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Michael Cianchette is a Navy reservist who served in Afghanistan. He is in-house counsel to a number of businesses in southern Maine and was a chief counsel to former Gov. Paul LePage.
Secretary of State Shenna Bellows needed that win.
Over the past two months, her appeal to the Maine Supreme Court defending her decision to ban Donald Trump from the ballot was dismissed. Then, the federal First Circuit Court of Appeals rejected her attempts to keep Maine’s voter registration information confidential from public interest organizations.
As of Wednesday night, it was not clear whether she would be permitted to bar independent presidential candidate Robert Kennedy from collecting signatures at the polls on Tuesday.
Yet, while election oversight gets most of the headlines, the secretary of state has other responsibilities. Most are far less controversial.
Like license plates.
This week, the next generation of standard Maine license plates was revealed. Nearly a quarter century ago we transitioned from one state symbol — the lobster — to another, the chickadee. Now, we will have something new gracing our vehicles. The design is a riff on the 1901 state flag, with a pine tree and star.
Like many Mainers, I was partial to the present plate. The rendering of the black-capped chickadee had artistic merit and there was some logic between a bird and transportation representation.
Yet its continuation is not to be. C’est la vie.
However, the final design for the new plate is far better than the prototypes shared previously. For example, it actually has a white pine instead of a stylized spruce-ish Christmas tree.
It should serve serviceably as a symbol of our state, particularly when we find ourselves on the other side of the Piscataqua River.
One of the secretary of state’s other less-controversial duties comes as the keeper of corporate documents. Every entity operating in Maine has to file paperwork with Augusta in order to conduct business. Further, the last time Republicans controlled the Legislature, the office of Small Business Advocate was created and couched with the secretary of state.
As long as she holds the office, Secretary Bellows should try to leverage the good feelings that come from the new license plate she unveiled. That is doubly true given the duties she owes to Maine’s small businesses.
One of the most interesting case studies ongoing today is that of the once-humble Stanley thermos. It was a brand known to many on job sites, keeping coffee and other beverages warm throughout cold winter days. It denoted quality and consistency. It was a lot like Maine.
Then, in 2020, with a new branding strategy at hand, Stanley’s sales exploded. The company had been selling around $70 million worth of product before COVID. In 2023, their sales topped $750 million.
They didn’t have some wild, new, never-before seen product. They didn’t force a competitor out of the market and establish themselves as a monopoly. They simply did some work to find a better way to get their already great product in front of more people and, ultimately, into their hands.
The same is true of Maine. Our public-facing symbols — license plates, flags, and the like — are branding tells about who we are. From Aroostook potatoes to wild blueberries, Maine lobster or Bean Boots, people rightly associate Maine with quality.
Helping build out a way for our local small businesses to leverage the Maine brand, utilizing “official” symbols like our license plate’s artwork, should be some of the easy wins for the secretary of state. As former Secretary of State — later Governor — Ken Curtis acknowledged in an interview, it should be pretty easy to be pretty popular holding that job.
While Bellows is in office, she should try to spend some more time on the business-focused aspects of the job. And to try and help our small businesses, earning headlines for things unrelated to court battles.