Sigrid Olson, a resident of Cape Elizabeth, has a master’s degree in policy, planning and management from the University of Southern Maine.

According to a recent news article, residents of Washington County are bewildered and angered that five years of financial mismanagement has left an $11 million hole in the budget. Other reporting has shown the jails and sheriff’s offices were some of the biggest recipients of the millions of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, intended for pandemic relief.

How did this happen? The truth is that Maine’s counties are, as the League of Women Voters of Maine put it,  “a backwater of poor visibility, low citizen engagement, uncertain transparency and sub-standard representation.”

Citizens wanting to exercise more oversight over county government may find it difficult to do so. Audits are years behind in many Maine counties, despite a law requiring annual audits. The most recent audit for Washington County is for 2021. That’s appalling, but they’re doing  better than Aroostook County. 

Without up-to-date audits, financial mismanagement can go undetected. Equally, finding information about when public county commissioner meetings are and what they are about can be a challenge. The League of Women Voters found that only two county websites provide agendas before commissioner meetings, five fail to list meeting times and four don’t offer remote attendance.

Maine received $261 million, disbursed throughout the counties, to help it recover from the pandemic. How did this money get spent? It’s very hard to find out. Few county websites mention ARPA or opioid settlement funds, but U.S. Treasury Department reports suggest the funds were not spent on recovery.

Although a report by the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the major health providers in the county states that Androscoggin County health providers have “mostly emerged from the pandemic, we are still experiencing a myriad of lingering effects and impacts from it” what were Androscoggin’s ARPA-funded public health projects? There were none assisting the hard-hit providers on the front line of the pandemic. Instead, new guns and vehicles for the sheriff’s office were the county’s pandemic public health expenditures. Cumberland County’s largest ARPA-funded project was a new wing for the county jail.

One cause of this dismal list of inadequacies could be the fact that the majority of county elections are uncontested. Of the county commissioner elections in Maine since 2020, only 41% had two or more candidates on the ballot. Three races had no candidates on the ballot — the winning write-in candidates got 2% of the vote, with 98% of ballots left blank.

None of Washington County’s five commissioner elections had more than one candidate on the ballot. The elections for sheriffs are even less competitive. Throughout the state, fewer than a third of the elections for sheriff since 2020 had more than one candidate on the ballot. Only a few of these uncontested elections had a primary. 

What can we do? Residents of Washington, Aroostook, Waldo, Sagadahoc and Penobscot counties should demand that timely audits be done, as required by law. We can urge media, such as the Portland Press Herald, to cover more county affairs. Most importantly, we can require that counties post public notices of what positions will be open and how prospective candidates can get on the ballot well ahead of the deadline. 

Maine is a big state with many, often tiny, municipalities; we need a layer of elected government in the middle. Counties are frequently ignored because of their poor accountability and governance. That needs to change. Let’s pay more attention to what they do and ensure their elections are competitive.