Birds and the bees

A floor debate on the experience needed for the state auditor’s job was interrupted Monday evening by a couple of pigeons trying to mate in the House chamber.

The birds apparently got in through a window left open over the weekend. They found true love on a ceiling ledge just as Rep. Stan Gerzofsky, D-Brunswick, started a floor speech.

“I was making some good points,” lamented Gerzofsky after the bill he was opposing passed 74-71. His comments were drowned out by applause for the birds.

Making sausage

The Legislature this week started evening sessions in an effort to move the nearly 800 bills still left for consideration through before adjournment in June.

Majority Leader Rep. Glenn Cummings, D-Portland, urged his fellow Democrats to have patience and good humor.

“You are entering the dark part of the gauntlet,” Cummings said at a Monday caucus. “A lot of stuff will be flying by you,” and, he warned, members wouldn’t always understand what they were voting on. He urged them to trust the recommendations of the chairmen of the committees churning out the bills.

The session started with more than 2,000 bills filed. At the start of this week, 97 had been passed.

Wal-Mart tax, take two

Rep. Arthur Lerman, D-Augusta, said he’s not done with his plan to put a special sales tax on Wal-Mart and other big-box stores despite the bill’s resounding defeat in committee.

Lerman will bring the issue to the floor for a fight, he said this week.

The Tax Committee voted against the bill even though five of its members had been co-sponsors. The bill would have put a gross receipts tax on out-of-state big-box retailers, but exempted locally owned ones. The $60 to $90 million raised would largely be used to pay for health coverage for the stores’ low-paid workers.

Rep. Thomas Watson, D-Bath, was one of three committee members to stick with the bill in the end.

“It’s unconstitutional,” Watson said, but he supported the tax to get the discussion started.

Check your watch

Rep. Jonathan McKane, R-Newcastle, was co-sponsor on a bill that would ask voters to decide if they want to spring Maine clocks ahead permanently – by putting us in the Atlantic versus Eastern Time Zone.

The bill got unanimous support of the State and Local Government Committee last week.

“Maine people are out of sync,” with the usable daylight in the winter, said McKane, who is also a member of the government committee. By the time we get home from work, the sun is gone.

“Sadly, this means for many, it is time to move inside, sit down in front of the TV or computer or video game and eat and drink and smoke,” McKane said.

What the bill proposes is that Maine go on Atlantic Time permanently, meaning we would be on what we think of as daylight savings time year-round.

“It would get rid of the ‘winter blues’,” said Thomas Collins of New Harbor, a long-time proponent of the change. Collins testified at the bill’s hearing and is hoping the time change, which he has been advocating since the King administration, will finally see the light of day.

-Victoria Wallack, Maine Statehouse News

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