basis, have little pockets in, you know, very small regions along the coast where we might see like, More lobsters than we would like to see.
But it tends to be female lobsters who are in the reproductive phase, who have not shed their shell in a few years. So there were a few years along the way where we saw it in newer shell lobster and that was very concerning and that was something that they really monitored to see. Is it something where the lobsters had the shell on for a long time and, and the dhell disease sort of has time to take effect, but they’ll ultimately shed it out?
Or are we gonna see it in this sort of new shell lobster, which represents the majority of the catch in Maine. And we really, we really didn’t see that trend. So, you know, you’ll get calls in the spring from a handful of lobstermen. You know, I just had, you know, a bunch of female lobsters with dhell disease. Immediately call the state of Maine, they immediately report that. I think it is an issue that’s elevated enough that if somebody sees an anomaly in their catch, they always call the state offering to send up samples. So from my perspective I have not seen anything that, that is just sort of like a really low level of sort of annoyance, but in a sector of the lobster stock that has had its shell for a long time is gonna mold out of that and not something that we’re really seeing sort of spread across the catch. So I think that translates into a pretty minimal economic impact on the fishery.
And, you know, something that much more rare we would hear in the offshore waters, like every once in a while, like a deep pocket of warm water, somebody might pull up a few again, a lobster that’s had its shell for a long time, a lobster that’s gonna mold out of that and not something that we’re really seeing spreading through what’s gonna be the majority of our catch those newer shell lobsters.
So I don’t know, Rick, if you’ve seen anything different than that in the data, but that seems to be the way that the trend has gone the last five years or so.
Richard Wahle: yeah. Yeah. I  think you captured it pretty well there, Patrice. You know, the highest prevalence levels are essentially in the warmest places and also among the lobsters that hold onto their shells the longest.
So the warmest places are near shore, southern New England,. and we see, you know, the highest prevalence among the larger, you know, oversized lobsters, but especially, as Patrice said, the egg-bearing females that are holding onto their, their shells longer, their exoskeletons longer.
So but you know, once that the epizootic took off, it did start spreading northward and it did start penetrating Maine waters. It sort of wrapped around Cape Cod and into Massachusetts, you know, north of Cape Cod Bay. And it reached its tentacles into, you know, southwestern Maine, but seems to have more or less stabilized, as that pattern hasn’t changed a lot in, say, the past 10 years.
So but you know, with increasing warming you know, the suggestion is that we might see higher prevalence levels, but especially in southern New England, I mean, sorry, in southern Maine .
Eric Miller: Got it. Definitely something to keep our eyes on as the years go on. According to NOAA Fisheries, approximately 368 North Atlantic right whales are left after what they define as an unusual mortality event, which has occurred since 2017. As the recent passage of the omnibus spending bill here in the States included a six-year pause on federal whale regulations as well as funding for marine ecological research and fishing gear, technological development.
Can you all weigh in on the significance of this pause and US federal government investment in those research and technical technological development initiatives? Which research priorities do you all think are most important to fishermen as the North Atlantic right whale and the greater North Atlantic Marine ecosystem?
And what do you know and not know about this endangered species? and how is this debate playing out in Canada as well?
Patrice McCarron: That is a broad question.
Eric Miller: Yep. Yep. An an easy one here.
Patrice McCarron: I’ll kick it off. Yeah. I’ll kick it off. Maybe I’ll just answer a piece of it and we can sort of circle through and, and, and work our way through.
In terms of the pause that we got from the federal government, that’s truly historic and, you know, very, very meaningful for our fishery. The US Lobster fishery, we implemented whale protection measures in the nineties. We did a significant round of whale protection measures in 2009, another significant round in 2014.
And then in May of 2022, we did a brand new 60% risk reduction, you know, off of our revised baseline. So we’ve taken rope out of the water, we weakened rope. We’ve really expanded our gear marking. We now have closures on the books and Maine. So super high impact for our fishermen. The Maine fishery was scheduled to bring that 60% risk reduction all the way up to 90% risk reduction by 2024.
And that is controversial because the Maine fishery doesn’t really have a documented track record of entanglement. So a lot of the risk that we’re mitigating now in Maine is hypothetical risk. We know where some of the entanglements take place, we know what fisheries they come from, but for a lot, we don’t know.
When we look at rope that right whales are carrying, we can say it doesn’t really look like the rope that Maine fishermen use. We tend to fish a smaller diameter rope than some of the rope that comes off. So the Maine lobster fishery has really been advocating to kind of put the brakes on and have the federal government reanalyze the science.
We feel like they haven’t followed the law as prescribed by the Endangered Species Act. What the federal government has done in giving us our risk reduction goals is they’ve basically said, anytime, you know, we, we get to a decision point and our data are modeling, we’re just gonna pick the worst case scenario so that we make sure that the whales get the most protection possible.
But actually what the law requires is that the federal government examines scenarios that are reasonably certain to occur. So not things that are so far-fetched that they’ll never happen. So we feel like, you know, bringing us to a 90% risk reduction and ultimately we’re slated to do a 98% risk reduction is something that would have potentially marginal benefit to the whales, but would have devastating impacts on our fisheries.
So this pause allows us time to kind of dig into these models, look at the data that we’re using, really examine the implications of the assumptions. and I, and I’ll give you an example of why that matters. When the federal government did a forward population projection for right whales, they said, you know, how many right whales do we think we will have in the year 2050?
And when they used very conservative estimates of reproduction, they used 2010 to 2018 in every scenario. Even with closing the US Federal Fisheries, the right wheel population continued to decline if they simply used the full reproductive dataset. So the nineties through 2019, in every scenario projecting that population forward, the right wheel population basically doubled.
And so it, it, it begs the question, you know, which is it you took the worst 10 years on record, or the worst eight years on record for a set of data that is without trend? And for us, it, it, it doesn’t make any sense. You know, they didn’t really ask the question of, you know, well, is it likely that whales are gonna continue to, you know, have more success in reproduction?
And since then they have. so we feel like, you know, they’ve just made very bad assumptions that will harm the fishery. So this federal pause, Congress recognizes that there’s a lot of work to be done. They actually haven’t solved the problem, but they’ve given national marine fishery service in the fishing industry and the conservation community and all of the stakeholders time to come together and really dig through those questions and try to figure out, you know, what the right risk reduction would be for our fisheries so that we can hopefully have a functioning industry and save the right whales.
And in terms of the funding that was a really important piece of the pause. there’s a lot of money that’s gonna come in for right wheel monitoring and surveillance, so have a better idea of where, where right whales are. Models are now indicating that right whales will be even less frequent in the waters where Maine lobstermen fish and shifting more into Canadian waters and down to the southeast US in the winter.
So to really get a handle on where the whales are, like what are the, what are the fishing areas we really need to be prioritizing for management will be important. But there’s also a lot of money in there to continue to develop innovative gear solutions, which will include on-demand fishing without rope, as well as other modifications to a traditional fishing system that would pose less risk to whales, that would allow maybe a more flexible, viable business model for some of the, the smaller vessels in our fleet.
So there’s a lot of really, really important stuff in there. And it set a high bar for all of us. We have a lot of work to do over the next six years to try to get answers and hopefully size that management to really address the actual risks that the right whales are facing. So I guess I’ll, I’ll leave it at that.
Geoff Irvine: Thanks. So the whales effectively came to Canada in 2017 and we did not expect them. They didn’t tell us they were coming. So that is, that is when we had that particular terrible mortality event, which caused us to immediately figure out how we could continue fishing, crab, and lobster and avoid mortalities and, and entanglements.
So we brought in a whole suite of measures, the dynamic closure management system where we have over flights and things that monitor whales. So if we see a single right whale on the Gulf of Sale, Lawrence, we close nine grids for 15 days. And if another whale is cited, we close it for the whole season.
So we’ve invested millions of dollars in that system and it appears to be working mostly. We’ve also done a lot of things that Patrice talked about you know, removing gear and gear marking and, and all kinds of other things like that, that we hope will work. So the old fishing industry’s committed to it.
We know it’s vital to ensure market access to the US to everywhere else that cares about right whales. I mean, we have customers in Europe and Scandinavia in Asia who are constantly asking us, you know, where we are with these measures. So it’s important for the market.
And back to the challenges in Maine. We’ve always wondered why the Maine harvesters have been so impacted by these measures by NOAA because we like, like Patrice, know that there aren’t a lot of whales there when they’re fishing. So we could never understand that. And also, we buy half of Maine ‘s lobster in Canada.
Uh we’re your biggest customer. and so we need that lobster to keep our plants going in the summer and the fall. So we were, we’ve been very concerned about your industry, notwithstanding all of our close relations. So we were delighted to hear about the pause. and we’re delighted to hear about more research.
I think one big thing that Rick will probably talk about is some of the work that he’s gonna do with the new NNA lobster network, which will do some of that work. But no, we’re taking it very seriously and, and the new measures every year, the Federal Fisheries Minister adjusts the measures, and we expect her announcement to come out in the next few weeks for this coming year.
But the fishing industry here is committed to doing what it takes.
Richard Wahle: Yeah. Perfectly well, both of you did. And really, this pause brings more than 50 million to start to address these really important questions. And they go toward both lobster and right whales and the communities that depend on this fishery.
So, as Patrice said, this is an unprecedented opportunity to start to deal with these thorny issues. But I divide the challenges into short-term and long-term questions because certainly, you know, resolving the entanglement issue, area closures and so forth, understanding right whale migration patterns and so forth, tracking them around you know, fields of lobster gear are really urgent needs.
And also understanding the impact of the new regulations potentially on our coastal communities. All that’s really urgent to know, but, you know, a lot of these changes that are happening as a consequence of climate change and we’re gonna be seeing longer term decadal scale changes happening.
We’re already seeing them and it’s really important to start to understand the mechanisms behind them. And this is where you really have to sort of back up and, and take the broader geographic view that not only encompasses our two fisheries, the US and Canada fisheries, Atlantic Canada, and basically New England, but really pan back to the North Atlantic and start to understand what’s happening here.
And what’s really interesting is that some of these dramatic changes that have been happening pivot around 2010 when there was a dramatic regime shift in the Gulf of Maine. All of a sudden we started to see warmer Gulf Stream water moving into the Gulf of Maine. And that had food, web level effects.
And, let me just put that in a somewhat broader geographic perspective. You know, we have really two currents that merge right off our coast. There’s the Gulf Stream I just mentioned coming from the south with warm, salty, nutrient-poor water. And then we have the Labrador current coming from the Arctic, bringing really cold, nutrient-rich water, and it’s that Labrador current in the Scotian Shelf water that has really fueled the huge historic productivity that the Gulf of Maine is so well known for. And in recent years, and again, pivoting around 2010, we started to see the Gulf Stream waters play a more important role in influencing the productivity of the system. And that’s where we started to see things collapsing to some extent primary productivity. The phytoplankton that feed the zooplankton that right whales depend on as well as, you know, things like herring, and even cod larvae and sand lance.
All those forage fish are strongly affected by the abundance of these tiny crustaceans called copepods. And there’s a particular copepod called Calanus finmarchicus that seems to be a real keystone species here. And it’s the prime and preferred food source for the Atlantic right whale. So that shift in the distribution of Calanus finmarchicus and some of these other cold water zooplankton to the north has played a role in influencing the migration of the right whale to northern waters and more prevalently in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
So, we’ve just secured some additional funding from the National Science Foundation to start to look at what’s influencing these changes in the Labrador current and the Gulf Stream. And, they’re linked to the changes that are happening in the Arctic. And so the program that’s funding this is one of the National Science Foundation’s polar programs called “Navigating the New Arctic.” And it’s really the only project in that portfolio of grants that have been funded that’s looking at the effects of Arctic change at lower latitudes, at a lower latitude system. Most of those projects are looking at changes in the Arctic and the consequences in the Arctic. And here we’re looking at the lower latitude effects, but having those, that larger scale view allows us to build these predictive models that essentially give us the lead time, out decades refining those predictive models so we can better understand these linkages between the changing climate, shifting lobster distributions, and shifting and migrating right whales.
Eric Miller: Got it. Yeah. As a data person myself, there always seems to be a need for more. It’s great to see so many resources poured into learning more, which is absolutely necessary. If folks would like to learn more about the North Atlantic right whale, as much as we do know—their habitat range, how many we think are out there, the context in which some of these fatalities have occurred—is on the NOAA Fisheries website for you to learn more. They’ve got maps and tables. So as we’re closing out here on our hour, are there any other things that you, you all would like to share about the lobster industry that we haven’t already covered?
Next steps for policymaker, citizens, the lobster industry itself, we’ll start off with Geoff.
Geoff Irvine: keep eating lobster…
I mean we’ve got a myriad of challenges and issues that are based on the world getting more insular and market access challenges where we’re noticing it in all of the markets, the de-globalization of the world it’s more, more challenging to, to, to sell protein everywhere around the world.
So we spend a lot of time dealing with those market access issues. And I’m sure our friends, our people who are exporting lobster for Maine do the same. So that’s just a really high level matter that we’re not gonna solve today. But it’s something that is becoming more and more of a challenge, and that is worldwide sort of nationalism and market access sort of putting barriers up that, that I’m seeing every day.
Eric Miller: Patrice, would you like to go next?
Patrice McCarron: Sure. Yeah. I would echo Geoff’s suggestion like, eat, eat more lobster. I hope that people took away from this, the incredible sustainability practices in place in the US and Canadian lobster fisheries. They are virtually unmatched internationally.
These are quite literally the most sustainable fisheries in the world. You know, throughout time where fisheries have been depleted and overfished and stocks have crashed, you know, these fisheries have blossomed. You know, in part, mother nature has given us a hand. But really it would not have been possible without the incredible conservation practices in place in both countries.
And I hope people also understand the commitment that both countries have to North Atlantic right whale conservation, all of the fisheries, the shipping industry. The governments are really trying to get measures in place that will allow these, you know, incredible heritage, fisheries and traditions to continue, and conserve this incredible endangered species that is at risk.
And people should feel really good that the fisheries are in fact making changes, that they are actively continuing to improve what they’re doing. And people should feel proud to choose this product and not be confused by the media and wonder, you know, if they’re doing the right thing. Because so much time and energy has gone into really getting it right and really having an industry.
We hope that we’ll be handing off to the next generation proudly in both countries.
Richard Wahle: Great. Well, it seems fitting to sort of close this out with a little quote from Jim Acheson himself. And there’s this wonderful book he wrote in 1988 called The Lobster Gangs of Maine. And, you know, it’s close to my heart because he did a lot of his interviews in my home town of Bristol, Maine.
You know, he was an anthropologist, and so he studied the social systems of territoriality, and used the American lobster fisheries as his case study. So the very first words in that book were, “Hhigh risk and uncertainty in all parts of the world are the everyday lot of the fisherman.”
And, you know, I think we just reinforce that message with this podcast today. But I think we also take away a really strong message of the sustainability ethic of the participants in this fishery. They’re, essentially naturalists in the field every day. They’re seeing these changes happening. Their fishery is in their own backyard and it’s in their best interest to make it sustainable. So that sustainability ethic is, a conservation ethic, is in their blood and right whales are part of the ecosystem in which they live and want to see them continue to thrive. So it just means bringing people together to work on this project and problem.
Eric Miller: There are some excellent closing words there. Thank you all so much for joining us today, Patrice, Geoff, and Rick. And we will have you look forward to checking in hopefully with you all again sometime in the future.
All: Great, Eric. Wonderful. Thank you very much. Thanks Eric.
End of Interview
What you just heard was Rick Wahle’s, Patrice McCarron’s, and Geoff Irvine’s perspectives on the lobster industry as discussed by James Acheson and Ann Acheson in their article “What Does the Future Hold for Maine’s Lobster Industry?” Maine Policy Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. For all citations for data provided in this episode, please refer to the original article in Maine Policy Review.
Special thanks to the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine for sponsoring this episode of Maine Policy Matters. Since 1987, the Lobster Institute has been fostering collaboration and communication in support of a sustainable and profitable lobster industry in the Northeast United States and Canada as well as aiming to maximize the engagement of UMaine faculty and students with stakeholders in this iconic fishery.
The editorial team for Maine Policy Review is made up of Joyce Rumery, Linda Silka, and Barbara Harrity. Jonathan Rubin directs the Policy Center. A thank you to Jayson Heim and Kathryn Swacha, scriptwriters for Maine Policy Matters, and to Daniel Soucier, our production consultant.
In two weeks, we will be reading a summary of Jonathan Rubin et al.’s research on road salt in their report entitled, “Road Salt in Maine: An Assessment of Practices, Impacts and Safety”.
We would like to thank you for listening to Maine Policy Matters from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. You can find us online by searching Maine Policy Matters on your web browser. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your preferred social media platform to stay updated on new episode releases.
I am Eric Miller. Thanks for listening and please join us next time on Maine Policy Matters.

S3E1 Offshore Wind Development - A Comparison of Rhode Island and Maine

In our first episode of season three, we cover an article by Mary Morrissey, who gives us an inside perspective on Maine’s offshore wind development and proposes short- and long-term actions to guide Maine’s development of the offshore wind industry in federal waters in her article “Maine and Offshore Wind Development: Using the Coastal Zone Management Act and Marine Spatial Planning to Influence Projects in Federal Waters.” This article was published in volume 31, number 1, of Maine Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center.
You can find Mary Morrissey's article here: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mpr/vol31/iss1/2/
Transcript
How can looking to Rhode Island as an example in offshore wind development benefit Maine?
Today, we will be looking at a comparison between Rhode Island and Maine’s offshore wind development projects made by Mary Morrissey, a law student and editor-in-chief of the Ocean and Coastal Law Journal at the University of Maine School of Law.
Welcome back to Maine Policy Matters, the podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. I am Eric Miller, research associate at the Center.
On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine. On our first episode of season three, we will be covering an article by Mary Morrissey, who gives us an inside perspective on Maine’s offshore wind development and proposes short- and long-term actions to guide Maine’s development of the offshore wind industry in federal waters in her article “Maine and Offshore Wind Development: Using the Coastal Zone Management Act and Marine Spatial Planning to Influence Projects in Federal Waters.” This article was published in volume 31, number 1, of Maine Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. For all citations for data provided in this episode, please refer to Morrissey’s article in Maine Policy Review.
How can comparing Rhode Island’s coastal management plan help Maine’s current offshore wind efforts and potential for marine spatial planning? Morrissey provides somerecommendations based on the Governor’s Energy Office offshore wind roadmap process.
Morrissey outlines the actions that Maine can take to replicate Rhode Island’s model in a ‘responsible’ way – as concerns for sustainability of marine ecosystems and the coastal economy are quite high given the environmental challenges on the horizon. Back in 1972, Congress passed the Coastal Zone Management Act, or the CMZA, to, “preserve, protect, develop, and where possible, to restore or enhance the resources of the nation’s coastal zone.” This act encourages states to develop and implement their own management programs for land and water resources of their spatial zone. For example, both Rhode Island and Maine participate in the CMZA and have their own coastal management plans. Where Maine can learn from Rhode Island is from their site assessment management plan, referred to as an SAMP. Maine has yet to designate a SAMP.
Morrissey cites that, “Marine spatial planning is a public, sociopolitical process that aims to manage human activities to achieve predetermined outcomes.”  Marine spatial planning is important because it identifies areas of ecological concern, makes space for conservation efforts, and protects cultural heritage, among many other benefits. Even though there are many benefits to marine spatial planning Morrissey names five main challenges. The first is marine spatial planning cannot be effectively carried out without legislative and regulatory efforts. Second, the necessity of stakeholder engagement to produce an innovative, long-term plan. Third, the requirement for collaboration and coordination to allow for engagement with administrative entities and overlap with regional, local, or other strategic plans, policies, and laws. Fourth is managing errors in plan design and execution. And lastly, that marine spatial planning is a process that can slow offshore wind development.
As an example of a state that successfully faced these challenges, Morrissey discusses Rhode Island’s offshore wind planning and their Ocean SAMP. This regulatory document was a result of 2006 Governor Donald Carcieri’s goal of harnessing 15 percent of the state’s electricity from wind within a span of three years. As Morrissey explains:
The Ocean SAMP is a regulatory document made up of three integrated approaches: research, policy making, and public engagement. It maps a portion of Rhode Island’s state and surrounding federal waters to identify how to use this region and manage its resources to support the state’s environmental, social, and economic needs. It also specifically details potential effects on existing uses and resources in the Ocean SAMP area, including impacts on port development and job creation, electricity rates, coastal processes and physical oceanography, marine mammals, and commercial and recreational fishing…Ultimately, the Ocean SAMP was one of the first marine spatial plans in the nation and “laid the groundwork for the siting and permitting of the nation’s first offshore wind farm.”
It was not until 2010 that the Coastal Resources Management Council approved the Ocean SAMP, giving it the force of law. In 2011, NOAA approved the Ocean SAMP as part of Rhode Island’s coastal management plan, which meant that federal actions that have reasonably  foreseeable effects on Rhode Island’s coastal zone must undergo federal consistency review to ensure they do not conflict with the Ocean SAMP.   This created an issue because NOAA only ensured federal action that impacted the state waters were consistent with Rhode Island’s coastal management plan. This led Rhode Island to take a new approach to apply for a geographic location description.
This request was approved in late 2011, and Executive Director of the Coastal Resource Management Council Grover Fugate remarked that the geographic location was
“the first of its kind in the state and the nation, and allows the Coastal Resource Management Council to have a voice in what kind of offshore development takes place in the federal waters off Rhode Island’s coast….This tool will work as a major component of the Ocean SAMP, and both will help further Rhode Island’s role as a model for other states in marine spatial planning.”
Ocean SAMP has five other strengths and strategies that Maine could find useful: conceptual benefits, tangible goals and guiding principles, strong university engagement and research, extensive stakeholder and public engagement, and adequate funding.
In 2019, Governor Mills received a request from the Board of Ocean Energy Management to join a Gulf of Maine Intergovernmental Renewable Energy Task Force. In response, Maine began focusing on its offshore wind through four efforts. The first is Aqua Ventis, an 11-megawatt floating offshore wind technology pilot. It will be located south of Monhegan Island, more than 12 miles off the coast of Maine. The University of Maine designed the VolturnUS floating concrete hull technology that will support the wind turbine and will lead design, engineering, research and development, and post-construction monitoring. UMaine and the US Department of Energy also funded many studies and surveys to help these efforts.
The second effort is what is being called a research array, the nation’s first floating offshore wind research site in federal waters, which is a response to  the federal government’s ambitious energy goals and to “ensure that Maine develops [the offshore wind] industry in a manner that capitalizes on [its] innovative technology and abundant resources, while protecting [its] interests, industries, environment and values.
The third is a roadmap, supported by a $2.166 million grant from the US Economic Development Administration, that will detail how to advance offshore wind in ways that support Maine’s people, economy, and heritage. The roadmap also looks to understand and plan for the state’s role in commercial offshore wind in the Gulf of Maine.
The fourth is a moratorium on offshore wind projects that was established by Governor Mills to restrict the state from licensing, permitting, approving, or authorizing leases, easements, or other real property interests for offshore wind projects in state waters for 10 years. The Mills administration also proposed the moratorium to appease fishing interests, especially lobstermen, who opposed the research array over concerns about what they saw as potentially disastrous impacts on the lobster industry.
Morrissey suggests that “if Maine can implement a marine spatial plan, there are
potential environmental, social, and economic benefits—not least of which would be more efficient coordination of offshore wind efforts with other marine industries, such as aquaculture and fisheries, while protecting areas of biological and ecological concern.”
However, she names a few challenges and possible solutions for implementing this planning. The first is the risk of interrupting progress from changes in administration as well as fitting Maine’s legislative and regulatory process. Planning for differences in administration stance toward marine spatial planning policy is not something that can necessarily be codified with ease, to say the least. However, regarding the issue of fitting a SAMP to Maine’s legislative and regulatory framework, Maine could follow Rhode Island’s plan of building a regulatory framework explaining the marine spatial plan’s goals, means of implementation, decision-making authority, general policies, and regulatory standards.
The second is Maine’s large gulf size. The Gulf of Maine spans 36,000 square miles of ocean and 7,500 miles of coastline, with Maine stretching along 3,478 miles of that coastline and the rest being split between Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. In comparison, Rhode Island only has 384 miles of coastline with the Ocean SAMP covering roughly 1,467 square miles of the ocean as well as no international border. Maine would need to expend more energy and resources to define the limits of a marine spatial plan and divide the area among different ocean uses.
The third is concerns for collaboration. Maine must obtain support from its fishing communities, particularly lobstermen with over 4,800 lobster licenses, to successfully create a marine spatial plan.
As a solution to these concerns, Morrisey closes her article with several actions that Maine can take to replicate Rhode Island’s model and responsibly develop offshore wind in the Gulf of Maine.
Regarding actions that could be taken immediately, Morrissey outlines the following, increasing opportunities for public engagement beyond a public comment period, including fishing community in research, facilitate collaboration and investigating research gaps using public tools – such as the Northeast Data Portal, develop educational materials to communicate the benefits of offshore wind development, and developing partnerships with other Northeastern coastal states to identify points of concern and how the Gulf of Maine will be affected.
Beyond the immediate actions, Morrissey outlines longer-term options including signing memorandums of understanding with neighboring coastal states to facilitate collaboration, a marine spatial plan like the Rhode Island SAMP discussed earlier, codifying the marine spatial plan, and then expanding it into federal waters.
As a final note on this issue, Morrissey concludes:
Rhode Island serves as a primary example of how to use federal consistency review and marine spatial planning effectively in the form of an Ocean SAMP…Maine can begin working on its own marine spatial plan by capitalizing on preexisting efforts…The offshore wind industry is moving quickly, and it is in Maine’s best interest to take proactive steps to extend its influence into federal waters. Maine’s marine economy, environment, and ecology depend on it.
What you just heard was Mary Morrissey’s perspective on offshore wind development and marine spatial planning in Maine based on her article in Maine Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center.
The editorial team for Maine Policy Review is made up of Joyce Rumery, Linda Silka, and Barbara Harrity. Jonathan Rubin directs the Policy Center. A thank you to Jayson Heim and Kathryn Swacha, scriptwriters for Maine Policy Matters, and to Daniel Soucier, our production consultant.
In two weeks, we will be hosting professionals in the lobster industry for an interview and a synopsis of James and Ann Acheson’s article titled “What Does the Future Hold for Maine’s Lobster Industry?”
We would like to thank you for listening to Maine Policy Matters from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. You can find us online by searching Maine Policy Matters on your web browser. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your preferred social media platform to stay updated on new episode releases.

S2E8 Frank O’Hara’s Comparison of Covid-19 to the London Plague

Today, we will be covering an article by Frank O’Hara titled, “The Great London Plague of 1665 and the US COVID-19 Pandemic Experience Compared.”  This article was published in volume 30, number 2, of Maine Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Policy Center. For all citations for data provided in this episode, please refer to Frank O’Hara’s article in Maine Policy Review.            
In the article, O’Hara uses historical accounts from a 5-year-old survivor of the London Plague: Daniel Defoe. Listeners might recognize Daniel Defoe as the author of the novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe also wrote a lesser known novel called A Journal of the Plague Year. This novel is based on Defoe’s childhood experience of the Plague, city records, and his uncle’s diary.
You can find O'Hara's article here: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mpr/vol30/iss2/14/
Transcript
The COVID-19 pandemic and the Great London Plague of 1665. What, if anything, do we stand to gain by comparing these two crises?
Actually, quite a bit, according to long-time community and economic development planner, Frank O’Hara.  Today, we will be offering statistics and a survivor’s historical account of the Great London Plague of 1665 compared to the COVID-19 pandemic. While these two events may seem unrelated, the way survivors experienced them isn’t all that different.
Welcome to the Maine Policy Matters podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. I’m Eric Miller, research associate at the Policy Center. For those of you who tuned in for this season of the show, we are deeply grateful for your attention and we are excited to bring the next season starting January 17th, 2023.
We’ll be bringing in the new year with discussions regarding the lobster industry, opioid crisis, forest resources, and. So we hope that you are as excited as we are for those essays and interviews. Until then, have a safe and happy holiday season and we will be back with you all next year. On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine.
Today, we will be covering an article by Frank O’Hara titled, “The Great London Plague of 1665 and the US COVID-19 Pandemic Experience Compared.”  This article was published in volume 30, number 2, of Maine Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Policy Center. For all citations for data provided in this episode, please refer to Frank O’Hara’s article in Maine Policy Review.
In the article, O’Hara uses historical accounts from a 5-year-old survivor of the London Plague: Daniel Defoe. Listeners might recognize Daniel Defoe as the author of the novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe also wrote a lesser known novel called A Journal of the Plague Year. This novel is based on Defoe’s childhood experience of the Plague, city records, and his uncle’s diary.
Frank O’Hara uses excerpts from that novel to argue that our current experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic are not that much different from those of people in 1665 London.
At first glance, it would seem that there is little in common between these two plague experiences. How can we compare the mass deaths in the first 18 months of the Great Plague in London, for example, to the 98 percent survival rate of people infected by the coronavirus?
Despite these drastic differences, Frank O’Hara argues that there are similarities in the “human element” that get at what he calls  “basic human reactions to crisis”   that can teach us some lessons for the current pandemic. The human element of both crises goes beyond the differences in medical understanding, research and distribution systems, and public health infrastructure.
O’Hara identifies ten main similarities between the Great Plague and COVID, which he calls: the Early Rumors, Fears and Complacency, Fleeing to the Country, Quackery, the Economic Collapse, Government Relief Strategies, Government Public Health Strategies, Masks and Cleanliness, Social Division, and Easing Up Too Soon.
Today we’ll be looking at three of these topics: Fleeing to the Country, the Economic Collapse, and Easing Up Too Soon. We’ll start by discussing what O’Hara calls “Fleeing to the Country,” which refers to people’s attempts to leave crowded cities as a way of staying safe.
Dafoe writes in A Journal of the Plague Year:
The richer sort of people, especially the nobility and gentry, thronged out of town with their families and servants in an unusual manner. Nothing was to be seen but wagons and carts, with goods, women, servants, children, and coaches filled with people of the better sort, and horsemen attending them all hurrying away. In all it was computed that 200,000 people were fled and gone.
This type of plague-fueled migration also happened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
New York City, one of the most populated cities in the US, had a net outflow of 100 thousand households in 2020. This means that people were relocating to their summer houses or moving back in with their parents in smaller towns to try and get away from over-populated areas. Maine experienced a real estate boom in 2021 for this exact reason. Recent research from the Brookings Institute has found that “51 of the 88 U.S. cities with a quarter million people or more lost population between July 2020 and 2021.”
In both centuries, migration to the country highlights a class disparity. Wealthy people in both centuries were able to escape once things got bad, a move that not everyone could afford to make.
Relevant to wealth and class disparity is the next section of O’Hara’s article: the Economic Collapse.
O’Hara writes that “here in the United States, the country lost 20 million jobs in April 2020, the largest single-month decline on record. As we’ve covered in previous episodes, the hardest hit sectors were leisure and hospitality, retail, professional services, and manufacturing. This economic collapse is similar to what happened to the economy in London during the plague.
From Dafoe’s journal:
All master-workmen in manufactures stopped their work, dismissed their journeymen and workmen, and all their dependents. As merchandising was at a full stop, for very few ships ventured to come up the river, and none at all went out; the watermen, carmen, porters, and all the poor, whose labour depended upon the merchants, were at once dismissed, and put out of business. All the tradesmen usually employed in building or repairing of houses were at a full stop; so that this one article turned all of the ordinary workmen of that kind out of business, such as bricklayers, masons, carpenters, joiners, plasterers, painters, glaziers, smiths, plumbers and all the labourers depending on such. The seamen were all out of employment, and all the several tradesmen and workmen belonging to and depending upon the building and fitting out of ships, such as ship-carpenters, caulkers, ropemakers, dry coopers, sailmakers, anchor-smiths, and other smiths; blockmakers, carvers, gunsmiths, shipchandlers, ship-carvers, and the like; all or most part of the water-men, lightermen, boat-builders, and lighter-builders in like manner idle and laid by. All families retrenched their living as much as possible, so that innumerable multitude of footmen, serving-men, shop-keepers, journeymen, merchants’ bookkeepers, and such sort to people, and especially poor maid-servants, were turned out, and left friendless and helpless, without employment and without habitation.
Listeners might recognize some similarities from this account of the unemployment and supply chain disruptions that we are currently experiencing. Despite the similarities between the two crises, O’Hara points out that unlike 17th century London, the United States had unemployment insurance to cushion the economic impacts, something that did not exist in 17th century London.
The last section of O’Hara’s article that we will be covering today is Easing Up Too Soon. O’Hara states that, in the summer of 2021 in the United States, we opened up too soon, which allowed the COVID-19 pandemic to reignite through August and September via the new Delta variant. But even with rising numbers of cases and death, governments did not increase restrictions.
Something similar happened in London according to Dafoe:
Upon this notion spreading that the distemper was not so catching as formerly, and that if it was catched it was not so mortal, and seeing abundance of people who really fell sick recover again daily, they took to such a precipitant courage, and grew so entirely regardless of themselves, that they made no more the plague than of an ordinary fever, nor indeed so much…This imprudent, rash conduct cost a great many their lives who had with great care and caution shut themselves up and kept, retired, as it were, from all mankind. A great many that thus cast off their cautions suffered more deeply still, and though many escaped, yet many died. The people were so tired with being so long from London, and so eager to come back, that they flock to town without fear or forecast, and began to show themselves in the streets, as if all the danger was over. The consequences of this was, that the bills increased again 400 the very first week in November. 
O’Hara identifies other similarities such as the quackery of Londoners and Americans trying to make at home remedy treatments, the swift relief programs the magistrates of London and America’s federal government pieced together, the ways public health was handled by London officials and the US Centers for Disease Control, and Londoners’ and American’s desires for being done with the crises before they were actually over.
O’Hara concludes his article with a hopeful message and prediction:
There were similar behaviors in both centuries with regard to hating quarantines, falling for quack remedies, and easing restrictions before the pandemic was over. There were also differences. The American response to COVID-19 was much more casual than London’s response to the plague, our social divisions persisted during the pandemic, and oddly doctors in 17th century London appear to have been listened to with more respect than doctors today.
The year after the Great Plague ended, the Great Fire burned the City of London to the ground. Many records were lost, and the plague was forgotten in the rush to rebuild. Had that five-year-old boy not returned to tell the story 50 years later, we would know very little about the plague that wiped out a quarter of London’s population in 1665. Which raises the question—is there a five-year-old child in Maine today who will someday tell of our experiences in 2020 to future generations?
 
What you just heard was Frank O’Hara’s comparison of the Great London Plague of 1665 to the US COVID-19 Pandemic Experience. Maine Policy Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center.
The editorial team for Maine Policy Review is made up of Joyce Rumery, Linda Silka, and Barbara Harrity. Jonathan Rubin directs the Policy Center. A thank you to Jayson Heim and Kathryn Swacha, scriptwriters for Maine Policy Matters, and to Daniel Soucier, our production consultant.
We would like to thank you for listening to Maine Policy Matters from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. You can find us online by searching Maine Policy Matters on your web browser. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your preferred social media platform to stay updated on new episode releases.
I am Eric Miller–thanks for listening and please join us next time on Maine Policy Matters.

S2E7 Sustainable Small Businesses and Employee Ownership

In this episode, we will be offering data and strategies from Rob Brown, the director of Business Ownership Solutions at the Cooperative Development Institute based in Northampton, Massachusetts. Business Ownership Solutions works throughout the Northeast states with business owners to think through whether conversion to a cooperative could meet their needs. They also work with employees or community members to execute the co-op conversion. 
You can find Rob Brown's article here: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1905&context=mpr
Transcript
Today, we will be offering data and strategies from Rob Brown, the director of Business Ownership Solutions at the Cooperative Development Institute based in Northampton, Massachusetts. Business Ownership Solutions works throughout the Northeast states with business owners to think through whether conversion to a cooperative could meet their needs. They also work with employees or community members to execute the co-op conversion.
This is the Maine Policy Matters podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. I am Eric Miller, research associate at the Center.
On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine. Today, we will be covering an article by Rob Brown, the director of Business Ownership Solutions at the Cooperative Development Institute. Brown gives us an inside perspective on how we can build back our economy in his article entitled  “How to Save Jobs and Build Back Better: Employee Ownership Transitions as a Key to an Equitable Economic Recovery.” This article was published in volume 30, number 2, of Maine Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. For all citations for data provided in this episode, please refer to Rob Brown’s article in Maine Policy Review.
What are small business owners to do in the midst of a pandemic as they approach retirement age? How can small businesses and their employees successfully stay afloat once the owner decides to retire? Rob Brown has some answers.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Maine was already on the leading edge of what is called the “silver tsunami.” This term refers to the large oncoming wave of baby boomer business owners looking to exit and retire, many of whom do not have a plan and don't understand the process and options.
Nationally, the average age of business owners is over 50 years old. In rural Maine, almost half of business owners are over 60.
Maine has 12,790 small businesses where the owner wants to retire in the next several years. These retirements would affect 108,000 workers across the state.
And yet, less than one in five business owners have a documented exit plan for what will happen to their businesses–and their employees–once they retire.
What options do business owners facing retirement have?
Having their children take over the business is risky, as business transitions to second generations are only successful 19% of the time.
Well, what about retirement age owners selling their businesses?
This is also often not a good option either, as only 20% of commercial listings for businesses actually sell.
If retirement-age owners are closing their businesses, what happens to their employees? What are they to do when their jobs close down with the business?
Brown paints a picture of how such retirements impact employees and the community: “Too often, the default option ends up being liquidation and closure, and the smaller and more rural the business, the greater the likelihood of that outcome. As a result, business closure due to owner retirement is the largest single source of avoidable job loss over time.”
Workers affected by business closures had a harder time reentering the workforce.
In response, Brown argues that helping businesses transition to employee ownership can address some of these problems.
How can employee ownership save small businesses, and how has the “silver tsunami” been impacted by COVID-19?
Let’s take a look at a few small businesses in Maine that were saved by an employee ownership transition.
Rock City Cafe and Coffee Roasters is a great example. Maine’s first ever espresso bar and bookstore combo was opened in Rockland in 1992. After receiving community support, the business grew and added a coffee-roasting business. This allowed them to move to larger locations and become Rock City Cafe and Coffee Roasters. By 2010, Rockland had become a national model for downtown rejuvenation and Rock City Cafe and Coffee Roasters was an anchor business on Maine Street. At this point, the owner was considering retiring and it was time for her to consider her options. Because she was deeply committed to her 35 mostly young employees, she decided to transition her business to a worker-owned cooperative. This decision preserved her legacy, rewarded her employees who helped her build the business, and helped her secure a good retirement income for herself. But most importantly, this decision helped her business survive the COVID-19 pandemic better than other food and tourist-oriented businesses.
Three retail businesses on Deer Isle offer another example of a successful employee ownership transition. Burnt Cove Market, the Galley Markey, and V&S Variety employees heard that the owners of these businesses were thinking of selling the stores and retiring. So what did they do? They worked with a group of advisors to create the Island Employee Cooperative and bought the stores. Now the employee-owned Island Cooperative is one of Deer Isle's largest year-round employers, the largest worker cooperative in Maine, and second largest in all of New England.
As Brown argues, these examples suggest that employee ownership transitions are a good option for building back better, especially since the pandemic has impacted small businesses.
What are the benefits of employee ownership transitions?
First, these transitions are more profitable and productive. They create more jobs in the good times and lay off fewer workers in downturns, and invest more in workforce training. They also have lower rates of bankruptcy, closure, and loan default.
For workers, this means increased wages, benefits, and job stability and security. The benefits are even greater for low-income, non college-educated, minority, women, and young workers.
A big concern in Maine has been attracting and retaining young workers. One study that tracked 9,000 young workers from ages 18 to 35 highlights the benefits of working for an employee-owned company. These workers saw 33 percent higher wages, 92 percent higher household wealth, and 53 percent longer job tenure. These impacts held true regardless of race, gender, or geography.
Formerly incarcerated workers were also shown to have a lower rate of reoffending, had 25% higher annual income, and worked 9% more hours than formerly incarcerated workers in nonemployee owned companies.
Even though some businesses were able to survive through employee ownership transitions, others did not or were not able to make this change and as a result, were not so lucky.
Permanent business closures between March 2020 and February 2021 increased between one-third and one-half of what was expected before the pandemic.  Even though business closures were not as bad as the pre-pandemic predictions, Brown writes, “Saying ‘It could’ve been worse’ is cold comfort for business owners who lost their life’s work and the millions of workers who lost their jobs.”
Factors such as no exit plans and the type of business contributed to many business closures.  For example, businesses offering personal services and food service closed more frequently than businesses like construction and home improvement stores.
Even businesses that survived the pandemic are still struggling. In October 2021, Census data confirmed that nearly 60 percent of Maine’s businesses are still facing moderate to severe negative impacts from the pandemic. Many businesses are still behind on at least one bill, such as rent, loan, and supplier bills.
Because of this, Brown and others who work with businesses have seen an increase in retiring business owners looking to make an exit plan.
Here is Brown’s perspective, “In my work throughout the Northeast providing introductory exit planning education for business owners and consulting on transitions to employee ownership, I have seen a tripling of requests for assistance and attendance at workshops. Lawyers, accountants, and others who communicate directly with businesses, have told me that they are seeing the same thing—older business owners, already thinking about how to retire before the pandemic, want to develop a plan now.”
Rob Brown argues that, “If anything, the pandemic’s impact on job security and stability and its acceleration of income and wealth inequality has strengthened the argument for promoting and supporting employee ownership transitions. Helping business owners sell to employees could be a key to an equitable economic recovery.”
What could this transition look like for businesses on a national scale?
Brown offers a prediction: “An article in the Harvard Business Review calculated that if 30 percent business ownership were extended to all workers through employee-ownership models, household wealth would more than quadruple for the bottom 50 percent of workers, for all Black workers, and for all workers with only a high school degree.”
This kind of large-scale action cannot happen without the help of public policy. What have public policy officials been doing to help businesses shift to employee owned businesses?
Public policy like President Biden’s American Rescue Plan and the Mills administration’s 10-year economic development strategy could provide benefits for local business owners seeking retirement.
These benefits include things like exit planning outreach; education and technical assistance for business owners; expert financial advice for employee ownership transition; assistance in designing and executing a transition; and education and training for employee groups in business management, finances, and strategy so they can succeed.
Many states are also offering or considering tax and other incentives for selling a business to the employees. Around 18 states have employee ownership centers to provide education, training, and technical assistance for businesses considering employee ownership.
In the past, Maine offered a tax credit to encourage private citizens to contribute to Family Development Accounts programs, so matching funds are available to support low-income workers’ savings, but this incentive was eliminated by the previous administration. Restoring this funding could leverage substantial additional private funding. These funds would be helpful to employees saving to build equity for a worker cooperative transition.
These policy examples are a sampling of ideas and resources that could be part of a larger project that is effective in the short and long term. In the short term, these policies can help by preserving small businesses and jobs while building wealth for communities and individuals in the long term.
Rob Brown concludes with a hopeful message:
“From a public policy perspective, it is oftentimes much cheaper to save existing businesses and jobs than to replace them once they’re gone. Throughout Maine, there are grocery stores, cafés, coffee roasters, construction companies, energy companies, farm businesses, manufacturers, insurance agencies, and many other types of businesses that are owned by their workers. They are a model for how an economy, even in the face of unprecedented threats, can be made to work for working people and their communities”
What you just heard was Rob Brown’s perspective on how employee ownership transitions can be an answer to saving retirement age business owners from having to sell or close down theirr businesses. Maine Policy Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center.
The editorial team for Maine Policy Review is made up of Joyce Rumery, Linda Silka, and Barbara Harrity. Jonathan Rubin directs the Policy Center. A thank you to Jayson Heim and Kathryn Swacha, scriptwriters for Maine Policy Matters, and to Daniel Soucier, our production consultant.
In two weeks, we will be covering Frank O’Hara’s piece entitled, “The Great London Plague of 1665 and the US COVID-19 Pandemic Experience Compared.”
We would like to thank you for listening to Maine Policy Matters from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. You can find us online by searching Maine Policy Matters on your web browser. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your preferred social media platform to stay updated on new episode releases.
I am Eric Miller–thanks for listening and please join us next time on Maine Policy Matters.

S2E6 Maine Food System and the Pandemic: Interview with JG Malacarne and Jason Lilley

In this episode of Maine Policy Matters we are joined by scholars Jonathan Malacarne and Jason Lilley to discuss how the pandemic shocked the Maine Food System and how it recovered. 
You can find their article here: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mpr/vol30/iss2/5/
Transcript
Eric Miller: The early days of the Covid-19 pandemic quite literally shocked the Maine food system economically affecting many individuals and sectors in different but interconnected ways. Many households, budgets were disrupted as people lost income, which led to acquiring food in two different ways, all while concerned over the availability of certain products.
Maine food producers faced multiple stressors as the demand for food at home rose, the restaurant market disappeared, and the availability of labor and the tourist market became uncertain. In response to these shocks, policymakers were forced to innovate and adapt in order to support farms, protect consumers, and ensure the food security of the people in Maine.
What can we learn from these shocks of those early days of the pandemic in order to help food consumers, producers, and policymakers deal with the next big shock? This is the Maine Policy Matters podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. I'm Eric Miller, Research associate at the center. On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine.
Today we will be covering JG Malacarne, Jason Lilley, and Nancy McBrady's Maine Policy Review article entitled "The Response of the Maine Food System to the Onset of the Covid-19 Pandemic", which argues that reflecting on how the Maine food system weathered shocks early in the pandemic can help us prepare for future crises.
This article was published in Volume 30 number two of Maine Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the center. We will first briefly summarize that article and then speak directly with Dr. Malacarne, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Maine, and Jason Lilley, Assistant professor of sustainable agriculture and maple industry educator at the University of Maine Cooperative Extension about where the food system is now, two years later, and what the future of food in Maine might look like. Malacarne, Lilley, and McBrady offer data on how the pandemic shocked consumers, food producers, and policymakers in different ways. For example, before the pandemic, Maine was already the most food-insecure state, and the pandemic made this issue worse.
Food insecurity in Maine rose to 14.6% in 2020, compared to 12.4% in 2019. This rise was not related to the unavailability of food, but rather the surge in unemployment and underemployment during the pandemic's early days. Food distribution outlets thus increased their efforts. Good. Shepherd Food Bank of Maine, for example, distributed 31.7 million meals during the first year of the pandemic as part of the USDA's Farmers to Families Food Box Program.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP waived their three month eligibility limit and made it easier for applicants to apply, update, and use their benefits with the pilot programs for online food purchasing. To help curb food insecurity, the USDA announced the Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer Program, which allowed households with children facing school closures to access resources through the state's EBT card system.
During the early pandemic, there was also a rise in the demand for local products. Hannaford reported that purchases from Maine vendors went up by 33.5% in March 2020 compared to March 2019. Local vendors were partly able to meet this demand via direct to store deliveries and safe direct to consumer sales.
Maine farmers, however, also experienced challenges that complicated their ability to plan for this growing demand, such as, as Malacarne et al. wrote: "The disappearance of the restaurant market restrictions on face-to-face marketing and extreme uncertainty about labor availability and the tourist market. To help address this issue, a farmer led effort led to the creation of the main farm in seafood directory, which opened on March 19th, 2020."
By the end of March, 337 farms and seafood vendors listed their operations and available products on the directory. In under a month, the directory received 47,000 views by consumers who were interested in safe, local, and direct shopping. At the end of September of 2020, the Maine Farm and Seafood Directory had gathered 483 farmers, fishermen, and other producers, and received 91,910 views.
What did consumers and farmers alike learn from the pandemic in these shifts and how do we move? Malacarne et al. conclude their article with two points. The first is the vital need for investments in agricultural storage, processing, and packaging infrastructure in the state. The second is the need for packaging and processing infrastructure to be flexible enough to shift across the restaurant, institutional, and consumer-facing markets.
Having the ability to shift markets when needed will be more sustainable and effective. Malacarne et al. conclude: "Resilient systems include a measure of flexibility and redundancy. Maine can maintain, even enhance its integration into the broader food system while increasing the prominence of its own agricultural products by investing in local agricultural infrastructure, Maine can provide market opportunities to its producers, increase the reliability of the supply of important stable goods for its consumers, and provide sources of employment and income to its workforce. Now we will be talking with Malacarne and Lilley about what the future of the Maine food system might look like.
Thank you both so much for joining us today.
Jonathan Malacarne: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having us.
Jason Lilley: Thanks for having us.
Eric Miller: Before the pandemic, what aspects of the main food system are unique strengths and weaknesses relative to other states? Has the pandemic and other shocks changed these attributes at all? And if so, how?
Jason Lilley: So I'll jump in on that one. I would say that from the farmer perspective, the production side of things, Maine has really been ahead of the game and has had a leg up in relationship to the diversity of production types here in the state. So there's a lot of different types of agricultural production that happen.
And not all, but a lot of that agricultural production is marketed through local channels. So there's a lot of good relationship building that happens between the clients and, and or the consumers and the farmers as well as loyalty on the consumer's part to either specific farms or to just supporting the Maine food system as a, as a whole. And I've spoken with many folks from the Ag Service provider network, so people from Cooperative Extension and various organizations. And it, it really is a kind of out-of-state Maine is really known for the style of agriculture that we have.
Jonathan Malacarne: I think that's a great description of some of the strengths on the, on the challenges side and moving a little bit to kind of viewing it through the consumer's eyes. Maine's a very rural state. People are pretty spread out and in certain parts of Maine, one of the challenges is the distance to places to go and buy food. It's often hard to support traditional grocery stores in areas with low population density, and that means that you either have to travel farther to buy food or you have a more limited set of options from which you can buy food, and maybe you need a car to get there. and so as particularly for vulnerable populations, both of those can can make it hard to access food, even if food exists and is offered at an affordable price somewhere.
Eric Miller: Yeah, those excellent insights. It reminds me of a couple of facets of Maine in terms of social relationships in that it's like a big small town in that you can get to know everyone, but at the same time you can't get there from here. So it's going to be a struggle to maintain the supply chain connectivity. And both of those strengths and weaknesses are reflected there, and that's really, really interesting to me. You suggest in your article that there's a need for investment in agricultural storage processing, and packaging infrastructure in Maine. You also stress the need for packaging and processing infrastructure to be flexible enough to shift across restaurant institutional and consumer-facing markets.
Have you noticed any evidence of these shifts occurring in Maine over the past two years?
Jonathan Malacarne: Yeah, I'll start. So I think the first thing to note is that these are really long-term issues. And while it feels like a lot of time has passed in terms of infrastructure changes, we're still very much in the early stages of making use of what we learned during the pandemic.
At the same time, I think there has been some great movement In infrastructure investment both on kind of through private sources, farm businesses, realizing what they need and starting to make those changes as well as support from, from the state through access to grants. I think we're just finishing up the Department of Ag Conservation and Forestry administering about $19 million in grant funding specifically for increases in processing infrastructure on farm businesses.
I believe they made 64 grants totaling just under $19 million—that finalized maybe this past month. And so it's great to see that happening. And it's also important to acknowledge that that's really just the tip of the iceberg. In terms of needs for infrastructure investment, there were many, many more applicants proposing much-needed upgrades to the system and to their own operation that remain to be funded in the future. So definitely moving in the right direction, but it's a slow process.
Jason Lilley: Adding a little onto the Ag Infrastructure Investment program that Jonathan was mentioning, those 60 some awardees they were awarded the grant funds due to the strong agreement and plans to build out the infrastructure on their farm in a way that would help with distribution and processing, not only for their own farm, but for other farms that they're collaborating with. Or other farms in, in the network with, you know, similar types of production. So that was, yeah, really exciting to see.
That's gonna have some huge impacts. That's anywhere between 250 and $500,000 per awardee. And as Jonathan, I was also mentioning there were almost 800 applicants. So that really from my perspective shows the immense amount of need for additional funding into these types of improvements.
Eric Miller: Yeah. On one hand, it's very encouraging to get so much interest and the fact that this kind of programming and funding is, is, is rolling. But yeah, the, it definitely highlights the, the, the need which hopefully will be addressed as soon as, as feasibly possible, whether it's through the state, federal programming, what have you.
So can you talk a bit about the consumer demand for local food markets? Uh, is that demand still increasing? What progress and or setbacks has the local food market faced since you wrote this article?
Jason Lilley: So, in my role with Cooperative Extension, I spend a lot of time driving around visiting farms, primarily in the southern part of the state. And one of the, as mentioned in the article, one of the big benefits, I guess, of the pandemic was this big turn towards local food and a huge amount of interest. And um, that has really carried over for the majority of producers. So not only have they built relationships with local people in their communities.
Um, but now the restaurants have started open back up and are really trying to, to, to push hard to support local businesses and all that.
Jonathan Malacarne: Like Jason mentioned earlier, Maine has long had a strong consumer demand and strong consumer interest in local food. And I think that that has continued for lots of people and for, for lots of you know, businesses that make it their goal to provide food that matches well with what consumers want. But now, like always it's not everyone and it's not a continual upward path. Some shoppers have gone back to previous behaviors. Some businesses have gone back to business as usual.
Others, you know, found that they liked what they were doing. When it came to food procurement during, during the pandemic and consumers have, those consumers have continued to prioritize local purchases, and a lot of businesses as they reopened and recovered, have identified that being more integrated with local producers can be something that differentiates them in the eyes of consumers and have, have really doubled down on that.
Eric Miller: Yeah, it's really interesting to think about benefits coming out of Covid, but one thing that was really almost like special to see was how much more engagement people had, both what was on their plate and, and how it got there. And I find that to be something that I mean this goes into my, my personal biases, but I'm very happy to see how that transformation happened because prior to Covid, I, you see the grocery shelves and, and most of the calories people were getting were not necessarily from, they were from a longer supply chain. And so it's nice to see maybe some, some nudging toward engagement with local producers. and a more diverse set of types of food is nice to see.
Jonathan Malacarne: Yeah, I think it's a little, I know, we all, a lot of us who work in this space and who have these conversations we spend a lot of time you know, being, being happy about that. I think it's important to, to realize, and this is a point that we make in the article as well, that the goal, especially if we're talking about resilient food systems, isn't necessarily to, to make them hyper-local.
Eric Miller: Right.
Jonathan Malacarne: There are lots of things that we can't produce here, or lots of things that would take many more resources to produce here.
And so don't actually kind of have that desirable, say, environmental impact or that desirable impact on sustainability broadly that we might think because they're local. I think the goal is, as you mentioned, to diversify and to really take a little bit more holistic view of the food system and figure out what we can do well here and make sure that we're doing that. And at the same time recognize that there are many ways to ensure access to affordable, high-quality food for, for everyone. And that involves making use of our resources here, but then also integrating in a smart way to kind of the broader national and global food system.
Eric Miller: This is why I appreciate having folks like you studying this so carefully because it's so nuanced. There's no silver bullet solution. It's not too industrialized nor hyper-localized. So how would you describe the situation that the main food system is in now, two years in the pandemic and at a point where food costs have been rising for various other reasons?
Have any lessons from the early days of the pandemic helped the food system, whether these new shocks?
Jonathan Malacarne: Yeah, so there's, you know, one of the things that's more salient now is that We're always facing, there are always shocks to the food system, the, the pandemic, the early days of the pandemic, especially where a sudden, large, unexpected and kind of unprecedented shock.
What we're facing now with rising food costs happens repeatedly, right? Food costs go up, food costs go down. and I think that a few things make this different. and consumers have some, some experience now from the pandemic that can help them face rising food costs. And the first is we all have a little bit more practice being flexible.
And so whenever the cost of, I'm an economist, and so I imagine that whenever the cost of one thing goes up, consumers decide whether or not they wants to continue purchasing it or whether they want to switch to a similar, but maybe cheaper or good. and we have a lot of evidence that that's actually what consumers do.
So I work with a group at the University of Maine and at the University of Vermont that's part of the National Food Access and Covid research team. and we run some ongoing surveys and rising food prices is one of the questions that we asked about. and so in our most recent survey 62% of respondents reported that the rising food costs has made them alter their behavior.
But then at the same time, there's a lot of work that's done, and in particular I'm thinking of the Consumer Food Insights report that runs out of Purdue. That happens at a much, much higher frequency. and they see similar things that consumers are changing their food purchasing behavior in response to rising food price.
But what they find is that some of that is seeking out more sales and discounts, or some of that is swapping between name brands and generic brands. and so it doesn't necessarily mean that there's a one-for-one association between rising food prices and rising food expenditure in every household.
And that is not at all to say that rising food prices are not challenging, it's just that we have a little bit, everybody has a little bit more practice now responding to challenging situations when it comes to procuring food, and so I know that the system itself is dealing with that and is using that experience very wisely. And I'm confident that consumers are doing the same thing.
Jason Lilley: I would say that the farmers who again, have more of a direct to consumer outlet um, have, have been able to maintain those relationships and that. A lot of the early structures that they set up in order to, to market safely in the face of, of Covid.
So their online sales platforms, their increased, you know, newsletters, all of that have really carried over and not only allowed them to continue to market to these new customers, but have allowed, have allowed them to improve their businesses as a whole. So they've got better tracking of what they're producing and what they're selling and, and what market outlets their products are going through.
So there are a lot of benefits and kind of on-farm lessons learned that are definitely going to be carried over from the perspective of the farmers who sell wholesale and who have less control over their pricing, they're, this has been a very challenging season. farm inputs have gone up, you know, between 60 and 120%.
So while farmers' cost of production is going, is essentially doubled their, what they're getting has, has really not increased at all. I've spoken to several farmers who work with some grocery chains and, and they haven't seen any increase since 2019. So it's really tough for them to figure out, you know, how they're gonna continue to make the farm viable if what they're selling their product for doesn't match that cost of production.
So that's a serious hurdle that needs to be addressed.
Eric Miller: Yeah, it's, it's fascinating how this, this practice and flexibility has, has carried over. and it's also, it blows my mind how in the span of two and a half years we have experienced two historic global shocks, One being pandemic and the other, of course being the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
So, to, I, I'm glad you are keeping tabs on how this, how input costs, is changing and negatively affecting folks and how that's going to shape policy coming up. And so to transition to little policy talk so there are policy initiatives that help support the food system at the onset of the pandemic.
Now that most of those have expired, have there been any new policy initiatives to aid with ongoing food and financial insecurities due the pandemic or even gas price increases? Uh, what kind of food policy do we need at the present moment?
Jason Lilley: Yeah, I think that you know, unfortunately I don't have any specific, you know, silver bullet policies that would really solve some of these crises.
But I think that, you know, going back to the previous question, my response in that farmers need to get paid more to match the cost of productions is kind of counter to Jonathan's response of the consumer's ability to pay for food and, and rising food costs. So I don't know if, if there is a solution of stipends for food or, you know, offsets for, for the cost of production. I don't know in what form that would come in, but that is something that does need to be addressed. So.
Jonathan Malacarne: Yeah, this is actually what Jason just highlighted is often at the top of my mind. I teach a class called the Main Farm and Food Economy and we really engage with this directly like this, this challenge of supporting farmers and wanting farmers to get paid for their effort and for the products they produce and the service that they provide. And at the same time, trying to manage the cost of food so that everyone has access to sufficient quantities and qualities of food to live a healthy lifestyle. and it really is, it's one of those challenging questions to answer and then put on top of that.
You know, having to, to realize and recognize that anything that we do that affects the price of, of fuel or affects the price of chemical inputs, you know, may also have undesirable impacts for, for emissions and for our kind of ongoing needs to address climate change. and all of these things are connected and, and that makes it really hard.
I think it is important to note that, you know, while some of the specific programs and policies that were designed to address needs at the beginning of the pandemic may have expired. There were lots of organizations and lots of uh, departments and divisions within organizations like the USDA that this is just what they do. And supporting, supporting both farmers and supporting consumers has been their mission since long before the pandemic and will continue to be their mission long after the pandemic, as they administer and run programs to support both farmers and food insecure households every day.
And here it's the same, the same is true here in Maine, right? There are organizations and there are many people who get up and go to work every day. And this is just, this is their job, and we are going through a moment where that's been a little bit more in the public eye. And I would love that to be true all the time so that we acknowledge their efforts and support funding for their program even when we're not dealing with a new acute crisis, right? Access to sufficient quantities and quality of food is an ongoing and always pressing need, and as Jason mentioned, supporting farmers is similarly and, and ongoing and always present pressing need and to, to deal with it. We need to pay attention, not just when something new and exciting and big happens, but every day.
Eric Miller: I really appreciate you both entertaining such an easy question to toward the end of the interview here, and I also appreciate how you're able to communicate these challenges of consumer prices as well as farmer income as that is very, very challenging problem to address. To finish things off, is there anything else you'd like to share about the Maine food system that we haven't covered already?
Jason Lilley: Yeah, I'll, I'll just jump in as kind of a cherry on top here and remind folks of, you know, the scenario we were in at the onset of the pandemic. Everyone was you know, fully stressed out, confused, didn't know what was going to happen.
And farmers took a moment, you know, pivoted, you know, almost immediately, and, and really worked on figuring out how to continue to support our community and our local economy and our local food systems. And I would argue that they did that in a way that was wildly successful. And, you know, not at I mean definitely at their own expense and risk to their own health.
And you know, it was financially burdensome, but they all stuck with it. And they were, they were here for the state. And now, you know, the tables have kind of turned, like things have kind of leveled off. We're seeing inflation kind of in our general economy. I've heard numbers of eight to 13% for the average American.
Um, and to pair that with farmers, increased cost, cost of productions being, you know, 60 to 120% in increases. So, I think it's now a moment to, for the, you know, general consumers of Maine to just really kind of step back and think, you know, if we have the means at all, it's really, it goes beyond just the food that we're putting on our table. Us taking that effort to support our local farmers has that ripple effect at supporting a whole economy, the ecosystem you know, and our communities. So that's what I would leave us with.
Jonathan Malacarne: I can't do better than that, so I'll give Jason the last word there.
Eric Miller: Yeah, that was very well put. Thank you, Jason, and thank you Jonathan as well for joining us today on Maine Policy Matters.
Jason Lilley: Thank you for the opportunity to be here.
Jonathan Malacarne: Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thanks.
Eric Miller: What you just heard was JG Malacarne's, Jason Lilley's, and Nancy McBrady's perspective from their article, "The Response of the Maine Food System to the Onset of the Covid- 19 Pandemic." Maine Policy Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Policy Center at the University of Maine. For citations for the data provided in this article, please refer to the original article in Maine Policy Review. The editorial team for Maine Policy Review is made up of Joyce Rumery, Linda Silka and Barbara Harrity. Jonathan Rubin directs the policy center. A thank you to Jayson Heim and Kathryn Swacha, script writers for Maine Policy Matters, and to Daniel Soucier, our production consultant.
In two weeks, we'll be reading a summary of Rob Brown's article entitled "How to Save Jobs and Build Back Better: Employee Ownership Transitions As a Key to an Equitable Economic Recovery." We would like to thank you for listening to Maine Policy Matters from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine.
You can find us online by searching Maine Policy Matters on your web browser. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your preferred social media platform and stay updated on new episode releases. I am Eric Miller. Thanks for listening and please join us next time on Maine Policy Matters.

S2E5 Interview with Liam Riordan - Democracy and the Humanities

Today, we have with us Liam Riordan, Adelaide and Alan Bird Professor of History at the University of Maine and serves as Chair on the City of Bangor’s Historic Preservation Commission. Riordan was the past Director of the University of Maine McGillicudy Humanities Center, is a past board member of the Maine Humanities Council, and has been a faculty member since 1997. In his current role, Riordan helps organize Maine National History day, a statewide history contest for middle and high school students. His recent work has included him traveling across Maine giving talks such as “What Did We Learn from the Maine State Bicentennial? Reflections on Historical Commemoration”. He also gave a talk titled “Picturing Maine’s Indigenous Context”.
Transcript
Eric Miller: Welcome to Maine Policy Matters, a podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. I am Eric Miller, research associate at the
center. Today we have with us Liam Riordan, Adelaide and Allenberg, professor of history at the University of Maine and serves as chair on the city of Bangor’s Historic Preservation Commission, Riordan was the past director of the University of Maine McGillicuddy Humanities Center, is a past board member of the Maine Humanities Council, and has been a faculty member since 1997. In his current role, Riordan helps organize Maine National History Day, a statewide history contest for middle and high school students. His recent work has included him traveling across Maine, giving talks such as “What Did We Learn from The Maine State Bicentennial? Reflections on Historical Commemoration. He also gave a talk entitled “Picturing Maine’s Indigenous Context.”
Miller: Hi, Liam. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Riordan: Hey, it’s great to be here. I’m happy to be invited to Maine Policy Matters.
Miller: So what brought you into the field of humanities and what role does this subject play in discussing American history and modern policy issues?
Riordan: So I’m a history professor at the University of Maine, and I arrived here in 1997, and so my initial way of understanding my work as a historian was a somewhat traditional academic understanding that I’d be a scholar. I do original research about the American Revolutionary era, which is my period of specialization and that I would teach undergraduate courses of all sorts, big survey classes to 150 students, small upper-level classes, and one of the real privileges of being a member of the history department at the University of Maine is that we are the only PhD-granting department in the humanities in the entire state of Maine. And so I think that’s a really interesting responsibility, and it’s an aspect of the history department at the University of Maine that I’m really proud of.
Miller: Yeah, very nice. Thank you so much for entering that field and contributing in such a way and taking on a public service to this degree in being so involved and I know the university is paying some dividends from your, from your service. Could you tell us a bit by what you mean, chatting about the public humanities, and how this relates to policy specifically.
Riordan: So this is really a significant way in which my understanding of my role as a history professor changed over the course of my 20 plus years at the University of Maine I, I mentioned earlier when I began, I really thought of myself as a scholar and as a teacher both at the undergraduate and graduate level. But, I now realize that there is really an important role for university faculty to play in helping to lead the public humanities in Maine, and what I mean by that is that the humanities have a really vital role to play not just in the scholarly and university tradition, but the kind of impact that the history, particularly, but the humanities more broadly, should have on how we understand life in Maine in the 21st century. And so in this sense, it has a real significant application for public policy, and there are a variety of ways I sort of got involved in this commitment to the public humanities. First was I served two terms as a member of the Board of the Maine Humanities Council, which is the state affiliate of the National Endowment of the Humanities, and that really helped me understand the place of the University of Maine in the context of the state of Maine quite differently.  And then a few years after that, I became, helped to organize and became one of the early directors of what’s now called the McGillicuddy Humanities Center at the University of Maine, and that has a number of goals, but one of them is to share the humanities research that students and faculty do more broadly with the public. And as the director of that Humanity center at UMaine, I guest edited an issue of Maine Policy Review in 2015 that looks specifically at the relationship between humanities and public policy. And then more recently still, because I’m a specialist in the American Revolutionary era, I got very involved with the commemoration of the Maine Bicentennial. So that 200-year celebration of Maine becoming a state that sort of connected the year 1820, Maine’s birthday as a state with 2020 lead to a lot of public speaking all around the state. It’s led to a volume that I’m co-editing with my colleague Richard Bud, and I also organized conference at the University of Maine in the summer of 2019, all of them really emphasizing the public humanities and the need for us to improve our quality of life in the present by having a deeper understanding of significant historical themes and events in the Maine past.
Miller: Yeah, that celebrating Maine’s Bicentennial is very exciting. What did you, and you played a very special part in that celebration, what did you enjoy most about touring the state, doing that, public speaking , and maybe what was one of your most memorable interactions during that experience?
Riordan: So it was a real privilege for me to do a lot of local public speaking about the Maine Bicentennial and one of the curious things, so I gave I’ve forgotten, you know, close to 100 public talks over the course of four or five years, and one of the sort of curious things about this is that I trained for my PhD in Philadelphia and part of my training was to try to argue that the position of New England in our understanding of early American history was overstayed. So then, of course, I got my job at the University of Maine and I had to sort of start changing my tune and learn more about New England generally and about Maine in particular. So my process of developing my understanding of that statehood era that culminates with statehood in 2020 really began as a listening experience in a lot of ways, and many of these early meetings were really just discussions to try to understand what did people see as pressing issues from the statehood era that had some relevance for them in the 21st century. So one of the memorable experiences I had was being hosted by a colleague in Madawaska and getting a very different understanding of what Maine statehood meant from the perspective of people living in the northern part of the state, where statehood, and especially the eventual clarification of where the northern boundary was with the state that didn’t occur until the early 1840s. This was a much more traumatic event in memory that is very much ongoing to the present, particularly for Francophone people in the Saint John River Valley. So that was one really memorable experience for me and I, I would say the second more broadly is just the way in which doing the Bicentennial commemorative work helped me to realize the incredible passion that is had for history at the local level. So local historical societies, county genealogical societies. Practically every Public Library in the state has a local history room and, and that’s really where a lot of the most intense commitment to understanding our past lies and a lot of that occurs at really a great distance from academic historians and professional scholars. So to kind of circle back to my interest in public history, a commemoration is a kind of special opportunity to try to connect that local passion at the grassroots level with what goes on in the university both in terms of my scholarship, but also in terms of my teaching.
Miller: Yeah, we are all very grateful for our librarians and volunteers and passionate stewards of preserving history, whether oral or written down, that is so valuable. And I also find so fascinating how seemingly nearby places can have such different perspectives on the history of a place. And so as you as you mentioned in 1820, Maine was gained its statehood suffering from Massachusetts as part of the Missouri Compromise, which for as I’m sure many know, but Missouri and Maine rendered as states at the same time Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a Free State and so as a historian what does this context of the birth of Maine mean to you as well as this milestone of reaching 200 years.
Riordan: So, Eric, thanks for that question. You know, the way in which Maine statehood was connected to Missouri is I think almost certainly the most famous aspect of The Maine statehood era. And it’s a complicated story of how that unfolded. And I have to confess, I never really understood it very well until I began to do my preparation for this Maine Bicentennial commemoration of statehood. And so one of the things that I now feel pretty strongly about is that we probably shouldn’t describe this event as the Missouri Compromise. And I say this because of a letter that four members of The Maine Congressional delegation published in a Maine newspaper in 1820 to explain why they voted against Maine becoming a state. In the US Congress in the spring of 1820. And what they said was that it was such an abomination for Maine to become a state and to accelerate the expansion of slavery West, that it would be better for Maine not to become a state. And they specifically say in their letter that they rejected the idea that this was a compromise, that this was something forced upon them and that they disagreed with and that they thought was a big error for the United States. And what’s really interesting about this very technical vote in the US Congress in the spring of 1820 is that in that meeting of the House of Representatives, the district of Maine, just a portion, still a part of Massachusetts, but the district of Maine before it became a state had 7 U.S. congressmen. Now, that’s pretty interesting to anyone with a sense of civics today, right? We only have two U.S. congressmen today, and we barely hold on to two. Knock on wood when the census comes in. So we had seven when we were a district as part of Massachusetts, and five of those seven voted against the critical bill where Maine and Missouri were linked, and slavery would be permitted to expand into the western part of what was then the Louisiana Territory. Now even just to keep going deeper on this little nugget, the vote in the US House of Representatives was so close on this issue that if those two in the minority in Maine had voted with the majority of the Maine delegation that would have blocked the expansion of slavery to Missouri. And so for me, this opens up a really fascinating counterfactual sort of speculation. That if those if the full seven members had voted against Maine statehood because they objected to slavery expanding to Missouri, I really wonder, might that have led to a very different outcome for slavery in the United States? That, of course, will come to an end, but only with three decades of continued expansion of slavery after, and with the horrific personal and financial cost of the civil war that if we had had bolder and more courageous political leadership earlier, and Maine was really at the center of this, perhaps we would have had a much different course for the expansion of slavery and the kind of, you know, no more pivotal event in American history than the civil war that would, of course, come three decades after the Maine/Missouri crisis that ends with the joint admission of those two states.
Miller: Wow, there are so many layers there that we could pick away at I something that just stands out to me immediately is the courage I would assume that would be bad politics to vote against more autonomy in for the, what was then then district of Maine becoming their own state having more control of their own territory, so, a little bit of a follow up. Was there much political cost to those five individuals?
Riordan: So that’s a great question and it’s a little tricky to figure out the answer to that. Some of them don’t stand for reelection, others because Maine becomes a state. It then gets 2US senators, so one of those congressmen gets named by the legislature to become a senator. So that’s really a good research question that maybe one of my graduate students should take up in the future. Broadly speaking, the small number of northern members of the House of Representatives who voted with the southern interests to expand slavery, the majority of them faced a very difficult time getting reelected to Congress. Now it is different in the Maine context, right? Because obviously they were voting in favor of becoming a state, but I like to think that there was enough anti-slavery popular interest in Maine that that would not have prohibited them from becoming being reelected or continuing their careers as politicians in the district of Maine, and I do not think it would have seriously changed Maine becoming a state. That the, you know, some people sometimes say that there was a timeline and it had to get done quickly, but I think that’s really not the case. It’s quite clear that political leaders in Massachusetts, as well as the majority of people in the district of Maine, agreed that having two New England states, Maine and Massachusetts, made sense by early 1820. So I think statehood would have happened anyway and I think we might have had a somewhat different future for slavery and antislavery if Maine representatives had acted differently in that critical vote in the Spring of 1820.
Miller: Yeah, wow, I love history for this reason is digging into things that occurred centuries ago and getting into the discussions around a particular issue, and that it wasn’t as straightforward as the outcome. There was discussion and disagreement all happening at the same time. I appreciate your clarification and maybe we will get an answer to that question someday. You may have just covered this in the past question, but is there a significant event or period in Maine history that you believe is underappreciated?
Riordan: Well, let me, I’ll just continue to talk a little bit about the statehood era. Cause this sort of represents my specialty in what I know best. And I do think that talking about the Maine/Missouri crisis is the most famous aspect of how Maine became a state. But it’s interestingly also to sort of start our discussion at the very end. And I think one of the things that’s really surprising to people in Maine today is that it took a very long time for popular opinion in Maine to decisively express itself that Maine did want to separate from Massachusetts. So I think this does kind of surprise people ’cause we are pretty familiar with this idea of being suspicious from people of from away and having, you know, cutting comments about flatlanders from Massachusetts. But this is a good example of how the distant past surprises us. It, it was not an easy decision for people to cut that long connection. And so when I talk about this statehood era, I’m really talking about a period from the 1780s to the final successful vote for Maine statehood in July of 1819. And in that final vote, there are overwhelming majorities for Maine to become an independent state. But previous to that final vote, there were five other statewide elections that were all bitterly contested and the movement changed a lot over time, and so something that we might think would be an automatic or easy decision from the perspective of 2022 was actually something extremely difficult and that really required a lot of work and a lot of changes in the independence movement over the course of several decades before we got to that explosive moment of the Maine/Missouri crisis in 1820.
Miller: Yeah. Thank you for expanding upon with that answer, talking and diving so deeply into the Maine/Missouri crises. And so, of course the Wabanaki Nations were present long before Maine statehood. So, would you like to discuss the context of relations with Wabanaki Nations at the point of statehood and how these relations have changed or developed over two centuries?
Riordan: So this is really a very important issue, both for thinking about the history of Maine, but also thinking about contemporary circumstances in Maine and one thing I think is important to stress is that when we’re talking about commemoration. That, I think, is a different act than just celebration. And so commemoration calls on us to reflect and engage and think about the circumstances of how Maine became a state in 1820. And that means more than simply being partisans and fans and saying that that was really a great thing. And so one of the important observations is that Maine statehood in 1820 accelerates the colonial process of dispossession of Wabanaki people from their homeland, and I would say that it even accelerates a experience of genocide for those Wabanaki people. And this was an absolutely crucial issue in 1820, as Massachusetts prepared to transition away from having a sort of sovereign government roll over the district of Maine. And part of the articles of separation that the Massachusetts legislature required Maine voters and the new Maine government to accept as part of the terms of separation was an explicit recognition that the new state of Maine would take on all the duties and responsibilities and obligations that the state of Massachusetts had entered into in its state-to-state treaty negotiations with tribal nations. And that is a very serious and you know textually specific aspect of the articles of separation that become part of The Maine Constitution. Now some of your listeners may know the Maine Legislature and Maine voters in 1875 voted to redact this passage from printed copies of The Maine Constitution. They said it would remain lawfully intact and enforced, but this specific language about Maine bearing responsibility for maintaining Massachusetts treaty agreements no longer would be printed in The Maine Constitution. This is kind of bizarre and hard to wrap our heads around. And as recently as four or five years ago, the legislature revisited this, but were not successful in getting this language restored to printed copies of The Maine State Constitution. You can actually find the language the, Secretary of State’s office, in a separate piece of legislation, has made it available to the public, but this, I think, really stands as a clear symbol of just how unequal that transition to Maine State sovereignty was for Wabanaki individuals, for Wabanaki communities, and for Wabanaki sovereignty as their own tribal governments. And Massachusetts even gave the new state of Maine a large sum of money to continue to honor their treaty obligations. So, we might think in the 21st century that Wabanaki issues are somewhat newly resurgent in public life in Maine, but this was also a searing issue in the statehood era and was a big part of the transition from Massachusetts to Maine sovereignty that I think, if we think about this logically, also had clear implications for Wabanaki sovereignty. The last thing I will say is that it’s striking that that 2020 bicentennial of Maine statehood is also the 40th anniversary of the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Act that is the sort of crucial Federal legislation that remains a matter of really intense political debate in Maine about the balance of tribal state relations. And I do feel that that hasty language in the 1980 law that has been interpreted as excluding Wabanaki federally recognized tribes from the benefits of over 200 Federal laws pertaining to Indians since 1980 is really an extraordinary injustice and is something that should be addressed by the Maine state government, so that Wabanaki tribes don’t discover this, don’t continue to suffer this very unfair discrimination in how they’re treated as sovereign entities.
Miller: I really appreciate your differentiation between commemoration and celebration. There are things in history that we don’t have to celebrate at all, but recognition being a huge factor in just grappling with the past, and something that comes to mind as we’re just talking about the courage of those five legislators that voted against slavery or the Missouri Compromise, but then also at the same exact time, that language being striked from the distributed papers of the Maine Constitution, I find that quite interesting and taking a stance on one subjugated population and not necessarily carrying that over to a different, and within the bounds of the new created place, minority population. So as guest editor of the 2015 Maine Policy Reviewspecial issue on Humanities and Policy, you covered William Adams’s piece entitled “The Urgency of Democracy”. What would you like to share about the significance of that piece in the current state of American democracy?
Riordan: Great. Well, thanks for that question about the issue of the Maine Policy Review that I guest edited back in 2015, and I’ll remind your listeners that all issues of the Maine Policy Review are accessible on the Digital Commons of the University of Maine Library, pretty easy to Google and get there, and you can look up in the special issues column, you can click on the one related to the humanities and policy and see the wide spectrum of pieces that were in that particular issue. William Adams wrote one of the two Margaret Chase Smith essays that opened that 2015 issue. We had sort of two high profile national figures on the humanities landscape in the United States, write our Margaret Chase Smith essays, William ‘Bro’ Adams was then the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities and he wrote a piece called the Urgency of Democracy. I think you’ve covered this on a recent podcast so listeners who are regular subscribers have probably heard him read that piece. And one of the things that really strikes me about it is that he, you know this was published in 2015. So this was before both of our most recent presidential elections that have been so controversial, and I think that he was really, had a sense of foresight about the coming crisis of American democracy and how this connects directly to our need for a more robust engagement with the humanities in order to preserve the quality of civic life in the United States. So, I’m going to just repeat what I think are the final lines of William Adams’s essay in that 2015 issue. He wrote that, “the humanities provide richness, beauty and wisdom in our lives, and they help our communities to flourish. But we need them, especially because the humanities provide the intellectual and emotional foundations for democratic life and citizenship. For Maine and the country as a whole, the urgency of the humanities is the urgency of democracy.” So for me, what I think he means by this is that a concept like citizenship, well, what does it mean to be a citizen or a concept like democracy? These are both fundamentally born out of the humanities, right. We don’t get a sense of citizenship from mathematics. We don’t get a sense of citizenship from a well-designed bridge or road. We don’t get a sense of democracy from a bottom-line analysis of how to have the most successful investment, right. And I think a lot of times scientific, technical, economic calculations are ones that get prioritized in how we think about what matters for public policy. And so, William Adams’s essay at the start of that 2015 issue of Maine Policy Review really was the opening note of, I think, some 30 essays in that issue that explored, you know, what do we mean by the humanities? What are the value of the humanity? And how could a more robust engagement with the humanities have a positive impact for our quality of life in Maine and for the types of public policy that we value and choose to pursue? So, you know, we’ve got in the time since that article was written, we’ve got a national presidential election that remains contested. We’ve had the US Capitol building stormed in a violent riot. And this is absolutely crucial that I think we really take up William Adams’s point that the urgency of democracy and the urgency of humanities are deeply related to one another. And this circles back to my opening comments of why I think the public humanities are so crucial for where Maine and the nation are in the 21st century. That the humanities prioritize the qualitative aspects of human experience. And in our daily life that means the basic skills that we have for insight, for reflection and for better understanding our place in an often confusing and complex world.
Miller: Thank you for all that additional context around William Adams’s piece. I second the recommendation to listeners if you haven’t listened to that episode or read the piece. I’m frankly when I read it, I was so taken aback by the fact that it was written in 2015. I would have assumed that it was sometime in 2021 if the date was removed. It’s amazing how some folks can articulate such an incredible point at a time, but that seemed a little bit, not quite, as of course was very relevant at the time, otherwise you wouldn’t have wrote it, but even more relevant today. So to finish things off, is there anything that you’d like to share that we haven’t covered already?
Riordan: Well, I guess I’ll close with another plug to your listeners. I’m really proud of that 2015 issue of Maine Policy Review that looks at the intersection of the humanities and policy. And of course we’ve got people like William Adams or the President of the American Association of Arts and Sciences who give our sort of opening Margaret Chase Smith essays, but the, the heart of that issue are about 30 other essays that really showcase the vitality of the humanities in Maine. And this is partly university faculty, but it’s also important organizations like the Maine Humanities Council, like your public library like, your local historical society, like museums, theaters, concert halls, and movie houses. So, I would encourage everyone to take a look at that issue online at Digital Commons, and I’d also say it’s time to reengage with the humanities. And that could be something different for every single listener. It could be pursuing other podcasts, it could be reading a book, it could be visiting your local historical society or library and participating in the way that the humanities can really enrich our individual lives, but more significantly, is how it can enrich our communal lives. And I, I do think we’re at a moment where we need a more robust sense of what are our civic responsibilities as citizens and how can we have a more civil life in the state of Maine? So that starts with our family and our households and our friends and our neighbors, but the humanities should have a robust part in that for everyone.
Miller: Thank you so much for your perspective and your service to humanities in the state of Maine. And thank you so much for joining us today, Liam.
Riordan: Thanks, Eric. It’s been a pleasure to be on the podcast.
Miller: What you just heard was Liam Riordan’s perspective on Maine’s history. Maine Policy Review is a peer reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. The editorial team for Maine Policy Review is made up of Joyce Rumery, Linda Silka, and Barbara Harrity. Jonathan Rubin directs the Policy Center. A thank you to Jayson Heim and Kathryn Swacha, scriptwriters for Maine Policy Matters, and to Daniel Soucier, our production consultant. In two weeks, Jonathan Malacarne and Jason Lilley, two of the authors of an article entitled “The Response of the Maine Food System to the Onset of COVID-19 Pandemic” will join us for an interview. We would like to thank you for listening to Maine Policy Matters from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. You can find us online by searching Maine Policy Matters on your web browser. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your preferred social media platform to stay updated on new episode releases.  I am Eric Miller–thanks for listening and please join us next time on Maine Policy Matters.

S2E4 William D. Adam’s’ Reading of ”The Urgency of Democracy”

In preparation for election day on November 1st, today we are hosting William D. Adams—the tenth chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities—for a reading of his essay “The Urgency of Democracy.” 
Link to essay: https://mcspolicycenter.umaine.edu/mpr/2021/06/16/the-urgency-of-democracy/
William D. Adams served as the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2014 to 2017 and where he launched a new initiative, The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, as a way to demonstrate the critical role humanities scholarship can play in public life. He was president of Colby College from 2000 to 2014 and served previously as president at Bucknell University. At Colby, Adams led a multimillion dollar campaign that included expansion of the Colby College Museum of Art and support for several other humanities-based initiatives.
Transcript
Eric Miller: In preparation for election day, today we are hosting William D. Adams—the tenth chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities—for a reading of his essay “The Urgency of Democracy.”
William D. Adams served as the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2014 to 2017 and where he launched a new initiative, The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, as a way to demonstrate the critical role humanities scholarship can play in public life. He was president of Colby College from 2000 to 2014 and served previously as president at Bucknell University. At Colby, Adams led a multimillion-dollar campaign that included expansion of the Colby College Museum of Art and support for several other humanities-based initiatives.
(Music)
This is the Maine Policy Matters podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. I am Eric Miller, research associate at the Center. On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine. The article covered in this episode was published as the Margaret Chase Smith Essay in Maine Policy Review, Volume 24, Number 1.
Here is William D. Adams.
Williams D. Adams: Maine is well known for producing impressive political leaders and for producing impressive women political leaders in particular. Senator Margaret Chase Smith is rightly remembered as the first of these in the contemporary era, anticipating and no doubt inspiring the impressive careers of Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Chellie Pingree, among others.
Senator Smith grew up in Skowhegan, where her father was the town barber. She attended Lincoln and Garfield elementary schools and Skowhegan High School. I don’t know what subjects Senator Smith learned at Lincoln and Garfield elementary schools or at Skowhegan High School, but considering her distinguished career it’s not too fanciful to imagine that they included healthy doses of civics, American political history, and the American constitutional tradition.
In Maine and across the country, these foundational concerns of primary and secondary education, along with many humanities subjects, are under increasing pressure. We are familiar with the reasons—fewer resources, the pressure of testing regimes and expectations, the introduction of new technologies, and misguided, if understandable, anxiety over career readiness, which continue to envelop many of our policy frameworks for assessing and reforming education.
The effects of this pressure are not surprising. According to statistics produced by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, in both 1994 and 2010 “a substantial majority” of school-age children in the United States “failed to demonstrate ‘proficiency’ in U.S. history.”1 Worse still, nearly 60 percent of high school seniors graduating in those years failed to demonstrate even a basic knowledge of U.S. history. It’s some consolation, though not much, that the history proficiency of students in the fourth and eighth grades improved between 1994 and 2010, though the percentages of students with only a basic understanding remains depressingly low. Student achievement in civics shows a somewhat more encouraging trend. In this realm, fourth and eighth graders showed improvement between 1998 and 2010. Still, less than 20 percent of all students in these grades demonstrated civics achievement levels of proficient or advanced. As was true of the National Assessment of Educational Progress assessments in other humanities subjects, strikingly lower levels were observed among older students, with only 64 percent of twelfth graders demonstrating a mid-level of basic achievement in 2010.
In what seems almost surely to be a related development, meaningful political participation in the United States continues to decline, and civic engagement of all kinds is increasingly fragile. For evidence, we need look no further than the most recent general election. As the Washington Post reported (November 10, 2014):
General election voter turnout for the 2014 midterms was the lowest it’s been in any election cycle since World War II, according to early projections by the United States Election Project. Just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots as of last Tuesday, continuing a steady decline in midterm voter participation that has spanned several decades. The results are dismal, but not surprising— participation has been dropping since the 1964 election, when voter turnout was at nearly 49 percent.
It’s hard to imagine a robust democratic political culture without a citizenry that is at least proficient in U.S. history, the basic structure and workings of our political institutions, and in the founding principles and values of American democracy. And it’s hard to imagine proficiency in these areas without an abiding commitment to civic education in our schools, colleges, and universities.
But the democratic significance of the humanities goes well beyond the need to cultivate specifically civic and historical sensibilities. Democracy and democratic citizenship also require the ability to think critically and clearly about the central issues of shared concern, to imagine alternatives to standing arrangements, to entertain and advance the common good, and, perhaps most important of all, to feel empathy and respect for others. These capacities are in some important sense inherent to human nature, but they require the cultivation, reinforcement, and testing that lie at the heart of humanistic learning, exchange, and understanding.
Democracy flourishes alongside a robust sense of place. This may be especially true in Maine, where sense of place is such an important part of collective identity. With the help of the National Endowment for the Humanities, scholars from the University of Maine have recently given to the people of Maine a remarkable new asset related to place—the Historical Atlas of Maine. Now a beautiful printed book, the Atlas is entering a planning phase to become a national model as an interactive digital resource. It will then serve as a resource for schools and individuals across the state and beyond.
Maine also has another wonderful humanities resource in the Maine Humanities Council (MHC), one of the most energetic and admired of the national system of state and territorial humanities councils supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The MHC is doing exemplary work around the state, providing resources and leadership to the statewide humanities network.
Over the years, Maine has also served as a mecca for creative writers and artists and now boasts an international reputation for its literary and artistic production. Our lives are richer and fuller as a result of such creativity in our backyard. We’ve also experienced the power and impact of the cultural economy, which will be such an important part of Maine’s economic future.
The humanities matter in all of these ways. They provide richness, beauty, and wisdom in our lives, and they help our communities to flourish. But we need them especially because they provide the intellectual and emotional foundations for democratic life and citizenship. For Maine and the country as a whole, the urgency of the humanities is the urgency of democracy.
(Music)
What you just heard was William D. Adams’ reading of his essay entitled “The Urgency of Democracy.” Maine Policy Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. For all citations for data provided in this episode, please refer to the original article in Maine Policy Review.
The editorial team for Maine Policy Review is made up of Joyce Rumery, Linda Silka, and Barbara Harrity. Jonathan Rubin directs the Policy Center. A thank you to Jayson Heim and Kathryn Swacha, scriptwriters for Maine Policy Matters, and to Daniel Soucier, our production consultant.
In two weeks, we will be hosting Liam Riordan—Adelaide and Alan Bird Professor of History at the University of Maine and Chair on the City of Bangor’s Historic Preservation Commission—for an interview of his perspective on Maine’s history.
We would like to thank you for listening to Maine Policy Matters from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. You can find us online by searching Maine Policy Matters on your web browser. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your preferred social media platform to stay updated on new episode releases.
I am Eric Miller–thanks for listening and please join us next time on Maine Policy Matters.
(Music)
William D. Adams served as the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2014 to 2017 and where he launched a new initiative, The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, as a way to demonstrate the critical role humanities scholarship can play in public life. He was president of Colby College from 2000 to 2014 and served previously as president at Bucknell University. At Colby, Adams led a multimillion dollar campaign that included expansion of the Colby College Museum of Art and support for several other humanities-based initiatives.

S2E3 Commemorating Indigenous Peoples’ Day with Gail Dana-Sacco

In commemoration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day on October 10th, we will be hosting Gail Dana-Sacco on today’s episode with her reading of her article entitled “Indigenous Voices Charting a Course Beyond the Bicentennial: Eba gwedji jik-sow-dul-din-e wedji gizi nan-ul-dool-tehigw (Let’s try to listen to each other so that we can get to know each other)”
Link to article: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1857&context=mpr
Credit for intro and outro music goes to Allen Sockabasin, who advocated for the restoration of the Passamaquoddy language throughout his lifetime through his music and his teaching.
Gail Dana-Sacco became the first known Passamaquoddy to earn a Ph.D. when she completed her doctorate in health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University in 2009. Today, her work centers on advancing wolibmowsawogon, a world in which Indigenous peoples, lands, and languages can thrive. This article is dedicated to all the Passamaquoddy who have come before us and who are with us today, and the ones who are still to come, whose love and support have made this journey possible and will guide us forward. Gazelmulpa.

S2E2 Interview with Maine State Economist Amanda Rector

In this second episode of Maine Policy Matters Season 2, Eric Miller interviews Amanda Rector, the Maine state economist since 2011. Rector describes what it was like to be the state economist during the pandemic, how things turned out compared to how she originally thought they would turn out, the effects from the federal response to the pandemic, changes in the workplace, and makes predictions for the future.
Maine State Economist Amanda Rector Transcript 
Miller: Welcome to your main Policy Matters podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. I am Eric Miller, Research Associate at the Center. 
Today we have with us Amanda Rector, State economist since 2011. In her role as state economist, she analyzes Maine's economic and demographic conditions to help inform policy decisions. 
Rector is a member of the state of Maine Revenue Forecasting Committee and serves as the Governor's Liaison to the US Census Bureau. 
Amanda Rector has published an essay in the Maine Policy Review entitled, “(Un)precedented: Reflecting on the Early Lessons of the COVID-19 Pandemic”, which you can find of reading of right here on the Maine Policy Matters podcast. Her essay details her personal experience with the pandemic and her journey from unprecedented to precedented times. 
She explains how research has given us a historical reference point for the pandemic, saying we will be talking with Rector about her thoughts on what has changed since those first days of the pandemic. 
[Background music] 
Miller: Firstly, thanks so much for joining us today. 
 
Rector: It's my pleasure. 
 
Miller: To start with an easy one, can you describe for us a bit what it was like to be the state economist in those early days of the pandemic? 
 
Rector: Well, I suddenly became a lot more popular. It's funny how a pandemic and recession will make economists suddenly people that everybody wants to talk to. You know, I think that one of the things in the early days, everyone was scrambling to get a sense of what was happening and scrambling to get data. And so, in some senses, there was this sort of drinking from the firehose effect of just everybody trying to grab onto any piece of information they possibly could. 
So, I felt like I was spending hour upon hour just reading things that were in some cases completely foreign to me. I had not done a lot of reading about pandemics in the past - not in my usual wheelhouse. 
And then I started just - I think one of the advantages to Maine is that because it's that, it's that sort of big, small town feel. Everybody is willing to just pick up the phone and talk. And so I spent a lot of time just getting on the phone saying, “Hey, you know? What are you seeing? What's happening in your field? Are you seeing things going on in your businesses? What are you worried about? What are you concerned is going to happen that you're not going to be able to come back from or recover from?  
And you know, it was really challenging to try to wrap my arms around everything that was going on in a fashion that I could then condense that and share helpful information with the folks who are making policy decisions. 
 
Miller: Yeah, I can't even imagine. I can't say that I heard too much from a state economist prior to the pandemic myself and I have a masters in economics, so it really has been interesting to observe how the ground has shifted in so many ways over the past two years. 
What surprised you over the past two years now that we're in a different part of the pandemic, did any of what you predicted in your piece come true, or what did we get right? We need to work out. 
 
Rector: You know, I think we thought it was going to be a lot worse than it really was in economic terms, particularly at the very beginning. 
And if you look back at some of the predictions that were coming from very qualified forecasters, there was a lot of doom and gloom that was coming out. And I think that the thing that we didn't and what prevented those really dreadful outcomes was the federal response. 
We simply had no way of knowing that the federal response was going to be as rapid and as extensive as it was. And so that really provided enough cushion to prevent those outcomes that were being tossed around early on where you know revenues declining by just tremendous numbers and it didn't happen. 
And in fact, if you look at our revenue picture now, we have revenues that are well above and beyond even what you know, our most recent forecasts were we've seen just a lot of revenue growth. 
We certainly we don't have explanations for all of it. You know a lot of it is still unprecedented in a different way now, I guess, because it's, you know, looking at this and saying, gosh, we don't really know where all this is coming from. 
But I think some of it was a matter of the federal supports that came out. If you look at what happened for personal income, for example, personal current transfer receipts, which are the funds that come from a government entity, either to or on behalf of an individual and it includes things like Social 
Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, other income maintenance benefits, veterans benefits, a whole slew of different things. 
Those become a really important component of personal income during a couple of quarters. 
In particular, the quarters where stimulus checks went out when the enhanced unemployment benefits were flowing, and then when the child tax credit payments were going out during the second half of 2021. 
And so that enabled people to continue to engage in the economy at a level that wasn't really anticipated. We haven't really seen that kind of a response before and so that was able to keep people paying their bills, going up shopping. 
Maybe in some cases ordering online because they couldn't actually go out. But able to engage with the economy in a way that If they hadn't had those supports, we wouldn't have seen those purchases continue and it would have been a very different situation for revenues in turn.  
 
Miller: When you mentioned the speed of the federal response, my mind immediately goes to the 2008 and the federal response was a little bit slower. They'll shift your targeted in a much different way than the CARES Act that came out at the beginning, which I'm interested in how the policymakers learn from that and realize the scope of the pandemic and what that means economically, as well as from a personal health context. 
 
Rector: Right. I think there were there were a lot of feelings that the response following the Great Recession wasn't enough and there were a lot of concern is that we, the federal government, needed to move more rapidly this time around. 
And of course, now we'll learn from this one and hopefully we won't face another global pandemic anytime soon, but certainly in terms of what the response might be next time. Learning what worked, what didn't work. Uhm, and where things need to be tweaked further? 
 
Miller: Right. Every experience is definitely a learning experience. Yeah, as a research Economic Research practitioner myself, I have a little bit of a technical question I'm interested in asking you if you indulge me. Now it's been a couple of years we have data from the more traditional economic giants that like the Census Bureau that release data. How does the unconventional and creative data sources that you piece together match up with what they've released now, like the Census Bureau, such as, you know, calling up businesses, et cetera. 
 
Rector: Yeah, you know, some of some of what we heard absolutely panned out. I mean, when I talked to folks who were in the leisure and hospitality industry, they said we can't do anything because it is literally our business model is face to face interactions and we cannot do face to face interactions. 
We knew that they were going to be hard hit and they absolutely were and that has been a piece of the economy that has been somewhat slower to come back although certainly as we're in the summer tourism season now, they're hopefully doing better than they had been. 
I think you know I think that some of the pieces that we looked at there were there were some data sources that I was looking at from Opportunity Insights. They had a website, tracktherecovery.org was their website and we relied on that because it was reasonably well vetted, but they put together a bunch of different sources on things like small business openings and consumer spending and employment. And they were much more timely than a lot of the official sources they had some on employment where they were looking at employment levels by income rank essentially so high wage, middle wage, low wage workers and what were the employment. One of the things that we were seeing there was this K shaped recovery where the higher wage jobs were coming back faster than the low wage jobs and that seemed to pan out in the official data as well. If you looked at the sectors that were lagging behind in the recovery, they tended to be lower wage sectors. So leisure and hospitality, which I mentioned, some parts of health care and social assistance including long term care and social assistance - child cares in particular - and state and local government particularly, sort of the public education piece of it. 
So that was one piece that we had an indication that that that was happening before we got the official data on that one. 
And another one that actually tracked really well was the time spent outside the home. 
 
Miller: Those walks those walks were big. 
 
Rector: One of the earliest data sources that was actual data that I got was vehicle miles traveled from the Department of Transportation, which you would not think of as a traditional economic indicator, but if you think about the nature of the recession, like, people physically couldn't go anywhere and so we saw vehicle miles traveled drop because of course people weren’t driving to work anymore and they weren't driving to restaurants or to go shopping and or to schools. 
And that matched up very well with some of the early declines in employment and then the declines in sort of time spent outside the home, which was one from the track, the recovery website that I mentioned that was I think they were using cell phone data to figure out where people were traveling to using, you know, pings off of cell phone towers and stuff, and that they broke that down by times set up outside the home for different purposes, like going to a workplace and the workplace numbers as everybody shifted to remote work, or a lot of people, shifted to remote work. 
We saw that remain subdued, even though things like time outside for recreation went up considerably higher than they had been. 
So, there were certainly there were some sources that gave us early indications of what the official data sources might be trending towards later on. 
 
Miller: It's so interesting and fun to reflect how parsing different levels and really digging into the nitty gritty can yield things like the differing recoveries or reactions in different blue collar, white collar, and what type of industry. 
It's really interesting and important for responding to and learning from the pandemic and any sort of economic disruption. 
 
Rector: Absolutely. 
 
Miller: So, we are recording this shortly after the June consumer price report came out and, speaking of government speed and degree of response, some would argue because of the 2008 was slower and obviously did not have the as much of a direct U.S. citizen level response in help. 
The recovery was quite slow and obviously the pandemic response was fast and quite a bit of money went to U.S. citizens. So, which is led to very different recoveries. 
So, there was a 1.3% increase for the month of June and a total of a 9.1% increase of the last 12 months. 
Can you reflect on the current economic picture or how much of this inflation is beyond our control in the state of Maine? And how much is from the stimulus packages and what role do supply chain issues play at this current moment? 
 
Rector: Inflation has been one of the hot topics of the past few months. I would say that here in the state of Maine, our control over the national inflation numbers is basically non-existent. 
I mean, we are a very, very small portion of the overall national economy. 
I think Maine makes up .3% of the US GDP, something like that. So, what we do here has pretty small impacts in terms of the national inflation there. There's been some research and some studies done trying to figure out sort of how much of an effect the national stimulus had on inflation. 
It, you know, it seems like it may have contributed, but the more important factor is going back to what we talked about at the beginning. If it hadn't happened, things would have been just so much worse from so many different levels, everything from, you know, supporting state revenues to people being able to continue to support businesses that they are patronizing or being able to pay their rent, being able to buy groceries, I mean, those federal programs had actual calculable results, reducing poverty levels, for example. So, there were a lot of impacts that came out of those beyond, you know, the potential negative consequence of having higher inflation. 
I think a lot of what happened with inflation and honestly, nobody really knows for sure. 
Inflation, if anything, I think economists have discovered that we have less of an idea of what causes inflation than we did previously. So, certainly there, the supply chain piece of it I think was a very big part, particularly early on essentially prices were going up because you couldn't get the stuff that you needed, got bogged down for a number of different reasons. Part of it was certainly related to COVID and closures due to COVID workforce shortages. 
Because of COVID there were some issues around, you know, we really learned just how globally integrated our economy is during the pandemic. Part of it is that the cost of shipping containers went up so much and if you have pain so much more to move stuff that price gets translated through the price of the actual thing that is being transported and that you're buying. 
So, there were factors related not just to the shortage of the stuff, but the movement of the stuff.  
There was a lot of demand that happened at the same time. 
And then there are things that are completely unrelated to all of that. More recently, energy prices have been playing a big role in the increases in inflation as food prices have as well as shelter. 
For a few different reasons. I mean, the Russian invasion of Ukraine played a big factor in those rising energy prices, although they've been rising even prior to that. 
But it has really added a whole extra level of volatility and increases and that's playing into the food price increases as well. And then shelter, you know, if you look at the housing market in Maine, we saw real estate become extremely desirable as a lot of people wanted to be here and we just haven't had a lot of supply. If you look at when do people decide to, you know, when do businesses decide to make the investment in building a bunch of new housing stock? 
Well, it's when you're expecting a lot of new household formations and either it's because you have a lot of young people who are moving out of their parents' homes and into their own homes or you have a lot of migration into an area and Maine hadn't had a lot of that before the pandemic. And so, we haven't had a lot of new homes being built for a long period of time. So limited housing stock and a lot of demand and prices went through the roof and that's been happening in a lot of the country. 
It's not just in Maine, but those are certainly if you look at the contributing factors to inflation, those are really essentials. 
Those aren't things that we have a lot of discretion over we all need to have shelter, we need to have food and we need to be able to have you know a mode of transportation and heating our homes and electricity and all of those things that go into energy prices. 
So, we're at the whims of inflation right now. Really, I think the, you know, the good news is that we did see energy prices come down a little bit in the past few weeks. 
Gas prices in particular have started to tick down a little bit. And the Federal Reserve is acting very aggressively to raise interest rates in the hopes of cooling inflation. And that, of course, plays into cooling demand, particularly for things like housing, doesn't do anything to alleviate the affordability issues.  
But it does perhaps put a little bit of a damper on how much that has been growing recently, but it also the psychology of it is almost equally as important because it gets into people's minds that this is a temporary situation, there is action being done to bring it under control and so people don't become locked into the mindset of we're going to have prices just higher and higher and higher. 
Which then in turn tends to make prices go higher and higher and higher. 
 
Miller: Right, yeah. Something that is encouraging about the lower energy prices and seeing at the pump myself a small but real decrease is that I guess it gets into that economic theory of increasing velocity of the dollar and that's the fears of hyperinflation, which is really, really catastrophic. And speaking of global integration, today, I think it came out that the euro and the dollar are of the same value, which hasn't happened in a long time. And so there are these macroeconomic trends manifesting all around the world, and so it's from an economic perspective, interesting to observe and curious how it will all play out. 
 
Rector: A fascinating time to be an economist. 
 
Miller: In your essay, you mentioned that the notes on your whiteboard were up for so long before you went back to your office that you could still see their traces. How has your workplace and the way you conduct research change since moving to remote work? Then back to in person working, has returning to normal been possible? 
 
Rector: You know, I'm still actually primarily working remotely, and I think that for the type of work that I do and long term, I'll be in more of a hybrid situation, which for the type of work that I do, makes a lot of sense. A lot of what I'm doing is sort of me and a computer and an Excel spreadsheet. 
And I do not need the distractions of being in the office when I am trying to do that. At the same time, there are certainly times when it's really helpful to be in person, in the office, meeting face to face with people and collaborate. 
And getting back to that is definitely nice. 
I think that it's been really interesting. I do a lot of presentations for different groups, and I have had a mix of in-person and remote presentations and I think there are a lot of advantages to having that flexibility now. 
It used to be that everything was in person and there are a lot of things that actually are better suited to an online format. Maybe you want to have a lot of breakout groups, and boy, it's a heck of a lot easier to do those when you can just click a button and send people into little groups instead of having to physically move people into small group discussions. And it means, you know, particularly for a shorter presentation, it means that instead of spending an hour driving there, parking, getting in, getting set up. 
And then we're reversing that whole process for a 20-minute presentation. 
It's just a matter of logging in, doing the 20 minutes and then moving on to the next thing. 
But there are also certainly some advantages to the in-person presentations. I like being able to sort of read the room as I'm giving a presentation. I get a much better sense if I'm actually there. 
Are people following? Did I lose everybody somewhere down the line and they're just staring blankly at me? Is it after lunch and they're all snoozing now? I can't tell that I'm doing a presentation online whether that's the case, but I like the fact that it seems going forward there's going to be more of this flexibility in how work gets done and how meetings take place and how presentations are done that sort of best suits the format to what the type of work or event or presentation is. 
And I think that one of the things that we did a lot more of during the peak pandemic period was the collaborations and just trying to figure out, ‘oh, hey, you know, I don't have any data on this. Can I talk to some people or gosh, you know? 
I'm working on this stuff and it's kind of related to that. Maybe we should talk about this together and see if we can figure out some way to work together on this.’ I think there's a lot more collaboration. 
I think people became more used to sort of all hands on deck during the pandemic, and having the ability to be comfortable with reaching out to other people and asking for help or asking for a chance to collaborate, I think is maybe one of the other silver linings to come out of this as we're realizing that you can get a lot of really interesting insights if you're working with people that you don't normally work with. 
 
Miller: Totally - it's really amazing that we had all this technology before and then we were all forced to figure it out. And really interesting things that have come out of it is obviously allowed us to do this, which we could have done before, but I mean it just seems like everyone realized, oh all right, we are going to adjust and we'll take what we like moving forward and then once, you know, the pandemic has changed and has become more severe, sometimes less severe other times, and in the lulls, you can kind of be creative in how in person you want to be, which has been really nice for those that are more vulnerable than that. 
So, to kind of cap things off, I won't hold you this, but we have to do predictions because you're an economist, even though you're trained to be how precarious the nature of that business is. Will we ever see $3 gasoline or $6 lobster again? 
 
Rector: Uh, gazing into the crystal ball. You know the thing you learn about being an economist is that your predictions are pretty much always going to be wrong. It's just a matter of minimizing how wrong they are. Uh, you know, I think in in terms of inflation, I do think that we're on a course for inflation. 
I don't know if it's peaked this month or if it's going to peak next month, but I think we're at the point now where we should start seeing inflation come down in the coming months and return to more normal levels. 
I think it's going to be high for a while still, but I don't think it's going to be as high as it is right now. I think the fact that the Fed is acting so aggressively is going to curb the inflationary pressures. 
You know, there's also the people are muttering about the next recession and are we in one or are we going to be in one. 
 
Miller: The perennial question. 
Rector: Uh, yeah, I know. If I'm not talking about a recession, it just doesn't feel like a normal year, you know. But I think that it's sort of an interesting shift. Normally we're thinking about the next recession and states generally don't have a lot of resources and we're thinking about, well, what is the Fed going to do? How can the federal government both, in terms of fiscal policy and monetary policy, help states whether whatever the recession might look like. 
States are actually in better shape than the feds right now, I think, because we still have money flowing out from the American Rescue Plan Act, and in Maine, it's going out through the Maine Jobs and Recovery Plan, and that's a not insubstantial chunk of change. 
You know, it was it was a billion dollars, all told so we still have, we have hundreds of millions of dollars, that is still flowing out wrote over a period of a year plus. Which is timed I think really well in terms of helping to support economic activity now at the point when we're sort of thinking, oh gosh, are things going to be slowing down and the federal government doesn't have a lot of resources right now to do things if there is another recession and the state Budget Stabilization Fund is in really good shape and I think that provides us with a lot of cushion if there is something that happens to be able to continue to provide programs and services without having to do the mad scramble to cut things right off the bat the way often happens in a recession. 
So, I think it feels very strange to be in this position, you know, at a state level facing down potentially the next downturn, whatever shape it might take, but having reasonably good resources as we're looking ahead to that. 
 
Miller: Very nice. 
 
Thank you so much for entertaining the prediction question. 
 
Is there any exciting research or anything we haven't particularly asked a question that you would like to toss out there as we close out? 
 
Rector: I think one thing that I would mention, you know, I talked a little bit about the real estate market and how interested people were in moving to Maine and I would just say, you know, we did see a really strong migration into Maine during the pandemic. 7th in the nation for our migration rate in 2021, and when we just recently got the final breakdown of 2021 population estimates, we got age and race and ethnicity. We actually saw our median age decline.  
 
Miller: Wow. 
 
Rector: And that's the first time in decades that that has happened, and we were the only state that saw that happen. So, we did in fact see migration of younger populations into the state, which is really important in terms of providing future workforce as more of the baby boomers head into their traditional retirement years we've been struggling, wondering where the workforce is going to come from in the future and this really provided some positive signs that we will in fact have some available workforce down the line. 
 
Miller: That's an excellent note to end on. 
 
Thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it, Amanda. 
 
Rector: It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me. 
 
Miller: You just heard Maine State Economist Amanda Rector’s thoughts on lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic and what the future might hold.  
 
You can read her published work on this topic in Vol. 30, Issue Number 2 of the Maine Policy Review.  The editorial team for Maine Policy Review is made up of Joyce Rumery, Linda Silka, and Barbara Harrity. Jonathan Rubin directs the Policy Center at the University of Maine. A thank you to Jayson Heim and Kathryn Swacha, scriptwriters for Maine Policy Matters, and to Daniel Soucier, our Production Consultant.  
 
In two weeks, we will have a reading by Gail Dana-Sacco of her essay, “Indigenous Voices Charting a Course Beyond the Bicentennial” to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day.  
 
We would like to thank you for listening to Maine Policy Matters from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. You can find us online by searching Maine Policy Matters on your web browser. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow us on your preferred social media platform to stay updated on new episode releases.   
I am Eric Miller–thanks for listening and please join us next time on Maine Policy Matters.