Two years ago today, Gov. John Baldacci vowed to pay Maine’s hospitals the $330 million they were owed for MaineCare. Hospitals were cautiously optimistic that this outstanding debt would, at last, be paid.Today, this optimism is fading. Not because Baldacci broke his vow – he’s paid hospitals as promised – but because the payments can’t […]

Cheers and jeers from around the news: • Jeers to Olympia Gaming for refusing to identify all of its partners in Evergreen Mountain Enterprises. One is Seth Carey, who founded Evergreen. Another nine are only said to live in Maine.The ballot question asks whether a “certain Maine company” can open a casino in Oxford County. […]

Last Friday, the Norway-Paris Solid Waste Committee voted 7-1 to release a letter from a local businessman. The vote was held by telephone.That’s right. By phone. This quasi-municipal committee, whose entire budget to operate the transfer station and landfill in Norway comes from tax dollars and user fees, held a discussion and subsequently voted in […]

Our story so far: With Byron voters rejecting Independence Wind’s proposal for wind power, plans for 20 turbines in Roxbury are moving ahead, despite efforts from some townspeople to reverse approval of that project. Meanwhile, another company – First Wind – plans turbines for nearby Black Mountain and will hold a meeting Thursday night to […]

Forget, for a moment, the rhetoric of the Oxford County casino campaign and focus upon where everyone agrees: The enacting legislation, as currently written, is an unmitigated disaster.The text consumes – in landscape format – three pages of 11- by 17-inch paper. The bill drops Maine’s gambling age to 19 and places the casino president […]

News that the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain has turned its attention to Maine – well, the 2nd District anyway – has political prognosticators in a tizzy about what this says about the state.Chris Potholm, the political oracle of Bowdoin College, told the Bangor Daily News a visit – not by McCain, rather running […]

Some members of the Legislature’s Criminal Justice Committee are miffed because the Department of Public Safety replaced one if its airplanes – using forfeited funds – without the committee’s permission.“This is something the committee should have been involved with,” said committee Co-chairman Sen. Bill Diamond, D-Windham, according to the Capitol News Service, even though the […]

Letters to the editor to endorse candidates for elected office, or about other issues to be voted on Nov. 4, must be received by Friday, Oct. 24, at 5 p.m. Endorsements are limited to 150 words and must be exclusively written for the Sun Journal or Sun Media Group newspapers. Form letters will not be […]

Plum Creek’s plans have almost been around for so long, they’ve become part of the Maine landscape.But the recent arrest of four protesters in the offices of the Maine Land Use Regulation Commission reminds us how contentious and difficult the decision-making process has been regarding its unprecedented proposal.Maine has never seen a project like what […]

Cheers and jeers from around the news: • Cheers to the Lewiston City Council, for supporting the Friends of Merrymeeting Bay’s efforts to improve the Clean Water Act classification of the Androscoggin River from Durham to Brunswick. The Friends are swimming upstream in reclassifying the river, but are gaining allies.What’s most important, though, is the […]