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Initiatives to address housing, wages, pollution will be on November ballot in Portland

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Initiatives to address housing, wages, pollution will be on November ballot in Portland

Jul 06, 2022 | 2:59 pm ET
By Evan Popp
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Initiatives to address housing, wages, pollution will be on November ballot in Portland

Four citizen initiatives designed to make Maine’s largest city more liveable by tackling the high cost of housing, increasing workers’ wages and fighting climate change will be on Portland’s November ballot, the group spearheading the campaign announced Tuesday. 

The initiatives are part of the “Campaign for a Liveable Portland,” led by Maine Democratic Socialists of America. The measures will appear on Portland’s ballot in November along with a competing measure that would make small changes to regulating short-term rentals, which Maine DSA is trying to limit, and recommendations put forward by a commission to reform the city’s governance.

The ballot measures come after Maine DSA flexed its political power in 2020 through the People First Portland campaign, which succeeded in passing initiatives to raise the city’s minimum wage, create rent control regulations, ban facial surveillance technology, and enact green building standards. 

Still, despite those successes, organizers of the current campaign say more must be done. 

“Our communities are being threatened by landlords making record profits off of an affordable housing crisis, wages being outpaced by inflation, and climate change and congestion pulverizing our waterfront. Portland is on a track to become unlivable, but we’re organizing to correct that course,” Maine DSA campaign chair Wes Pelletier said of the need for the Campaign for a Liveable Portland initiatives. 

Sarah Louden, vice chair of the campaign, added that the organization anticipates significant pushback from business interests within the city. 

“We know we will be massively outspent, as were in 2020, but we also know the voters understand what is at stake,” she said. 

Minimum wage measure

One of the ballot initiatives being pushed by Maine DSA would increase the city’s minimum wage to $18 an hour over three years and eliminate the sub-minimum wage paid to tipped workers. Previous attempts to eliminate the tipped wage, a vestige of slavery, have failed at the state level.

In 2020, 60.4% of Portland voters supported a ballot measure to create a $15 minimum wage with time-and-a-half hazard pay during emergencies, or $22 an hour. Since then, the city council has largely bucked the hazard pay provision endorsed by voters. Earlier this year, the council struck down a proposal to require hazard pay for workers when there is a mask mandate in the city. 

“Portland continues to be fueled by low-wage jobs that leave workers and their families struggling to make ends meet,” the executive committee of the Southern Maine Workers’ Center said in support of the effort to raise the minimum wage. “This is coupled with rising costs of living, where every major household expense and rent has increased faster than wages. We have a responsibility to do the best we can to make the future a better place for Portland workers and their families.” 

“This vote on the increased minimum wage, and abolition of subminimum wages of all kinds, is about what kind of city we want to be,” added state Rep. Mike Sylvester (D-Portland). “Do we want to be a city of the many or just the few?”

Tenant protections 

Maine DSA is also seeking increased protections for renters in Portland. The group’s initiative would reduce tenant costs by setting annual rent increases to 70% of the Consumer Price Index as well as restricting deposits to one month of rent and prohibiting application fees. The measure also calls for 90-day notice for lease terminations or rent increases, discourages no-cause evictions by allowing rent increases for voluntary turnover, and sets a $25,000 fee for condominium conversions. 

Furthermore, the referendum would grant greater authority to the city’s rent board to ensure landlords receive a fair return on investment and tenant complaints receive a fair hearing. It would also allow tenant unions to represent renters before the board, which isn’t currently permitted.

Maine DSA successfully passed a law in 2020 that established the rent board, limited rent increases to once a year and barred annual increases of more than 10%. However, organizers have expressed concerns that the city has not been aggressive in enforcing rental rules, prompting the need for additional action. 

“We need a rent board that is fully empowered to protect tenants from greedy landlords, while adjudicating fairly for everyone, and the ‘Act to Protect Tenants in Portland’ is how we get there,” Austin Sims, former chair of the Portland Rent Board, said of the new referendum. 

“Taking away a landlord’s ability to evict people solely to jack up the rent, strengthening the rights of tenants to organize, and giving the rent board more teeth are exactly what we need as rents are continuing to squeeze working people out of Portland,” added Matt Walker, a Portland tenant.

Short-term rentals

Along with tenant protections, Maine DSA is once again attempting to reduce the number of short-term rentals in Portland after failing to pass a similar provision in 2020. The latest measure would restrict such rentals to only units that are occupied by the owner or tenant or located in a two-unit building occupied by the owner. 

The initiative also increases the annual fee for short-term rentals, mandates that all residents within 500 feet of a short-term rental be notified, ups penalties and enforcement of violations, requires complaints against short-term rentals to be tracked, and allows for the revocation of short-term rental registrations. 

“Legal STRs now take up over 2% of the available long-term rental housing stock in Portland. That is 400 units that could be available to residents of the city and that could help bring down pressure on ever-increasing rents,” said William Higgins, a Portland resident involved with the campaign.

“STR’s have squeezed too many long term residents out of the market. And I personally know too many in the community who were evicted just so a landlord could raise the rent,” Jess Falero, a Portland resident and co-founder of the Portland Housing Coalition, said in a statement of support for both the short-term rental and tenant protection measures. “These two initiatives will reverse those trends and I encourage everyone who cares about keeping our city livable to join me in voting yes this fall.” 

Fighting the cruise ship industry

The final Maine DSA initiative is aimed at the cruise ship industry and the pollution it generates. The measure would limit the number of passengers who can disembark and come into the city from a cruise ship to 1,000 a day beginning in 2025. Cruise ships made 409 port calls and brought 450,000 passengers to Maine in 2019 before the pandemic.

The proposal is inspired by campaigns led by progressives in other cities dominated by tourism, such as Bar Harbor, Key West and Barcelona, organizers said, with the idea to reclaim some degree of local control over Portland while also reducing the harmful environmental impacts of the ships.  

“Luxury cruise ships with heated pools and air conditioning produce more carbon dioxide than any other ship,” said Avery Yale Kamila, a Bayside resident and co-founder of the environmental group Portland Protectors. “Because Portland lacks plug-ins for cruise ships, these polluting ships spew out black, toxic fumes while in port and this pollution drifts across the Old Port, Munjoy Hill, West End and Bayside [areas], increasing residents’ exposure to high-risk fine particulates and other toxic components of smog.” 

Photo: The Portland skyline | Corey Templeton