PARIS – Admitting to a personal struggle with thousands of dollars of student loans, Diane Russell appealed to a group of Rotarians on Wednesday morning to back a new plan designed to help Maine students pay for university and college.

“How many here would love to see every student go to college without financial inhibitions?” Russell asked members of the Rotary Club of Oxford Hills at their weekly breakfast.

Russell, a guest speaker, was pitching a new initiative called Opportunity Maine, which its backers are promoting throughout the state as they gather signatures. They want to collect 60,000 names by Jan. 25 to present the proposal to the state Legislature and get it on the November 2007 ballot.

Opportunity Maine is a strategy developed largely by a group of students and recent graduates who say the measure will encourage more Mainers to obtain college degrees in the state, as well as entice them to remain here after they graduate. And this will clip brain drain and boost the economy, they say.

The measure is crafted to provide students who have earned bachelor’s or associate’s degrees from Maine schools with tax credits that match dollar-for-dollar their annual student loan payments, if they stay and work in the state. This credit is capped at $21,000, roughly the average debt for a University of Maine graduate.

Or, if the graduates are employed by a business in the state, that business would have the option of paying back the loans – up to about $2,000 a year – and receiving the tax credit itself.

Russell, who is 30 and grew up in Bryant Pond, said it took her 10 years to complete her college education because she held down a job while attending school. And now she has $60,000 worth of debt. “I say this because I’m no one special,” she said. “This is the norm.”

The program is not retroactive, and would only apply to students in school at the time the initiative became law.

Initially, the state treasury would lose $3 million to $4 million, and up to $53 million in 10 years, according to projections supplied by Opportunity Maine. But Rob Brown, campaign director of Opportunity Maine, said these costs would be offset by revenue generated by better-educated Mainers working in the state.

Workers with bachelor’s degrees earn about $15,000 a year more than those with only high school diplomas, according to Opportunity Maine. And businesses would be attracted to a state of skilled employees, Russell pointed out.

“This is not easy, overnight-benefit legislation,” Brown said, adding that not taking a long-range look at policies is a common government failing. “This referendum gives us a chance to talk to Mainers about what the economy will look like in a decade, and let’s start planning on it now. It’s a conversation a lot of politicians don’t tend to have.”

While Opportunity Maine is unique in its universal approach, other similar initiatives have been used for attracting students to specialized fields like nursing and other health care professions.

Concentrating on the upcoming Nov. 7 elections, members of Opportunity Maine are trying to attract volunteers to talk to voters and collect signatures at the polls.

At Western Maine University and Community Center in Paris, Shannon Moxcey of West Paris, the administrative assistant and a backer of the initiative, said she’s already collected 50 signatures, which is about a quarter of the school’s enrollment.

“As a recent graduate with loans I found my earning potential would not be sufficient to support myself and pay off my loans,” a condition she said she sees mirrored in other students. Moxcey earned a bachelor’s degree in mental health and social services.