Author: Ethan Strimling
Ethan Strimling served ten years as Mayor and State Senator for Portland, Maine.
As I written previously, rent control has been a remarkable success in Portland. Rent increases have stabilized, averaging just 1.8% overall, and housing production is booming with over 50 new units a month being approved since rent control passed, versus less than 30 a month in the four years prior. The only weakness is the…
Rent control has been in place in Portland for over two years. By almost all measures, it has been a remarkable success. Rent increases have stabilized for rent controlled units, averaging just 1.6% overall in the first year (70% of rent controlled units saw no increases, while 30% saw increases averaging 5.6%). Non-rent-controlled units are…
U.S. Sen. Susan Collins is working very hard to put former Republican President Donald Trump back in the White House. Despite pretending to distance herself from Trump, Collins is quietly doing the bidding of MAGA Republicans by opening the door to the one avenue that guarantees Trump a second term: putting a conservative Democrat on…
In 2019, when the landmark paid time off bill, sponsored by Sen. Rebecca Millett and championed by the Maine People’s Alliance (of which Beacon is a project) with the backing of 80,000 petition signers, was passed, Governor Janet Mills insisted that a small provision be included in the bill that was demanded by the business…
In a column two weeks ago, I described how Portland Mayor Kate Snyder has launched an effort to make citizen-initiated referendums harder to initiate and less effective. In particular, she wants the Portland City Council to be able to repeal an initiative immediately upon passage, as Gov. Paul LePage was able to do when he…
Live + Work Maine recently launched an innovative campaign to recruit thousands of new workers to Maine. They put up billboards in Texas encouraging people to move here with two other non-profits, Boots2Roots and Northern Light Health. “Can you picture yourself in Maine? Good, so can we” One sign reads. And apparently it’s working. The…
Citizens being able to implement direct change when our government fails to act, whether at the state or municipal level, is an essential part of our democracy. At the state level, the citizen-initiative process has been used to ensure funding for our schools (twice), to raise the minimum wage, to implement clean elections and ranked…
Despite constant warnings from so many that guns are simply too numerous and accessible in Maine for us to avoid the tragedies so many states in America experience, Maine just had its 10th mass shooting since 2011. A lone gunman, another troubled young white male, has been charged with shooting seven people on Tuesday, killing…
As we all knew it would, it has happened again. A mass shooting occurred on the Fourth of July, in Highland Park, Illinois. Six dead, dozens wounded, and a young white male arrested. How much does anyone want to bet that the assault weapon from which the bullets sprayed into the crowd was legally purchased…
In its ruling last week basically allowing anyone to carry a handgun outside the home, the Supreme Court just made America much less safe. However, compared to what former Gov. Paul LePage and former state Sen. Eric Brakey did regarding handguns in Maine back in 2015, what the Supreme Court just did could be considered…