LEWISTON – Maine’s economy faces significant challenges, but the state also has tremendous assets and opportunities that can be translated into sustained growth and prosperity.

The challenge is turning those facts into action, especially in the midst of an election.

Taxes are too high. Growth has been uneven and unfocused. And dramatic changes in many of the state’s traditional industries have created a cloud of pessimism that hangs over even good news.

But Maine is a “brand” that’s known around the world. The name speaks of rugged individualism, natural beauty and quality. It’s one of the reasons why so many people visit the state every year and leave large bundles of money behind. Many of the trends that bespoke of recession and retreat have been reversed, even if popular perception has been slow to catch on.

Those are the general conclusions of an in-depth study of the state by the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, an independent research and policy institute based in Washington, D.C.

Sponsored by GrowSmart Maine and a coalition of business, environmental and government groups, the study was 18 months in the making and cost nearly $1 million to produce.

Many of the findings run contrary to the pessimistic conventional wisdom in the state, and the recommendations fall directly in the middle of the ongoing debate raging around taxes, government spending and borrowing, and economic development that will play out over the four weeks left in the election season.

Presented around the state Thursday and Friday, “Charting Maine’s Future: An Action Plan for Promoting Sustainable Prosperity and Quality Places,” is an attempt to capture the imagination of the body politic and help the state set a new course for economic development.

Hurdles ahead

The plan has been warmly received, but it faces almost as many hurdles as the state’s economy if it’s ever to be implemented.

Even among some who generally agree with the report’s findings and recommendations, there’s an underlying skepticism and a desire to put their own marks on the plan or to pull from it some ideas while disregarding others.

Maine Speaker of the House John Richardson, who has been traveling the state much of the year holding business and economic development forums, said Thursday that many of the ideas in the report are things the state is already doing.

“It makes a clear case for the economic development strategy Democrats have been championing,” said Richardson, a Brunswick Democrat who’s termed out of the Legislature.

The report recommends that Maine bond $390 million over the next 10 years to support a variety of economic development, research and job programs and to preserve open spaces and help revitalize the state’s downtowns.

It also proposes a way to pay for the investments. The plan would raise the lodging tax from 7 percent to 10 percent to raise about $20 million per year, cut government spending by between $60 million and $100 million a year and increase the deed transaction fee by $20, to raise between $5 million and $20 million a year.

While Richardson said he appreciates the blueprint provided by the report, the Legislature will probably need more latitude to determine, in a bipartisan way, how to get to where the report wants to go.

“I like the Brookings report for the identification of what needs to be done. I think it’s OK to make suggestions on a vehicle on how to get there, but I don’t want to pre-ordain how we get there,” Richardson said.

‘Bold steps’ needed

Along with its call for increasing the amount the state invests in economic development, the report also makes clear that state government and K-12 education need to undergo a major re-engineering to reduce waste and increase efficiency and to streamline government regulations that hamper growth in core areas.

“We’ve had the right intentions for the last 20 years,” said David Hughes, a Republican candidate for the House in Lewiston’s District 72. “But we haven’t had enough follow-through. Republicans have long said that Maine has a hard regulatory environment for everyone, not just businesses.”

For Lucien Gosselin, the president of the Lewiston-Auburn Economic Growth Council, the report provides important benchmarks about where Maine is today and where it needs to go.

“But obviously, it’s going to be a challenge for the Legislature to deal with some of these issues,” Gosselin said.

Rep. Tom Shields, an Auburn Republican, attended the Brookings presentation on Thursday, and while he said he could support many of the ideas in the plan – including efforts to export more of the tax burden onto out-of-state visitors – there are significant hurdles that can keep things from happening.

“I think that they expressed some things that are theoretically very nice, but I don’t know if they work in real life,” Shields said. “Somebody has to take the bold steps, and I don’t know that we have the people who are going to do that.”

Otherwise, it would take one political party with a large numeric advantage in the Legislature to push through such an agenda because the politics can’t be removed from the process, Shields said.

Brookings and GrowSmart aren’t the first to put together a good plan for moving the state forward, Gosselin said. “Typically, what it lacks is the catalyst organization to move it forward.”

“I think what remains to be seen is who’s going to step up to the plate and be the champion of this report. That’s the piece that’s usually missing,” Gosselin said.

Cut and invest

Alan Caron, the president of GrowSmart, said his organization is committed to a five-year plan that includes advocating for the Brookings’ findings until they – or something like them – are implemented.

“We want to find a way to move forward together,” Caron said Thursday while unveiling the report in Lewiston.

“We can’t wait for big change to come out of Washington or Augusta,” Caron said. “We have to make it happen ourselves.”

Former Gov. Angus King, one of the people involved in GrowSmart’s efforts and the fundraising for this project, said it’s time that the state dump its pessimism and work together to move forward.

“It punctures this air of pessimism around the state,” King said. “It makes the point, based on data, that we’re doing pretty well.”

And the balanced nature of the report, King said, has the potential to end the political deadlock on economic development.

“The report has the potential to build a bridge between the two camps about how to go about economic development. I call them the cutters and the investors,” King said. “What this report says is that both are right, but neither is right by itself.”

Richardson, who often angered members of his own party by reaching across the aisle during the past two years, nonetheless wasn’t ready lay down his partisan sword just yet.

“One of the things that’s semi-sweet about this report is that it talks about research and development,” Richardson said. “We couldn’t get Republicans to go along.”

Richardson also said the report rebuts much of the campaign rhetoric promoted by Republicans who say state borrowing is out of control.

To Hughes, who faces a tough race against incumbent Democrat Will Walcott, it’s the spin over the first few days that will determine what happens with the Brookings report.

“The public is going to come away with an overall impression,” Hughes said. “The question is whether people come away with the idea that we need to keep going on what we’re doing or change and fix where we’ve gone wrong.”

“There’s no guarantee that this report will accomplish a thing,” Richardson said. “What it does do is lay out a very comprehensive plan and a step-by-step way to get there.”