AUGUSTA, Maine — It has been a while since the biggest parts of Maine’s COVID-19 response got bipartisan approval, but lawmakers have agreed on one thing.
Both chambers of the Legislature moved earlier this month to approve a review of the state’s response, sending it to Gov. Janet Mills for a likely signature. It will assemble a 13-member group of lawmakers — six Democrats, six Republicans and an independent — and task them with a sweeping review of pandemic policies and setting a December due date for a report.
The task is a daunting one that could feature charged politics. The Democratic-led Legislature has recently blocked Republican attempts to repeal or loosen vaccine mandates. Those have been among the more contentious interventions after Mills, also a Democrat, lifted initial business restrictions that prompted protests in 2020, the first year of the pandemic.
“This resolve isn’t about placing blame on people or agencies,” said Assistant Maine Senate Minority Leader Lisa Keim, a Republican who championed the review. “It is about learning what worked and what didn’t so that we can be better prepared if and when this happens again.”
The first recorded COVID-19 case in Maine on March 12, 2020. The state has the sixth-lowest death rate and had the fourth-highest vaccination rate as of October 2022, according to The New York Times. Still, more than 3,000 people have died in a state whose older population was highly vulnerable to the virus when it first emerged.
Maine has generally fared well in national reviews of the response. The Commonwealth Fund, a national group focused on health care, gave Maine, Hawaii, Vermont, Washington and Oregon top marks for COVID-specific measures in a 2022 scorecard. A group of conservative economists gave Maine a top mark for preventing deaths and limiting economic harm.
Keim’s original bill laid out 14 areas of focus for the new commission, including contracts, executive orders and policy outcomes. The amended version narrows it to five directives that remain broad, including all laws and rules, health effects on different population segments, government preparedness and “any other matters” related to the response.
Democrats and Republicans voted in March 2020 to give Mills sweeping power to manage the response by executive order, but the minority party began to regret it in the spring, mirroring national fights over executive power by trying to overturn her authority. Some lawmakers in the governor’s party also distanced themselves from certain restrictions.
There is still an undercurrent of those tensions in this year’s decision to set up the commission. Among the groups leading the charge for a review were the conservative Maine Policy Institute, a critic of Mills’ response, which it said consisted of “medieval tactics.”
But things have calmed down a bit since Keim’s last attempt to establish such a commission in 2021, which was more focused on executive orders and pposed by a Mills administration that argued a review would divert time and resources from agencies still in crisis mode.
It was supported this time around by the Department of Health and Human Services and other groups that figured into the state’s COVID response, including the Maine Hospital Association.
“Now that we’re largely beyond the emergency, I think this is a good time for us to pause and review our systems and to try to learn from the past in order to improve our responses to future emergencies,” said Sen. Joe Baldacci, D-Bangor, who co-chairs the health panel.
No single template exists for a pandemic review. An effort to create a national commission on the subject stalled in Congress, though congressional Democrats argued in a December report that leadership failures under former President Donald Trump and misinformation contributed to the deaths of more than 1 million Americans.
Other states — not always with bipartisan support — have zeroed in on different aspects of their COVID response, such as Virginia looking at negative effects on K-12 education. Joseph Betancourt, president of the Commonwealth Fund, applauded Maine’s bipartisan move.
“I think even for states that did well, it’s important,” he said. “There’s always room for improvement.”
Interest groups will be watching the review closely and perhaps with anxiety.
Curtis Picard, CEO of the Retail Association of Maine, hopes the group would come up with procedures and resources for a future pandemic. Jeffrey Austin, a hospital association lobbyist, hopes the commission is “inward looking and reflective on decisions the state made.”
“Those are the decisions that drove the actions of others,” Austin said. “So, we’re hopeful that the focus is appropriately placed.”
