Maine lawmakers will return to the State House on Tuesday to vote on whether to override two vetoes from Gov. Janet Mills.
One bill rejected by Mills last week would have required farm workers to be paid Maine's minimum wage of $13.80 an hour rather than the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. While Mills said she supports the concept, she says late changes to the bill created confusion about the scope of the measure. And she pledged to for a stakeholders “to continue the discussion and promote consensus surrounding the issues this bill has presented.”
“Out of this work, I believe we can arrive at a shared understanding of how to implement a minimum wage bill for farmworkers, at which point I will present a Governor's bill during the Second Regular Session of this Legislature to address these issues without the confusion that now surrounds this bill,” Mills wrote in her veto letter last week.
Agricultural organizations, such as the Maine Potato Board, had opposed the bill, LD 398. But Mills was criticized by organizations like the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association as well as the bill’s chief sponsor, fellow Democrat and House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross of Portland.
"With her veto of LD 398, Governor Mills is yet again using the power of her office to maintain inequality amongst Mainers,” Talbot Ross said in a statement last week. “Current law perpetuates and abets an institutional and systemic legal system that fails to provide farmworkers with equal protection under the law. And with her decision today, she is continuing the cycle of discrimination against agricultural workers.”
The largely party-line votes in both the House and Senate are well short of the two-thirds margins that would be needed to override the governor’s veto.
The second bill blocked by Mills, LD 1610, would prevent entities that are wholly or partially owned by foreign governments from trying to influence referendum campaigns in Maine Foreign-owned energy companies have spent tens of millions of dollars to oppose ballot campaigns in recent years.
And Kaitlin LaCasse of the group Protect Maine Elections said she believes the public also wants to stop foreign spending on campaigns.
"So tomorrow the voters of Maine are once again coming to the State House to ask the legislators to stand with us, the voters of Maine, who are working to protect our elections,” LaCasse said on Monday.
But in her veto letter, Mills wrote that the bill could have the unintended consequence of "silencing legitimate voices, including Maine-based businesses, in debates that would impact their interests."
Mills also pointed to the fact that both the Maine Press Association and the Maine Association of Broadcasters urged her to veto the bill because of language that would require newspapers, television and radio stations as well as digital news sites to “establish due diligence policies and controls” to prevent the publication or broadcast of campaign-related advertisements or other “electioneering communications” from entities partially owned by foreign governments. The organizations said such requirements – and penalties of up to $5,000 per violation – would pose a hefty if not impossible burden on news organizations while violating constitutional protections on the freedom of the press.
The bill only received one roll call vote in the Senate but the 19-13 margin is well short of the two-thirds needed to overturn the governor’s veto. There were no roll call votes in the House on the bill.
Even if the veto-override fails, however, voters will still get a chance to weigh in on the issue. That’s because the bill was the result of a citizen’s initiative in which supporters gathered more than 80,000 petition signatures to send place on the statewide ballot.
In the initiative process, any referendum questions that receive enough petitions to qualify for the ballot go to the Legislature first, which has the option of approving it or sending the issue to voters. This would have been the first time in more than 16 years that lawmakers approved an initiative rather than allowing voters to weigh in.
