NEWS: Candidate: Maine needs businessman in governor’s role

As originally published by the York Weekly

Candidate: Maine needs businessman in governor’s role

By Deborah Mcdermott
April 20, 2010 2:00 AM
Editor’s note: This is one in a series of profiles of candidates running for Maine governor in the June primaries.

The first thing Bruce Poliquin wants Mainers to know is that he’s a businessman. He’s never held elective office, and he said that’s his strength. The second is that if he is elected governor of Maine, he wouldn’t care about being re-elected. Really.

And that’s crucial right now, he said, because “Maine doesn’t need a governor whose mind is on the next election. I will do what I think is best for Maine, without regard to the next election.”

What’s best for Maine is simple, he said: “You don’t spend more than you take in. Period.”

Poliquin, a Republican, has stances on education, health care, energy and other issues on the minds of voters in this election year; but he said superseding all of them is his conviction that what’s needed more than anything is a governor “with private sector skills who has worked in the real world.”

The next governor will face a shortfall for the next biennium estimated to be anywhere from $500 million to $1 billion, the result, said Poliquin “of 30 years of mismanagement. And as Maine doesn’t fix the problems, they just keep getting bigger.

“Sometimes in a democracy, one must get to the edge and see the abyss. We are there. For a generation, there’s been such gross mismanagement that we have created problems for ourselves,” he said. “The business sector has been taxed to death to pay for the public sector. Businesses are not the enemy. We should do everything possible to make business thrive.”

He often used the word “hire” instead of “elect,” symbolic of what he sees as a need for a business person to take over the Blaine House.

Poliquin, 56, is a native of Waterville. A graduate of Harvard University with a degree in economics, he and several partners formed an asset management firm out of college that managed pension funds for businesses like Bath Iron Works.

Since then, he has managed a number of businesses, most recently a housing development company.

While he is convinced that Maine stands at the abyss, he is equally confident that the problems can be fixed.

“Day 1” as governor, “I will hire professional managers, not politicians” for his Cabinet, “folks who have been thriving in the real world.”

He said he would order an audit of all departments, programs and agencies and then follow through on what the audit uncovers.

“Part of that is installing a performance matrix. We know what we’re trying to achieve, so let’s put a mechanism in place so we’ll know if we’ll succeed or fail at it, and then avoid the failures. Once we’re able to do that, we’ll save lots of money,” he said.

He ticked off a number of initiatives that he would undertake, as a person with the “political will” to get them done.

Key among the burdens facing the next governor is an unfunded liability in the state’s pension system totaling about $3 billion. Some experts put the debt burden for the next biennium for that alone at $477 million.

As a partner in an asset management firm managing $5 billion in pensions, he said he knows how to dig the state out of that situation.

“Of course it’s fixable, but you have to hire someone to run the state government who knows what he’s doing.”

He also said he would work to create “a better environment for small business” in Maine. “Here’s the problem. We’re broke and until we have more tax revenues, we have no more money.”

He would streamline business regulations, change the tax structure he said is one of the highest in the country, and work to make Maine an attractive place for new businesses by providing incentives to move here.

On the state spending side, he advocates a significant cutback in MaineCare, the state’s Medicaid system.

He said that over the years, MaineCare has been expanded to include many services that are not strictly health care, such as housing, meals and transportation. He said there’s no residency requirement, so people can move to the state and immediately get MaineCare.

“Of course we need to help the truly needy, but right now MaineCare consumes roughly 72 percent of all health care spending by the state,” he said.

He favors inclusion of public charter schools, which he called “laboratories for innovation,” to position Maine to receive some federal “race to the top” funds. He would also look into statewide negotiation of contracts, “anything we have to. When you’re facing what this state is facing, you have to look at everything.”

A quiet man who smiles often, he said he decided to run for governor because of his 19-year-old son, “who I adore.”

“When Sam is through with his educational years, I’m very concerned he may not be able to come back to the state of Maine to live. I don’t want to see that happen.”