Here are the highlights of Gov. Janet Mills’ State of the State address on Tuesday, when she unveiled her proposals for dealing with a $265 million surplus over the next two years, as well as gun safety legislation and investments in response to recent winter storms.
• Require background checks on all advertised private sales of firearms, strengthen Maine’s “yellow flag” law to allow police to seek a court order to forcibly take a person who is a threat to themselves or others into protective custody, and create a new felony for “reckless” gun sales that are not advertised.
• Establish a statewide network of crisis receiving centers to divert people experiencing a mental health crisis from jails and emergency departments so they can get appropriate care, beginning in Lewiston.
• Dedicate $50 million to increase the resiliency of coastal infrastructure in response to recent storms, fueled by a changing climate, that inflicted extensive washouts and destruction to important coastal infrastructure, such as commercial fishing piers.
• Put $100 million in a temporary reserve account to protect existing programs from cuts in future budgets in the event of an economic downturn.
• Use $26 million for emergency and permanent housing, including $16 million for warming shelters for people without homes and $10 million to provide incentives for the construction of permanent affordable housing.
• Address the workload of child protection caseworkers by hiring more legal aides to help with paperwork, and increasing pay through a job classification study and additional hiring/retention bonuses.
• Spend $6 million to address the opioid crisis by expanding access to the overdose reversal medication naloxone, increasing access to medication assisted treatment programs in county jails and adding nine recovery coaches to the state’s OPTIONS program, which sends people with lived experience with addiction on overdose calls with first responders to help people into treatment.
• Begin providing services and education for pre-K students with disabilities in public schools.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Success. Please wait for the page to reload. If the page does not reload within 5 seconds, please refresh the page.
Enter your email and password to access comments.
Hi, to comment on stories you must . This profile is in addition to your subscription and website login.
Already have a commenting profile? .
Invalid username/password.
Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.
Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.
Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.