Cutler says LePage is doing ‘great damage to a state I love’

Cites ‘extreme skepticism’
about east-west corridor

By Mike Lange
Staff Writer

    DOVER-FOXCROFT — Eliot Cutler may be down in the polls, but the independent gubernatorial candidate was in an upbeat mood during last week’s visit to Dover-Foxcroft.
    Dr. David McDermott; his wife, Ellen; and Doug and Lori Cummings co-hosted a meet-and-greet with Cutler at the McDermott’s Main Street home on Aug. 21.

Observer photo/Mike Lange

    MAKING A POINT — Eliot Cutler discusses the problem of student loan repayments during his Dover-Foxcroft visit on Aug. 21. Pictured, from left, are Lori Cummings, Cutler, Heather Duffy and Doug Cummings.

    The McDermott’s daughter, Lucy, was an intern on Cutler’s 2010 campaign staff and Cutler joked that she was so good that he tried to persuade her “not to go back to college.”
    Cutler said that one of the most common questions he’s asked is why he’s running for office again — he came within a few percentage points of defeating Gov. Paul LePage four years ago — and that motivates him.
    He cited his grandfather’s journey from a small village in Russia to Halifax, N.S. in the 1880s at age 12. “He had no money, no family and spoke no English,” Cutler said. “But someone either in his village or on the ship told him that when he got to North America, he should go to Bangor.”
    After working several years as a street peddler, Cutler’s grandfather met his future wife and opened a store on Exchange Street in Bangor. But even though he lost the business during the Great Depression, three of his daughters, including Cutler’s mother, graduated from college.
    “So the reason I’m running is because I feel an obligation to the state,” Cutler said. “Had it not been for the opportunity my mother had, I would not be here today, I would not have succeeded in life and have the chance to give back.”
    Cutler, who turned 68 on July 29, graduated from Harvard College and later earned a law degree from Georgetown.
    He served as associate director for Natural Resources, Energy and Science in the Office of Management and Budget in the Carter administration and later worked for U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie where he was credited with creating the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. Cutler was a founding partner of Cutler and Stanfield LLP, which became the second largest environmental law firm in the country, eventually merging that practice with international firm Akin Gump in 2000.
    During his local visit, Cutler cited sobering statistics about the state, noting that one out of eight families in Maine “are living below the poverty line, which is already lower than it should be.”
    The downturn was even more pronounced during the past 11 years, Cutler said. “When Angus King left office, Maine’s economy was neck-and-neck with Massachusetts,” he said. Now, Cutler said, Maine’s ranking is so low “that if we were a NASCAR race, we would have been lapped by the field.”
    Without mentioning LePage or Democratic candidate Mike Michaud by name, Cutler said the two major party candidates “are giving you a choice between what’s not working today and what didn’t work before: a choice between mean and inept, and nice but ineffectual and ill-equipped … This guy (LePage) is doing great damage to a state I love.”
    Cutler summarized his major campaign issues — property tax relief, health care reform, realigning the education system and eliminating partisan bickering — saying that this is the year “to change the way we think and fix the way we work.”
    When asked about the proposed east-west corridor, Cutler said that “before we start building new highways, we ought to fix the ones we’ve got.”
    He pointed out the condition of Route 15 to Greenville is so bad that many tourists who travel on it “probably don’t want to come back and that’s the biggest industry in the region.”
    Cutler said that if he were Cianbro CEO Peter Vigue, the proponent of the corridor, “I would never try to sell something I couldn’t describe or explain what the environmental impacts were on it … or scare everyone within a 300-mile radius of the proposed route. My attitude toward it is one of extreme skepticism.”
    Responding to some questions from the audience, Cutler said that he agreed with many of LePage’s policies on welfare reform such as drug testing for recipients, putting photo ID’s on EBT cards and requiring clients to actively seek employment or perform community service. “But that doesn’t solve the problem,” he said.
    Cutler pointed out the dilemma of a single mother working at a minimum-wage job that has to pay for child care “and lose all their benefits. They fall off a cliff and we need to replace that cliff with a bridge.”
    Grocery store owner Will Wedge said that the new Affordable Health Care Act provisions are “keeping me up at night” because the law requires businesses to consider anyone working more than 30 hours per week as full-time employees.
    Wedge said he already offers comprehensive insurance, but he may be “one of many small business owners in Maine that may be forced to rip away health insurance and tell my employees to go to the Affordable Health Care policy. I may have to go there myself.”
    Cutler said that as governor, he would have no control over the federally-mandated ACA, but criticized some of its provisions and the failure of the LePage administration for not working with the feds.
    He said that in his view, every Maine resident should have access to health care “because it’s morally right and makes sense financially.”