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AUGUSTA, Maine — Gov. Janet Mills will tell lawmakers Tuesday night to “join me in putting the people of Maine first” by passing a $11.6 billion budget that has drawn criticism from the right and left for mixing tax increases with cuts to certain health programs.
The Democratic governor also used her budget address to criticize a November referendum to create a “red flag” law, according to a prepared version of her remarks that came more than a year after the Lewiston mass shooting. Mills said the push would “directly undermine” Maine’s existing “yellow flag” law that removes guns from dangerous people.
Tuesday evening’s speech to state lawmakers gathered inside the House chamber did not feature many new specifics from Mills, who is midway through her final term. But she doubled down on the “tough” decisions needed to balance the budget amid a $450 million spending gap.
“It’s not been fun or easy to put this budget together, something you are beginning to understand,” Mills said in the prepared address, which she was set to deliver at the State House at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
Earlier this month, Mills unveiled her plan that features a $1 a pack increase to Maine’s $2 cigarette tax and cuts to Department of Health and Human Services programs. Republicans and were quick criticize the additional tax and fee increases Mills put in her budget plan, while Democrats and left-leaning groups expressed particular concern over cuts related to child care, food assistance and other DHHS programs..
It makes for perhaps the most difficult budget season for Mills since she took office in 2019, with the past few state budgets winning enough Democratic support but no Republican votes. She nodded to budget challenges in red and blue states nationwide while also saying Maine and its economy under her have still been in a better position.
She acknowledged the proposed tax hikes and cuts while highlighting $156 million to continue the state’s 55 percent education funding levels, $41 million or a 4 percent funding boost to public higher education institutions and $561 million to maintain municipal revenue sharing.
But the overarching theme of Tuesday’s speech was Mills telling lawmakers to work with her rather than only publicly criticize her ideas.
“It is easy to stand in front of a TV camera and say ‘no.’ It is easy to fire off a social media post and to feel good as the ‘likes” roll in,” Mills said. “But it is harder to do the work of sitting around the table … putting forward your own ideas, hearing what folks on all sides have to say and then coming to consensus to enact balanced public policy.”
She defended the “yellow flag” law that she helped craft as Maine’s attorney general and has since tweaked after the 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston that left 18 dead and 13 injured as “not a burden.” The law lets police take people deemed dangerous into custody before they receive a mental health assessment and a court hearing to temporarily lose access to guns, but proponents of a “red flag” law that removes a step by letting families directly petition a judge have collected enough signatures to put an initiative to voters in November.
Mills also urged lawmakers to pass her supplemental budget plan this year and her two-year proposal in order to close a $118 million MaineCare funding gap and protect the nearly 400,000 people who are enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program.
“No matter what, I ask this Legislature to join me in putting the people of Maine first,” Mills said. “The people we serve – they think for themselves, they take care of their neighbors and they stand together when things get tough, regardless of their differences. And so can we.”
