Funding homeless shelters, recruiting more construction workers and cutting red tape around housing production are among the major issues that Maine legislators will debate when they head back to Augusta in 2024.
The next legislative session begins Wednesday and is scheduled to end in April. Lawmakers will consider nine new bills related to housing as well as two dozen bills that were carried over from the 2023 session.
Some of the flashpoints are already showing themselves. Democratic lawmakers are championing proposals that would give more money to stretched homeless shelters and prohibit Maine’s biggest cities from barring emergency shelters. There could be room for compromise with Republicans on dealing with the shortage of construction workers.
Three of the new bills deal with homeless shelters. Lawmakers including Rep. Anne-Marie Mastraccio, D-Sanford, said that as homelessness increases around the state, expecting municipalities to weather the crisis in silos is becoming impossible. In York County, there is one shelter with just 43 beds, she noted.
Mastraccio is sponsoring a bill that would designate $10 million in ongoing funding to homeless shelters statewide. Key details of that bill, such as how that money would be distributed, have not yet been determined.
“Call it a makeshift solution, but let’s deal with what we have right now,” she said. “Recognize the problem and that, sometimes, money is the answer.”
For the managers of Hope House, a Bangor-area shelter, it certainly would be. They anticipate operating at a $800,000 loss in 2024 and have said the home might have to close in October.
Another bill from Rep. Colleen Madigan, D-Waterville, would send more money to Maine’s six low-barrier shelters, including Hope House. Those shelters don’t require a criminal background check, income verification, program participation, sobriety or identification for a person to stay there and can have higher costs than other shelters due to higher-level staffing.
Bigger cities are also looking for help. Rep. Grayson Lookner, D-Portland, said they are bearing the brunt of the homelessness crisis, and are expected to provide for everyone. He has a bill that would prohibit any municipality with a population of more than 30,000 residents — only Portland, Bangor and Lewiston — from imposing a moratorium on emergency shelters.
The bill is specific enough, Lookner hopes, that it won’t rub up against home rule and invite the opposition of the Maine Municipal Association, which normally opposes incursions by the Legislature into local government.
“Everybody’s got to do their fair share. It’s a statewide crisis and it’s going to be a statewide solution, and everybody’s got a chip in a little bit,” Lookner said. “I think most Mainers agree that when we all work together, we’re better off.”
Aside from homelessness, lawmakers will take up bills that aim to create more workforce housing for Mainers, improve the housing voucher system, strengthen tax credits for affordable housing and better fund veterans homes.
Sen. Matt Pouliot, R-Augusta, a real estate agent who sits on the housing panel, said that his priorities this session include increasing housing production by addressing Maine’s workforce shortage, particularly when it comes to construction workers.
Maine’s population and workforce is aging. The state economist has projected a 36.2 percent population increase in people over 65 from 2020 to 2030. Fewer people are entering the construction industry. The community college system has awarded more than 45,000 credentials since 2003, but less than 3,000 graduates have been in the construction trade.
Pouliot called that last figure “mindblowing.” Lawmakers will likely ask the system to increase the number of people going into the industry so that that number hits 7,500 by 2030, he said.
“It’s like we’re perpetuating this problem,” Pouliot said.
