If Maine’s economy lags behind the region’s, it’s not for a lack of study: Over the past few years, there has been a treasure trove of high-quality research that highlights the areas where Maine needs to improve if it is to have a prosperous economy.

The titles are familiar: “Charting Maine’s Future,” “Measures of Growth,” “Measures of Making Maine Work” and “Reinventing Maine Government.”

All involve key players from government, business and academia engaged in nonpartisan fact-finding, and all reached solid (and similar) conclusions about what Maine should do to move its economy forward. The reports were delivered and largely left to fill up bookshelves around the state. A group of lawmakers is hoping to change that, and while it may not be the most contentious issue before the Legislature this session, it is still an important one.

L.D. 1437, sponsored by Sen. Dick Woodbury, an independent from Yarmouth, would put all of these reports on the agenda of the Maine Economic Growth Council, a nonpartisan think tank. The council’s task would be turning the reports into proposed legislation that a future Legislature could enact.

This bill received a unanimous ought-to-pass report from the Labor, Commerce, Research and Economic Development Committee, which was appropriate. This is the kind of effort to which party lines and philosophical divisions have little relevance: Every Mainer wants a healthier economy with a more efficient and less costly government, and applying what was found by the researchers to work in the real world is a sound move.

Woodbury, who is an economist by profession, said the reports have an important thing in common. They are “can-do” reports, he testified before the committee last month, that don’t consider Maine’s problems to be insurmountable.

“I am a believer in self-fulfilling expectations and the psychology of economic markets,” his written testimony says. “So if we grow to think of Maine as bad for business, or impossible to make a living, or at the end of the economic highway, then that perception will come to be all-the-more true.”

Fortunately, a “can-do” attitude can drive another truth, said the economist-lawmaker. It’s certainly worth trying and should be a path that all lawmakers are willing to try.

 

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