AUGUSTA – Maine voters will decide next month whether the state’s law to limit the terms of legislators, implemented more than a decade ago, should remain as is or be adjusted to lengthen permissible runs in office.

Specifically, if approved by voters on Nov. 6, the proposal would extend Maine’s present four-term limit to six terms – or from eight consecutive years to 12 in either the House of Representatives or Senate.

The extension would not apply to lawmakers now serving their fourth and final terms.

“If people could see the impact (of term limits) like we do here in the Legislature, they would have second thoughts,” says Senate Majority Leader Elizabeth Mitchell, D-Vassalboro, a veteran lawmaker who was the first woman to serve as speaker of the Maine House.

Rebutting Mitchell is former Republican Senate President Richard Bennett of Norway, who like Mitchell has served in both legislative chambers.

“What I object to is the notion that this question is before us at all,” says Bennett. “Putting this out by legislative fiat is troublesome to me. … The Legislature put this out without anybody asking for it.”

The value of legislative experience is a key issue for proponents of an extension, who also say term limits undercut the right of citizens to choose the holders of their proxies in the capital. Opponents say prolonged time in the state Senate or House gives some lawmakers advantages over others and leads to having new ideas discounted.

“We’ve always had turnover, we’ve always had new people pushing back, which we need,” says Mitchell, who does not voice opposition to curbs on the tenure of legislative leadership.

“Where I don’t like the curbs is on the voters,” she says.

Bennett maintains that the imposition of term limits “struck a better balance … between career politicians … and the real life experience” that others bring to the job.

Bennett says he rejects intimations that “the only experience which is helpful in the Legislature is legislative experience.”

Modern term limits first took effect in 1996, in Maine and in California, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Maine’s pioneering move stemmed from a 1993 referendum vote that laid down restrictions on consecutive service in legislative office, and for the positions of state treasurer, secretary of state, attorney general and state auditor.

In recent years, the resultant impact was examined in “Changing Members: The Maine Legislature in the Era of Term Limits,” published by Lexington Books.

Co-authored by Dean Matthew C. Moen of the University of South Dakota’s College of Arts and Sciences and University of Maine political scientists Kenneth T. Palmer and Richard J. Powell, “Changing Members” asserts that putting new legislative seats up for grabs “certainly reinvigorated grassroots democracy in the short term.”

But heightened electoral competition brought some “rough-and-tumble” campaigns that “eroded some of the moderation and gentility of Maine politics at the local level,” the book concludes.

The authors also say forced turnover, by draining experience from the Legislature, has been advantageous for the governor and executive branch officials.

“In contrast to some apparent winners, average citizens appear to have gained only minimally from term limits. They are offered more new faces in each election cycle, but popular control over legislative decision making seems no more concrete than in the days when citizens maintained close ties with senior careerists,” the authors say.

More recently, a paper published by the Maine Heritage Policy Center argues that “one feature that Maine’s term limits law has in common with that of other states is its overwhelming popularity with voters.

“More than two-thirds of Maine voters approved the term limits law in 1993. On average, term limits legislation introduced across the nation has passed by a two-to-one margin, and has passed in almost every one of the 24 states with citizen’s initiative processes,” the center analysis says.

Looking toward next month’s balloting, the Maine Heritage paper asserts: “The Legislature has yet to make the case to the public for why such a change is necessary.”

Former state Sen. Jill Goldthwait, who served as an independent from Bar Harbor and during a term of Democratic-Republican power-sharing in the Senate co-chaired the Appropriations Committee, says she has found the effect of term limits to be “pretty much one way in the negative.”

For one thing, biennial elections, she says, provide “ample opportunity to change legislators as frequently as we care to.”

Term limits, she says further, encourage lawmakers aspiring to leadership roles to focus on moving up the ladder rather than concentrating on committee assignments and learning the methods and merits of compromise.

A result, she says, can be lessened interest in compromise and more of a tilt toward majority muscle-flexing.

“The committee is the heart of the political process there,” Goldthwait says.