Two months into the new year, Knox County has no budget and is seeking help from the Legislature after a lack of interest in county positions left it unable to begin its budget process.
Of the nine seats on Knox County’s budget advisory committee, only four were filled in elections last fall. Despite pleas from the county to town officials, who typically help find candidates for the job, nobody ran to fill the other five, leaving the county in an arcane legal bind.
Due to restrictions in the state law establishing Knox County’s budget process, there is no governing body to establish a county budget for 2026 without a quorum. Vacancies on the budget committee can only be filled by the committee itself. Since the committee cannot meet, it can’t fill its vacancies.
Hamstrung by its own governing document, the midcoast county based in Rockland has had no choice but to operate on last year’s budget for the past two months. It hasn’t caused any major disruptions yet, but the county may be forced to make steep cuts if it persists. The situation is another example of waning interest in county and local governments across Maine.
“When I ran for my seat, I ended up running unopposed as a write-in,” Commissioner Morgan Hynd, a Democrat from Warren, said. “No one else had stepped up to run for my seat.”
Officials are hopeful that the Legislature will help them out shortly. An emergency bill that would allow Knox commissioners to appoint budget committee members to fill the vacancies advanced in the Maine House of Representatives this week. Hynd said she hoped the bill would become law in March to allow the budget process to move forward.
Knox is the latest county to face budget problems. High costs for essential services, mostly in public safety, have forced difficult conversations across the state. Knox County officials said that lack of interest in the unpaid position on the budget committee contributed to the current crisis.
“People don’t have the time to volunteer anymore,” Commissioner Marc Ratner, a Republican from Camden, said. “It’s not a job that [makes] people go, ‘wow, you’re on the budget committee, that’s cool.’”
Hynd said that in the future the county would need to communicate more clearly with municipal officials, who in the past have helped put candidates up for budget committee seats.
While the Legislature has yet to schedule a vote on the bill to initiate Knox County’s budget process, it has so far moved through committee quickly and steep cuts to Knox services this year appear unlikely. The bill would allow commissioners to appoint five committee members, but Hynd said the plan is to only appoint one, the minimum required to start the budget process.
“We don’t want to take that responsibility out of the hands of the towns,” she said. “We are not trying to overstep our authority in any way.”
Daniel O’Connor is a Report for America corps member who covers rural government as part of the partnership between the Bangor Daily News and The Maine Monitor, with additional support from BDN and Monitor readers.
