A ‘Rubik’s cube’: Lawmakers reconvene as more than 200 bills await legislative action

The Maine Legislature will return to wrap up session this week, but the governor and legislative leadership are not on the same page about what actions should be taken. 

Gov. Janet Mills has said the Legislature should only cast votes to overturn or sustain her vetoed legislation, a typical action permitted after statutory adjournment each year known as “veto day,” which is scheduled for Friday.

However, spokespeople for House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross (D-Portland) and Senate President Troy Jackson (D-Aroostook) said the Legislature also intends to take action on at least some of the 200 some-odd bills still in limbo between passage and funding. 

These bills are currently on what is known as the “appropriations table,” which is under the purview of the Legislature’s Appropriations and Financial Affairs Committee that is also tasked with developing the budget plan. 

The committee is scheduled to meet at 1 p.m. on Tuesday to decide which legislation to move “off the table.” 

Bills that land on the table have already passed the full Legislature. However, if they aren’t explicitly funded in the state budget, they need to be paid for using remaining unappropriated money. 

There is roughly $11.4 million left unappropriated outside of the budget, which the governor signed on April 22. 

The 13 members on the Appropriations Committee have the authority to pass a bill as is, amend it to change its cost or kill it outright — because bills that remain on the table when the Legislature adjourns sine die will automatically die.

How this squares with last session

The silent death of bills on the table would not be unique to this session, though more bills are currently poised to die in this manner than did last session.  

In the 130th Legislature, which adjourned in 2022, a total of 154 bills were left on the table, according to data the Legislature’s Office of Policy and Legal Analysis provided to Maine Morning Star. This year, as the 131st Legislature comes to a close, 223 bills still remain on the table. 

In both cases, a handful of those bills were wrapped into the budgets, but for the most part, bills left on the table last session were ultimately not enacted after the Appropriations Committee did not vote to fund them off the table, which advocates worry will be the case again this session. 

Tribal, labor bills among those left in limbo between passage and funding

Advocates urge legislators to not leave business unfinished

Advocates for a range of issues have voiced a desire for the budget process to be more transparent, including Anna Kellar, executive director of Maine Citizens for Clean Elections, a nonpartisan nonprofit working to ensure that Maine’s campaign finance laws serve the public interest. 

“We have the Legislature in agreement that these things should happen,” Kellar said of bills that get put on the table. “It’s always so frustrating to feel like so many good ideas are fighting over the same pool of funding.” 

MCCE is a part of Democracy Maine, a collaboration with the League of Women Voters of Maine and Maine Students Vote, which has been advocating for two bills in particular that remain on the table. 

One of those measures aims to provide towns with support from the office of the Secretary of State to disseminate local election information online and upgrade their web domains. Kellar said the bill would set minimum standards for towns to share election information, after MCCE found through an internal study in 2020 of the 50 largest towns in the state that about half had missing or incorrect information about basic voting rights, such as how to get an absentee ballot. 

This proposal was carried over on the table from last year after failing to secure funding, as was the case for 141 of the other bills that still remain on the table. That said, Kellar expects it may not have a future but is more hopeful for another proposal from this year that would expand clean elections, specifically allowing candidates for district attorney to participate in the Maine Clean Elections Act.

The bill would not have an impact on funding for the current biennium but would for the next budget cycle. 

“We’re looking longterm in order for clean elections to be sustainable, district attorney aside,” Kellar said of the broader goal behind the effort. “There may need to be an increase in the basic statutory funding for clean elections.”

About $3 million per year currently goes to clean elections, and Kellar said an increase to $3.5 million would make the fund sustainable. 

Regardless of outcome, Kellar said of both proposals, “We fully plan to be back next year working for this again.” 

Sometimes, a bill dies but its substance is reintroduced in a new bill the following session. 

This happened this session with setting a minimum wage for school support staff. In 2022, a bill that sought to do so, LD 734, died on the table. This session, a similar proposal to raise pay for school support staff, LD 974, also made it to the appropriations table. The budget committee never took it off the table but decided to include much of the plan in the supplemental budget, which Mills signed into law last month.

The Wabanaki Alliance, a coalition of more than 250 organizations across the state, including MCCE, also has legislative priorities that remain on the table. 

Mills signed into law an expansion of tribal authority over prosecuting crimes this session, a significant but pared back effort for sweeping sovereignty reform. The Wabanaki Alliance is now urging people to reach out to the Appropriations Committee to voice support for a bill to create an Office of Tribal-State Affairs to improve the state’s relationship with the Wabanaki Nations and another that would establish an advisory council to ensure Wabanaki and African American studies requirements are effectively taught in schools.

Another measure on the Wabanaki Alliance’s list of priority legislation is a proposal from Talbot Ross to create a Maine Board on Place Names, a means to formally establish the renaming process after her father, Gerald Talbot, sponsored a bill in 1977 that prohibited the use of the n-word in the names of places. The continued existence of offensive names in the state show oversight is still lacking. 

(Since the introduction of this legislation, the Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous & Tribal Populations in Maine published an interactive map of some of the remaining offensive place names in the state and their origins.) 

Despite major concerns about child welfare, Legislature could adjourn without concrete action

The Legislature could also adjourn without concrete action to improve child welfare in the state, despite major concerns. Nearly all of the bills this session that sought to improve Maine’s failing child welfare system remain caught between passage and funding, as previously reported by Maine Morning Star. 

Other bills on the table range from measures to speed up criminal trials, to provide tax relief for wild blueberry growers, to address invasive aquatic plant infestations, to name a few.

An alternative death by procedure

Bills left on the table are only one area to look at when accounting for how bills can die, however.  

As an example from the previous 130th Legislature, a bill for sweeping tribal sovereignty reform that passed both chambers essentially died by way of the table — though it does not appear in the final disposition of the 154 bills officially left on the table that session. This is because the Senate removed it from the table but then tabled it without further action, leaving it to die in the chamber. 

That may be the case for a number of bills this session.

For instance, the Appropriations Committee amended several workers’ rights bills on the day of statutory adjournment, April 17, removing their fiscal notes but maintaining the policy changes within them. When taken up on the Senate floor for re-enactment as amended later that night, the chamber tabled them, leaving them as unfinished business.  

Some of these bills include measures to require minimum pay for reporting to work and the disclosure of pay ranges in job advertisements, as well as to protect workers from employer surveillance, prevent employers from holding workers liable for repaying training costs, and allow employees to request flexible work schedules.  

As James Myall, an analyst for the progressive Maine Center for Economic Policy, previously told Maine Morning Star, “It would be especially frustrating if they don’t even pass the small budgeted bills that they usually are able to get off the table. It would be a real missed opportunity if they let this kind of procedural thing get in the way.”

Outside labor bills, other bills caught in the Senate include a measure to improve women’s health and economic security by funding family planning services, which the Appropriations Committee switched to a one-time rather than ongoing allocation, and a plan to increase affordable housing by expanding tax increment financing, which the committee stripped of funding. 

Another ‘table’ adds to the mix

There is also another “table” that awaits further action to determine the future of bills, particularly those that require studies. 

The Legislative Council, composed of the ten highest ranking members of the Legislature, is responsible for the overall management of the Legislature, including something called the “Special Study Table.” Legislators put bills that include studies on the study table, and the Legislative Council then has the authority to decide which studies to prioritize and ultimately fund.

This process is similar to the “appropriations table” in that the Legislative Council has the discretion to pass a bill as is, amend it to change its cost or kill it outright. This session, 22 legislative studies ended up on the study table. Four had already been enacted into law and therefore didn’t need to be dealt with. Of the 18 remaining, the Legislative Council has so far advanced eight, one of which is a study of tenant-landlord relationships. 

Kathy Kilrain del Rio, advocacy and programs director at Maine Equal Justice, was excited to see that study move forward. 

“We feel like it’s a really important part of the conversation when we think about people with low incomes who need support in accessing housing,” Kilrain del Rio said. “We know that there’s people with housing vouchers, or other types of rental assistance, who’ve struggled to find landlords who will accept it. We hear different things about why that’s the case, so I think this will be a great opportunity to dig in on that.”  

Studies are funded using money designated into the General Fund Miscellaneous Studies Budget — this year, $31,065 — which the projected costs for all proposed studies exceeded. The expenses associated with the measures the Legislative Council have moved off the table so far put remaining funding at just over $6,000.

The Legislative Council tabled two of the bills on the study table — one to continue to study long-term care options and another to study the state’s clean energy transition — to try to find an alternative way to staff the studies. In addition to vying for funding, studies often require legislative staff, which is limited. 

The Legislative Council has yet to schedule a meeting to determine the final disposition of study bills. During its last meeting on April 30, Jackson, the Senate president, said of the funding process, “This is like a Rubik’s Cube.”

The remaining eight study bills that have yet to see action are therefore likely to die, which include a study of drug decriminalization, a study on the voluntary waiver of firearm rights, and a study to find alternative methods to fund higher education, among others.