From the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, Maine had a sunset law that required regular reviews of state agencies to see if they were doing anything productive. The Legislature’s Audit and Program Review Committee was responsible for those reviews, and in the law’s first year, its members took that responsibility seriously. They produced a long list of embarrassing waste that could be eliminated. Speaker of the House John Martin (yes, the same one who’s now a state senator) didn’t like that at all. He thought the whole process made the Legislature look foolish. So, Martin took steps to kill nearly all the committee’s recommendations. After that, committee members continued to do the annual reviews — reviews that cost a quarter-million dollars a year — but they stopped calling for any cuts. Eventually, the whole process was abolished, thereby producing its only real savings.
The reason Republicans like OPEGA is not because it cuts spending. It’s because it can’t embarrass them, seeing as how they’re not in charge. Democrats control the Legislature and the executive branch. So, any stupidity the agency uncovers reflects badly on the Dems. OPEGA provides a political payoff to the minority party, even if it never offers a comparable benefit to taxpayers.
“It’s an appalling way to do business,” GOP state Senator Kevin Raye of Perry told the Portland Press Herald.
“Shenanigans like this undermine confidence in elected officials,” Raye announced in a press release.
Those statements would constitute an astute assessment of the situation if Raye had been criticizing his own party’s allegiance to OPEGA. Unfortunately, he wasn’t. He was just annoyed because Martin inserted the proposal to kill the agency into the budget bill in a last-minute piece of legislative legerdemain. It’s embarrassing when an experienced pol like Raye gets snookered like that.
But unlike OPEGA, it’s an inexpensive embarrassment.
Too embarrassed to tell me off to my face? Do it by e-mail at aldiamon@herniahill.net.
