Emily Shaw

I have been spending entirely too much time today with the lovely dataset from the Maine Municipal Association’s most recent Fiscal Survey Report. This report provides the basic budget categories for the most common categories of expense across 218 Maine municipalities. That’s 45% of the municipalities in Maine, so it gives you a very good profile of the state’s local revenues and expenditures. Portland and Bangor apparently did not return their surveys, so are unfortunately not part of the list. C’est la vie. On the positive side, it gives Lewiston (our second largest municipality! How do I always forget this?), Auburn, Sanford and Biddeford an unusual opportunity to represent as members of  Maine’s cohort of larger towns.

The survey divides towns into categories based on sizes. For anyone thinking about municipal size categories outside of Maine, you’ll have to trust us (that’s me and MMA) – multiple sub-10,000 size categories are meaningful and relate to real differences in amenities, services, and atmosphere.

Around 50% of each Maine municipal size-category responded to the survey, so the distribution of the survey population pretty closely matches the distribution of actual municipal sizes in Maine — with the exception that the smallest size category, the sub-1000 size, is actually underrepresented even though it is already the largest category in terms of respondents.

There are many, many very tiny towns in Maine.  Nearly half of all Maine towns have fewer than 1,000 people.

So is this a problem? When we think of small Maine towns, we often think some pretty positive things: cute, homespun, Norman Rockwell-esque downtowns, perhaps with a neighborhood cat sauntering confidently across a quiet Main Street, traditional bean suppers. Depending on our frame of mind, we may think some negative things about these places as well: outdated, Norman Bates-ish pass-throughs on the way to somewhere else, uncontrolled feral cats, traditional bean suppers.

Both of these images have their place, and the answer to the question of which is true depends on who’s looking. The question that we can answer somewhat more definitively, given the MMA data, is whether these smaller places are cost-efficient.

In most of our direct purchasing, we have the experience that higher volume brings lower per-unit costs.  Buy the big box of cereal and you will pay much less per serving than if you buy lots of those little single-breakfast boxes. It would seem logical that this principle would continue to hold in municipalities. Surely there must be economies of scale in municipal purchasing, just as there is in personal purchasing. In municipalities, too, you would expect town offices in larger towns to be able to realize greater service efficiencies, since each job that a town employee does affects a larger number of people.

So is this the case?

Interestingly enough, the data from the MMA survey suggest: Not really. Towns in medium and small towns collect less property tax and spend less on basic services, per capita, than do large towns. (Tiny towns – the sub-1000 group – are a somewhat different and more complicated story.)

Here’s the story with property tax.

For all municipalities I found the per-capita property tax collection by dividing each town’s total property tax by its number of residents. I then found the median per capita property tax for each of the municipal size groups and reported these numbers above. Among towns ranging from 1,000 residents to over 10,000 residents, smaller towns collect significantly less per capita property tax. This may mean that the combination of mill rates and home values in larger towns produces larger residential property tax bills; on the other hand, because the MMA survey doesn’t break out residential and business taxpayers, maybe the higher business density of larger towns accounts for that difference.

But what is going on with the high levels of per capita property tax collection in the tiny towns? The tiny category (<1000) also demonstrated by far the greatest variation in per capita property tax collection. This amount ranged from a low of $104 per-resident average property tax collection in Garfield Plantation to an average of $8794 per resident property tax collection in North Haven. Are the residents of North Haven really each paying an average of almost $9000 in property tax?

Probably not. The data from many tiny towns are quite skewed because a number of tiny towns are popular locations for remote vacation homes. Swan’s Island and Newry are two more tiny towns with high per resident property tax, but these are locations where many people will pay to maintain a cabin or condo but not actually reside. On the other hand, there are also plenty of tiny towns which are not vacation destinations, and where the residents probably are the ones actually paying all the property taxes.

From the larger towns, however, the data seem more regularly dispersed. What explains the difference in per-capita property tax rates?

As it turns out, expenditures!

I know you sit here now on tenterhooks awaiting the resolution of this tale of 218 budgets, but like Scheherazade said, always leave them wanting more…tomorrow, tune in for the exciting denouement of “Analyzing the MMA 2011 Fiscal Survey,” featuring a detailed review of those very expenditures. Will the culprit be general administration? Public safety? Public works and human services? Tune in and find out!

I have been spending a lot of time since the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre thinking about gun control. I looked for groups that I could join to perform direct, legislation-supporting action; finding nothing immediately (beyond groups which I could – and did – support financially), I started my own outlet for my need for direct action. I have no illusions that it’s actually leading anyone to do anything but it does make me feel better. To the extent that it adds another small rhetorical pebble in favor of gun control to the larger social media environment, that’s also good and worth my time.

I called my daily direct-action site “Not Talking, Just Acting” because online argument-based persuasion is not a strength of the gun control movement. Because of the lack of effective infrastructure at the national level, the rhetoric of gun control is terribly underdeveloped relative to the rhetoric of gun ownership. However, this rhetorical problem doesn’t correspond to actual opinion majorities. Most households in the US don’t have guns. Most people in the US don’t have guns. Most people support a ban on assault weapons, armor-piercing bullets and high-capacity magazines.

The biggest reason to focus on action rather than persuasion, however, is the demonstration of the effectiveness of turnout-based efforts by Democrats in the 2012 election. When opinion is strongly polarized, you cannot hope to sway large numbers of adherents to your cause. What you can do is identify and mobilize your supporters. The first step to achieving effective gun control movements will be rallying the majorities who believe in taking some reasonable steps forward.

Then we can figure out our order of operations.

Already the beginnings of an interesting and detailed discussion below my new piece in the Bangor Daily News. This is a great topic and deserves a vigorous airing.

However, it is too bad so many clearly knowledgeable folks feel a need to post under pseudonyms. Especially when they refer to you by you first name, and then if you were to reply, you respond to…”Fruitbat47″? I can only assume that this is the case because most commenters are in work situations where they can’t discuss politics. I’m sorry you all work for such punitive employers!

We’ve been so busy and distracted trying to sell one house in Portland and buy another in Oakland.* No matter how much logic I try to apply to the situation, no matter how I recognize that probabilities, procedures, and other reasonable things underlie these processes, I feel overwhelmed by the desire to consult horoscopes, look at fortune cookie fortunes, knock on wood and ward off the evil eye in various atavistic ways. The whole thing is reminding me a lot of early teenagehood. You know why 13 and 14 year old girls are so into astrology and fortunetelling? Show me someone who has spent several years trying to figure out why her body,  skin, social and emotional life have turned entirely upside down and I will show you someone who has at least a passing familiarity with the Rider-Waite tarot deck. The desire to assert control over a consistently unpredictable situation leads to these predictable efforts to constrain the present and future, no matter how silly the method.

In this state of mind I was thinking about our governor, as one does. His recent statement that  the IRS is the new Gestapo has generated a lot of attention. (I started writing “outburst” instead of “statement,” but prepared remarks which are formally posted on the official Maine state website don’t really meet the standards of an “outburst.”) If there was ever a doubt that deliberate efforts to offend were a central part of Governor LePage’s approach to politics, let that doubt be dispelled now. The man relishes a good nose-tweak like nobody I’ve ever seen. I would bet lots of money that there have been multiple recent references in the Blaine House to uncomfortably-positioned underwear.

In my unmoored and teenage-esque state of mind, I can’t help thinking about how well Governor LePage fills the role of “the Fool” in the tarot deck. In the traditional meanings assigned to the card, the Fool is kind of a chaotic change-agent, without a whole lot of concern for risks, precedents or consequences. I feel like there’s a lot of that kind of energy to LePage’s leadership. If you’re in a position right now where you don’t have a lot, you’re probably not too concerned that he seems to be tearing down the existing edifices of state programming, government and propriety. On the other hand, if you are invested in or generally like the way things are in Maine, his behavior is likely to be of some concern to you.  Either way, the Gestapo comments confirm that the man is who he is, he is quite up-front about it, and no amount of requests that he be attentive to the concerns or feelings of others is likely to change him.

As I said in my opinion article in the Portland Press Herald this weekend, the governor does what he wants. A focus on his rhetoric is only humoring that part of him that gets a kick out of it. The idea that public outrage will somehow change the governor’s approach to politics is, sadly, no more effective than my efforts to scry successful house sales out of the leaves at the bottom of my teacup. Just as I should simply continue to focus on things that increase the probability of my preferred outcome — keeping the house in shape, maintaining communication with my brokers — people who would prefer not to be governed by a chaotic change-agent should work to elect people this year who will inhibit the governor’s more Foolish impulses.

* The obligatory advertisement:  interested in a well-maintained two-family house in a great Portland neighborhood? Call me for the special blog-reader’s discount!

Just starting to read the coverage of the Supreme Court ruling (until I can read the opinion itself, which doesn’t seem to be up yet), and it looks like the governor’s gamble that the Court would strike down the provisions of the Affordable Care Act didn’t pay off.

In the last months of the 2012 legislative session, the governor made several decisions which were based on the assumption that there would be no Affordable Care Act by the fall of 2012. The governor halted the state’s movement towards creating a state health insurance exchange, required by the ACA, and the governor’s budget also ended coverage for young people on MaineCare, which is prohibited under the Maintenance of Effort provision of the ACA. Because Maine did not set up a health insurance exchange on its own, the federal government will now design one for us – unless we get our act together and create a proposal for a joint state-federal exchange design by November.

Can’t wait to read this opinion!

ETA: Decision now available! I have to say I am seriously, seriously confused by the Court’s decision to declare the withholding of Medicaid reimbursements unconstitutional. This is how the federal government works through “cooperative” (or “coercive”) federalism. States can choose whether they want to participate in federally-supported Medicaid or not, and the federal government sets the terms for what they need to do to participate. This is exactly the mechanism used by President Reagan to create a national drinking age of 21: he threatened to withhold federal highway funding unless states all raised the drinking age. More to come, for sure.

Apologies for the silence here over the last few weeks. Busy, busy time right now! However, I did take time out from the frenetic activity to speak on a couple of MPBN radio programs recently. You can hear me having a great time chatting with a brilliant crew of Maine reporters on Maine Calling last week and later being interviewed by Tom Porter for MPBN Maine Things Considered.

Text of an OpEd I wrote that didn’t quite pass muster with the KJ/Morning Sentinel folks, alas.

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The Maine legislature just gave our low-income high school seniors a nasty graduation present by voting to take away MaineCare health insurance from over 7,000 19-20 year olds. Those young adults, who collectively face both mounting student debt and unemployment rates more than twice as high as the average Mainer’s, will now have to take on additional financial risk.  Most who lose this safety net will not be in a position to get another form of insurance. This leaves them vulnerable to the consequences of untreated illness – lost time from work and school, damaging their future prospects –as well as the possibility of incurring bankruptcy from medical debt. By deciding that passing tax cuts was more important than fulfilling promises to our young people, Maine’s legislators undermined the very people we need to support most right now.

Things are already hard enough for financially disadvantaged young Mainers. Young people are substantially less likely to be employed than the average adult since the employment of younger adults has lagged behind the rest of our economic recovery. According to the Maine Department of Labor, the 2011 unemployment rate for Mainers over 35 was under 7 percent, but for Mainers between 20 and 24 it was over 16 percent. The unemployment rate for men in that age group was nearly 20 percent: 1 in 5 young men are unable to find work. This has a lot to do with the kinds of jobs that were lost during the recession. Many of the jobs that we lost during the recession were jobs that required only a high-school education – jobs that could have been done by these young adults. Meanwhile, when young adults are employed, they are less likely to have access to the kinds of jobs that provide health insurance.  The main growth areas in Maine’s economy require post-secondary education. While many of these are good jobs, that’s cold comfort to 19 and 20 year olds who haven’t got the credentials to be eligible for these jobs featuring employer-sponsored health insurance.

When the legislature decided to save money by cutting young adults, they ironically cut MaineCare’s least expensive group. Covering young adults is much more affordable for the state than for any other group of people. They are less likely to be seriously ill, which means that they are a better insurance bet for their insurers – including for state insurers. Nonetheless, like all other groups of people, young adults sometimes become sick or injured. When this  happens, they are less likely to get timely and appropriate care if they are uninsured. According to the Kaiser Low Income Coverage and Access Survey, uninsured low-income young adults are twice as likely as their insured counterparts to have delayed or forgone care when they thought they needed it. Those decisions not to get care had consequences. Among those who delayed or never got care, nearly half saw their conditions get worse or cause significant pain. More than a third lost time at work or school because of their lack of access to health care.

Additionally, while covering this group is less expensive than the average group of enrollees, leaving our young adults vulnerable to illness or injury can have serious financial consequences. Uninsured young adults risk bankruptcy if they run up medical debt to pay for treatment. Medical debt is the largest source of bankruptcies in the country and young adults are as vulnerable to this as anyone. Even where young adults aren’t bankrupted, a major medical expense has serious and lasting financial effects. Like most people, uninsured young adults are most likely to try to cope with their medical expenses by accruing credit card debt. According to the organization Demos, low and middle-income young adults who have tried to cover medical expenses with credit cards have levels of credit card debt 79% higher than the same group without medical debt.

With the legislature’s reckless decision to remove MaineCare coverage from around 7,000 19 and 20 year olds, we’ve created additional road blocks for young people just getting started in a tough economy. While the legislature provides tax cuts to people who’ve already made it, we ensure that more of our future entrepreneurs, small business owners, educators and community leaders will never get the chance to reach their full potential.  Taking health care access away from our young adults is one sure way to diminish Maine’s future.