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Keith Mestrich is a finance professional who lives in New Harbor. He serves on numerous nonprofit boards in the mid-Coast and chairs the Lincoln County Democratic Committee.
For months, I have thought that the defining issues of this campaign season would be the basic kitchen table, pocketbook issues that determine whether people can actually afford to live and raise a family in Maine.
I keep coming back to three of them: Housing. Hospitals. Heat.
And unfortunately, each is becoming more urgent.
Oil has now broken through $100 a barrel. Gas in Maine is over $4 a gallon. Diesel — the fuel that moves our trucks, runs farm equipment and ultimately affects the price of nearly everything we buy — is over $6 a gallon. Heating oil is already averaging well above $5 a gallon, with prices in parts of Maine approaching $6 before winter has even begun.
Those prices hit working people in the wallet — and hard.
Housing isn’t any better. Mortgage rates remain near 7%, making the monthly cost of buying even a modest home dramatically more expensive. Rents remain unaffordable in communities across Maine. Young people wonder whether they can ever buy their first house. Seniors wonder whether rising property taxes will force them from the homes they already own. Businesses increasingly struggle to hire because prospective workers simply cannot find somewhere affordable to live.
Then there are our hospitals.
Rural Maine is watching essential health care services disappear. Maternity units have closed around the state, and now Lincoln Hospital in Damariscotta will end labor and delivery services. Each closure is described as an individual business or staffing decision. But taken together they represent something much larger: the steady erosion of the infrastructure that makes it possible to live, work, raise a family and grow old in rural Maine.
These aren’t separate problems. They need one leader with a plan for all of them. I believe that is Hannah Pingree.
What particularly impresses me is that Hannah isn’t treating housing, health care and energy as three unrelated policy silos. She understands that they are all part of the same fundamental question: Can ordinary people still afford to build a life in Maine?
And she has put real proposals behind that belief.
On housing, she has proposed investing $100 million annually in housing development and preservation while cutting unnecessary barriers that make it harder and more expensive to build. On energy, she wants stronger utility accountability while dramatically expanding efficiency programs, heat pumps and other tools that actually lower household energy costs. On health care, she has proposed a Maine public insurance option while making preservation of rural primary, maternity and reproductive care a priority.
Just as important, Hannah has experience turning ideas into action. She has been Speaker of the Maine House, led the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future, worked on housing and climate policy, and lived and raised a family in a rural island community. She understands both Augusta and the places far beyond it.
The next governor is going to inherit some extraordinarily difficult problems. We don’t need slogans about affordability. We need someone who understands the mechanics of actually making Maine more affordable.
Housing. Hospitals. Heat.
Those issues matter enormously right now. And they are a big part of why I’ll be voting for Hannah Pingree for governor.