THE BIWEEKLY:
SUNDAY, MARCH 7, 2021
Original news and information
from Maine Monitor staff and contributors
CORONAVIRUS
BY ROSE LUNDY | MARCH 7, 2021

In February 2020, Margaret Downing read an article that terrified her. It predicted that a novel coronavirus spreading around the world would overwhelm U.S. healthcare systems, particularly those in small communities like her town of Yarmouth. 

“It was very obvious to me that this was going to be a very bad situation,” Downing, 73, said this month. “There were going to be a lot of people that got sick, a lot of people that died. It required immediate and energetic focus. We needed to get going.”

Downing, who has worked as a lawyer and an affordable housing developer, said small local governments like the one in her town of 8,500 don’t have the capacity or flexibility to respond to an evolving pandemic. So volunteers stepped up.

Yarmouth residents established a task force to educate their community about social distancing, sewed thousands of masks, created a resource website, established a call center at the library, facilitated wastewater testing and helped set up a swab-and-send testing site. A town survey over the summer found 80 percent mask compliance.

Yarmouth’s task force is one of several across the state. Their work may be one reason Maine maintains one of the nation’s lowest COVID-19 infection rates one year after the state’s first case was detected on March 12. Their success could change Maine’s approach to public health even after the pandemic.
CORONAVIRUS
BY ROSE LUNDY | MARCH 7, 2021

Kayla Duvall knew she had to get out of her marriage.

If she didn't answer her husband's repeated phone calls, he grew angry. He accused her of lying or cheating if she turned off the tracking app on her phone. Once, Duvall said, she left their 9-year-old son home alone for an hour and her husband called the police and child protective services on her. At times during their 9-year marriage he became physically violent.

“There was so much gaslighting that he could have told me the sky was green and I would probably believe it until I saw it for myself,” said Duvall, now an advocate for domestic abuse survivors in Franklin County.

Her divorce was finalized in February 2020, one month before Maine’s first COVID-19 case. If she was still married during the pandemic, Duvall said, it would have been “excruciating.” Seeing his name in a phone notification still gives her anxiety a year later. 

The stress and isolation of the pandemic have made it more dangerous for survivors in similar situations. 
SEA CHANGE
BY MARINA SCHAUFFLER | MARCH 7, 2021

Amid a torrent of public comment at a recent Rockland City Council meeting to discuss a proposed Midcoast natural gas pipeline, a teenager’s honest expression of bewilderment stood out: “I am surprised by this project.” 

And well she might be. Why are we even discussing new fossil fuel infrastructure when scientists tell us that to forestall further climate catastrophes, the world has a decade to cut its carbon emissions nearly in half? 

The heating, cooling and lighting of buildings generates 30 percent of Maine’s greenhouse gas emissions. The state’s new Climate Action Plan emphasizes electrifying buildings as the fastest detox from the fossil fuel systems that heat 80 percent of Maine households but exacerbate global warming.

Our collective challenge is to electrify heating systems as fast as possible with highly efficient air-source heat pumps (which also cool), using electricity from renewable power, battery storage and sound grid management. 

To get there, we need to acknowledge and address the full cost of fossil fuels.
ANALYSIS
BY GORDON L. WEIL | MARCH 7, 2021

Behind almost every government action lurks a single question: How do we pay for it?

The answer seems easy: by taxes or debt. But taxes must pay off the debt, making the real question not “how” but “when” we ante up. At the federal level, the answer is often “later.”

These days the country is ringing up massive new government spending. Think of the COVID-19 economic recovery, including Maine’s struggle with taxing federal aid to business, plus the Texas energy collapse.  

The pain of COVID-19 will be long-lasting when it’s added to other debt, and the bill has to be paid.
CHASING MAINE
BY ROGER MCCORD | MARCH 7, 2021

From a Maine Maple Sunday visit by author Stephen King to feed-wagon breakdowns, seventh-generation dairy farmer Bob Parsons muses on life at the 200-year-old Gorham farmhouse that’s been home to the Parsons family since 1870.

Chasing Maine is a biweekly video series that explores Maine from a distinct visual perspective. Join veteran Maine journalist and storyteller Roger McCord as he chases the people, places and things that define the unique character of the Pine Tree State.
HEALTH
BY JORDAN WOLMAN | FEB. 27, 2021

Health facilities have expressed concern that they won’t be able to maintain quality medical care for the state’s lowest-income residents without an increase in the amount of money they receive from the state. 

The problem has magnified over the last year. More people enrolled in MaineCare amid the pandemic, raising questions about the sustainability of the program tasked with ensuring the most vulnerable people have access to healthcare, including those with low incomes and those who are medically needy.

“The biggest issue we have right now is getting coverage for individuals and having a sustainable model of reimbursement (from MaineCare) for those services,” said Chrissi Maguire, the president and CEO of Mount Desert Island Hospital. “It’s really abysmal.”

More than 345,000 residents — about 1 in 4 Mainers — are signed up for MaineCare, Maine’s Medicaid program, and the number of new monthly enrollees has grown substantially in the last year. An average of 3,600 more individuals enrolled each month since March 2020 compared to the six months prior to COVID-19, according to the Office of Fiscal and Program Review.
DEFENSELESS
BY SAMANTHA HOGAN AND AGNEL PHILIP | FEB. 23, 2021

Soon after receiving his license to practice law in Maine in May 2015, Jeremiah McIntosh, 36, began a new career as a small-town lawyer in the northeast corner of Aroostook County.

McIntosh advertised online that he had spent almost a dozen years working as a civilian employee for the Defense Department. Now, he quickly fell back into life in his hometown. He volunteered for the town planning board, helped the library register as a nonprofit and opened a rural law office in the small, close-knit community of Washburn, where fewer than 2,000 people live. 

Among McIntosh’s clients were poor residents of the county who had been accused of crimes. Unique among states, Maine has no public defenders. Instead, private lawyers like McIntosh contract with the Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services, or MCILS, to represent impoverished defendants in criminal cases and other legal matters.

The agency is supposed to screen attorneys to make sure they have enough legal and trial experience to represent their clients, especially those charged with violent felonies or complex criminal matters. Under the agency’s rules, McIntosh, as a new lawyer, lacked the required years of experience to handle dozens of cases in which he served as counsel.
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