The pandemic has shined a bright light on Maine government, both on its successes and failures.
For a year, decisions about business operations, providing benefits, educating students or containing a deadly virus have fallen to individuals and institutions often overlooked or misunderstood, from state agencies to town councils.
“I know for me — and this was incredibly foolish — but I thought this was a temporary shutdown, that we’d be looking at something for maybe a month,” says Maine Department of Labor Commissioner Laura Fortman, talking about March 12 of last year, the day marking Maine’s first confirmed case of COVID-19 and the beginning of a public health crisis that would shutter businesses and schools and send thousands of out-of-work Mainers to interact with a Labor Department ill-equipped for the challenge.
“One week we had 634 initial unemployment claims. The next week we were at roughly 20,000. And within three weeks we had 75,000 initial claims being filed,” she says.
Fortman’s agency, like many labor departments in the U.S., was underfunded and understaffed. When she previously held the top job at Labor during the recession in 2010, she had 100 more people and $10 million more to help administer claims.
She was already warning the Legislature in February last year that she was already short of federal funding to administer claims. That was when Maine’s unemployment rate was 3%. By April of last year, the unemployment rate skyrocketed to more than 10%.
State employees were pulled in from other departments after a crash course in unemployment eligibility rules.
“And on top of that you had the public who desperately needed these resources, were frustrated to not get accurate information and basically 24/7 service,” Fortman says.
Tens of thousands of unemployed Mainers encountered jammed phone lines and conflicting advice. Some went weeks upon weeks with no income.
At the same time, Congress passed emergency pandemic relief for self-employed people who don’t typically qualify for unemployment benefits, creating more complexity for Fortman’s understaffed team.
The Labor Department contracted with a call center. It also paid $6.3 million to the same global consulting firm already under fire for turbocharging sales of opioids.
Fortman has defended the contract, saying it helped limit fraudulent claims and dig out of the backlog.
“When you’re thinking about disaster preparedness, everything you do beforehand looks premature. And everything you do after the fact looks reactionary and too late,” says Maine Center for Disease Control director Dr. Nirav Shah.
Like Fortman, Shah took over an agency depleted in resources in 2019. He says inconsistent funding is all too common in public health, let alone preparing for so-called black swan events like a once-a-century pandemic.
“Those who take efforts to prepare for black swan events, and spend money on it, are often ridiculed in the political world,” Shah says.
Congress did significantly boost public health agencies’ resources last year, first to help with testing for COVID-19 and later to assist in states’ mass vaccination rollouts.
“But what happened is that there were precious, precious weeks that were lost while we were awaiting for the congressional appropriation to come our way,” Shah says.
Testing was a vital tool in tracking and curbing the virus, but a lack of testing supplies from the federal government forced states to come up with their own programs that cost money.
Shah says the Maine CDC ran into a similar bind in December when delays and a faulty registration site hobbled the state’s mass vaccination plan.
Throughout the pandemic, Shah has been a savvy communicator, holding regular press briefings where he delivers a mix of good and mostly bad news. He hopes the public now has a better sense of what the CDC does and why it’s important.
“Folks now have a good sense of at least what a number of offices within the Maine CDC do, what epidemiology does, what public health preparedness does, that we have a state laboratory in Augusta that is cranking out thousands of tests per week,” he says. “So I’m hoping that the pandemic has demystified public health.”
Other efforts have been more low-key, but arguably just as important.
When districts began shuttering public schools last year, education officials were confronted with an array of challenges: setting up virtual learning courses, keeping teachers safe and even making sure students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunch were not going hungry at home.
There was little to no guidance from the U.S. Department of Education, according to Steve Bailey, head of the Maine School Management Association, a group representing school administrators and school boards.
“Basically they had said, you know, figure it out on your own,” he says.
So they did.
Bailey says Maine Education Commissioner Pender Makin urged stakeholder groups to gather on Zoom calls to brainstorm solutions.
There are a lot of stakeholder groups in public education, and they’re not always in agreement, especially on tough issues such as reopening schools or allowing athletics.
Bailey says the Zoom calls would include between 20 and 30 people at a time.
Somehow they made it work.
“While we have our own individual interests and we need to make sure the needs of our associations are being honored, we’re still better together than separate,” Bailey says.
For the first six weeks of the pandemic, Augusta City Manager Bill Bridgeo was calling all the shots because he had been given emergency powers.
One of his first calls? Closing all city bars and restaurants … on St. Patrick’s Day.
“My relatives who live near where my Irish mother is buried swear that the cemetery trembled at about the time that that happened,” Bridgeo says.
Like many municipalities, Augusta is confronting lost revenues and increased costs because of the pandemic. And one of its economic engines, the Augusta Civic Center, has been mostly idle for a year.
Many staff have been laid off and there’s as much as a $2 million hole in the city’s general fund.
The civic center is now a mass vaccination site after the city entered what Bridgeo describes as a handshake agreement with MaineGeneral hospital to reimburse the city. He says there was no time for a detailed contract.
“We’re not going to hold up anything getting shots delivered,” he says.
Just like everyone else, Bridgeo is ready for the pandemic to end.
And so is Fortman, who says her staff knew that the mountain of unemployment claims on their desks each day represented a mountain of desperate people.
“And I just want to thank the incredibly dedicated state employees that we had, who … just kept showing up,” she says.
For more stories in Deep Dive: Coronavirus, visit mainepublic.org/coronavirus.
