Educators with ideas of how to meet an unmet need will now have a way to proceed.

Just two years after riding into town, Police Chief James Craig is on his way out again, leaving southern Maine for southern Ohio.

Craig was brought to a department in need of a shake-up. After 17 years under the command of Michael Chitwood and three years of his successor Timothy Burton, Chitwood’s deputy chief, the department needed a new perspective. And Craig, who had been a command officer in the city of Los Angeles’ war on gangs, had that.

Craig brought in new techniques, including methods of measuring crime and apportioning resources based on computer-aided analysis. He introduced technology, like non-lethal Taser stun guns for officers, that was new to the department but common elsewhere.

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling handed down Monday that could directly impact a provision of a Maine law has free speech advocates responding on both sides of the issue.

The U.S. Supreme Court overturned on First Amendment grounds part of an Arizona law that provided publicly funded political candidates “matching funds” when their privately funded opponents spent more than they did.

Like Maine’s Clean Elections Act, Arizona’s statute aimed at “leveling the playing field” between candidates who took private funds and ones taking a fixed amount from public sources. Similar laws exist in New Mexico, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

Instead of solving the nation’s problems, Congress is getting ready for the next election.

Because Maine’s leaders failed to act, only the marketplace can sort out this situation.