Maine: Portland

This May Day hundreds of Mainers will visit Senators Snowe and Collins' offices in Biddeford, Portland, Auburn, Lewiston, Augusta, Bangor, and Presque Isle to highlight the urgent need for federal reform that creates access to quality, affordable health care for all. A "Health Care Caravan" of twenty-five activists will travel to each office, meeting up with many more local residents in each city. At each office, community members will present the Senators with a lighthouse, share a personal story related to the health care crisis, and request that the Senator be a "guiding light" out of the health care crisis by supporting a public health insurance plan at the national level for everyone in America.

AUGUSTA, Maine — Students, parents and school administrators all told lawmakers the Department of Education should stop collecting the names of students disciplined by schools and keeping them in a database, but Commissioner Susan Gendron warned that could jeopardize all federal funds for education that come to the state.

“If we don’t comply with reporting requirements as the federal government specifies, we can in fact be required to return all and any federal dollars,” she told lawmakers. “IDEA [Individuals with Educational Disabilities Act] alone is $50 million a year.”

Gendron said that while the state is collecting the disciplinary information, it reports the information only as aggregate data without the students’ identification numbers.

Proposals aimed at eliminating soda and snacks from the federal food stamp program were defeated in the Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee this week, but some proposed changes to the state’s welfare program and a measure to prohibit smoking in outdoor restaurants and bars are headed to the House of Representatives for debate.

The 13-member committee voted unanimously against two bills that would have required the Maine Department of Health and Human Services to request a waiver from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. An approved federal waiver is the only mechanism the state could use to disallow the use of food stamp dollars for the purchase of soda and snack foods, the target of the bills.

PORTLAND, Maine — Maine is slated to receive nearly $100 million in economic stimulus funding for construction and renovation of federal facilities, with more than half the total earmarked for the Margaret Chase Smith U.S. Post Office Courthouse.

Members of the Maine congressional delegation announced Tuesday that the General Services Administration set aside $52.8 million to modernize the post office and courthouse in Bangor.

Another $37.7 million will be used for the border station and port of entry in Van Buren.

The remainder of the money will fund work at border stations in Calais and Madawaska, and the Edward T. Gignoux Courthouse in Portland.