2017-06-10 Update
Weekly Update
We have now moved into five day weeks in the House. Beginning next week, we will move to "double sessions." You are always welcome to check on the progress of legislation by viewing the calendars below.
House Calendars
Bill Text -> Bill
Text
Bill Status -> Bill
Status
Testimony Link -> Bill
Testimony
This is really a great resource as you can see
all the testimony presented on any given bill.
Events
Calendars -> Events
(Or, use the calendar to the left)
Refletiions.
First, it's
important to let everyone know that technical details kept me from my
usual posting, and I'm glad we are all back up and running. Keeping
a weekly update of some kind has been a habit for well nigh twenty years,
so it's a pretty engrained habit.
One of the Governor's vetoes
rather deserves some commentary. We all know that "nip" bottles
litter our highways. The reason for this is that there is no deposit or
return policy on nip bottles. Both the House and the Senate
passed a bill to establish a deposit on nip bottles - exactly as we have
deposit and returns on other bottles.
However, the Governor has
vetoed this bill. And he has promised to remove the sale of nip
bottles entirely from the state if the House and Senate override the
veto. Now, in and by itself, this may not mean much, but it will
mean several jobs in Maine.
Somehow this just seems vengeful
politics. Instead of cleaning up nip bottles and clearing them
from our streets, political concerns far outweigh any environmental
concerns. Instead, we will be content to allow people to buy nip
bottles, consume them as they will and then leave them littering the
streets for upwards of 400 years. Plastic doesn't rot. Rather
than clean the environment, we seem content to pollute
it.
