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Understanding 9/11tv Maine Governor Delivers State of the State Address CSPAN May 8, 2024 12:24am-1:21am EDT
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[applause] thank you distinguished members of the 131st legislature, members of my extraordinary
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cabinet and honored guests, thank you for joining me tonight. i'm pleased to be joined by the members of my cabinet as i mentioned including major general douglas who is retiring next month. thank you for being here. [applause] is join me in welcoming the major general nearly 40 years of
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service. [applause] i'm also joined by members of my family including my daughter and my sister and her children, anthony, julia and my brothers peter and paul. tonight we are sadly missing my brother who passed away last friday and i honor him tonight in my thoughts. my approach to the state of the state is a little unorthodox. a change to discuss high-profile issues, challenges and opportunities. true to its purpose must be a reflection of the times
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especially these past few months have been anything but normal. people value strength talk so i will put it to you straight. we've had a rough couple of months. we have been tested time and time again. we have some pretty serious stuff to talk about. in late october a gunman took the lives of 18 innocent civilian citizens from ages 14 to 76 and injured many more physically and emotionally in an act of senseless and unconscionable violence that demonstrated. the worst mass shooting in
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history and tenth worst in the nation's history then in december another traumatic event hit and heavy rain and powerful wind massive flooding and destroyed homes and businesses, roads and bridges into four people lost their lives. and in january, two more violent storms caused some of the highest tides ever which swept fish houses into the sea and dooms and breakwaters, roads and seawalls and changed the very landscape of the coast. these things break our hearts.
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now, people do not welcome the crisis on disaster. but we will always rise to meet them. and in these difficult times when it sometimes feels like we have little control over our future, the people of maine have banded together in the future of our state and ability to prepare for and overcome whatever challenges the future has in store. what gives me such optimism in
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the face of such hardship look no further than the simple acts of kindness, compassion and generosity demonstrated by people in the wake of these recent storms when the dairy barn was destroyed by powerful wind, his neighbors brought all his calls to safety and shelter. when the fishing boats ran aground at the height of the storm, fire and rescue crews twice in the middle of the night to rescue all four people on board and when the storms
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threatened to toss the boatyard into the sea, the fixture that has withstood the storms since 1855, this whole community stepped up to save it, young and old, friends and family and when it receded, there stood the strong and tall owner that said it worked because the whole town turned out for us. that's what people do. we take care of each other. we roll up our sleeves and rebuild. with help from the federal government and the support of this legislature and ingenuity and great that are the hallmarks, we will rebuild stronger than ever like other states feeling the brunt of extreme weather events maine is
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not safe from climate change. we know more storms will come and make no mistake about it, it is climate change causing storms to be more frequent, more intense and devastating. we no longer know the storms and winters of yesterday because when we burn fossil fuels, we expel hostile greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the gases envelop our planet and truck moisture that melt glaciers and raise sea levels
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and increase global temperatures. scientists know this and meteorologist snow this. farmers, fishermen, foresters, our sportsmen, our kids. we all know this now. it will address climate change by investing in clean energy and whether arising homes and businesses and expanding the states network and advancing cleaner more efficient technologies while also creating good paying jobs and informative
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by the main counsel where science, citizens, business leaders in the state and local officials we lead the nation in many of these respects. in fact we have received the original goal of installing the heat pumps and set a new ambitious goal, and as a result of the clean energy initiatives, we are seeing significant capital investments in the state that are creating new jobs and businesses. we have the fastest economy in all of new england have taken part in this voluntary program and we rewarded more than $6 million to them. a city that was hard-hit by the recent storms as you know
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recognized that its waterfront years in a seawall order deteriorating and need of repairs even before the storm. these resiliency funds used not only to plan for the result to make improvements to public spaces and infrastructure. that gives a clear path to obtaining other available funds and to protecting and strengthening its downtown waterfront. this is important work. the cities and towns are along the front lines of climate change and the recent storms underscore the importance of fortifying them in the long term. i propose to add $5 million to the community resilience partnership to allow cities, towns and governments to identify the vulnerabilities of
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extreme weather events and to be ready for the next storm, the next flood, the next washout, the next threat to the bridges, peers and homes. let's give them the tools to continue this desperately needed work and let's turn those plans into actions. in 2021 we created the infrastructure adaptation fund that provides grants to municipalities, tribal governments and others to improve infrastructure that is vulnerable to flooding and rising sea levels and other weather events exactly the type of upgrades that will withstand the kind of storms we are seeing now. for example, in kennebunkport
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the town is using a grant and utilities underneath it and to prevent road closures, reduce disruption from commercial fishermen and the need for costly repairs. replacing stormwater with those that would handle more water to reduce the risk of flooding and property damage. these are commonsense projects that will strengthen the resiliency in the long run and tonight i propose that we bolster this infrastructure fund with $50 million from the record high rainy day fund to remain and rebuild infrastructure,
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working waterfronts, stormwater systems make them tough enough to withstand the impact and climate change. essentially i'm talking about taking from the rainy day fund to respond to the rainy days we've had some pretty rainy days ahead. [applause] as soon a sweep as the supplemental budget and we get contractors and fishermen and towns to get things up and running back again before the height of fishing season, it's urgent and as we recover and
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rebuild from past storms as we prepare for those to come, so will we recover and prepare from those shocking events that have threatened our personal security, our community safety, the very character of the state. it's time to have a conversation about violence, violence in the media that pervades our subconscious. violence in homes, streets, towns and schools, violence in america, violence abroad, violence that has been all too common and wrong way to resolve differences. violence that we know all too
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well this past year on a scale previously unknown to us. on monday october 203rd, we boasted that we were the safest state in the nation with the lowest violent crime rate in the country according to the fbi. we relished the comfort of this brand that attracts people to the state along with the national beauty and a sense of place and community unmatched in other parts of the country. october 205th, everything changed.
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recreation doing what many people do all the time, bowling with their kids enjoying a cold beer after work spending time with family and friends. those people had their lives shattered by. eighteen people lost their lives to a senseless act of violence and many others injured. the tens of thousands of people sheltered in place for several days. restaurants, shops, retailers,
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public buildings college students locked themselves in libraries and dorms and classrooms. the streets emptied and silence. but those moments of darkness were punctuated by great heroism. they each rushed the shooter in an attempt to stop him and lost their lives. [applause] or when he ushered a group of children out the back door of that bowling alley getting shot
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in their own moment of grief to ensure that crucial information was delivered to those that are deaf and hard of hearing. and so many more. [applause] he was the state champion in 2022. [applause] tonight we acknowledge all of them, recognizing their heroism
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and that of their loved ones and honoring the memory of those we lost. please know people are standing by your side, offering what comfort we can in a moment of immeasurable pain, that we know that the pain and the hardship of the strategy will last a lifetime. and the recognition to create a fund is similar to the one created in virginia last year to cover the medical needs, the health needs of those injured last october long into the future. i propose that we capitalize it within an initial investment of $5 million. we know the road to healing will be long, but we will help you walk. [applause]
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some may prefer to consider the shooting an aberration, the operation, theproduct of one une individual on a rampage that is unlikely to recur. but many people felt it was unlikely to occur before. it is of little comfort to the children, the wives, the partners and parents who in an instant lost a child, a spouse, a breadwinner, stable of the community and who now facing an uncertain future without them.
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to all the businesses, schools, shops and homes where a shooter on the run requires them to shelter in place before he ate long hours. while they were simply driving down the highway minding their business, this after he already killed his parents and two other people in their home. it gives no comfort to the families who lost loved ones to the tragedy of suicide, of domestic violence. yes we are different than other states. but violence is here and does exist here in the state of maine
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and its right to the heart of who we are and everything we hold spirit david capricious place we call home. it creates a cynical attitude that certain things are inevitable and we can't do anything about it. i refuse to give in to that idea and refuse to let us stop it from taking action. as some have said it's really just a mental health issue and we need to fix the behavioral
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health system and the violence will end. certainly there may be people with mental health issues that commit violent crimes. but the vast majority of people with those issues do not commit violent crimes and it would be wrong to stereotype anyone that has mental health problems as a potentially violent individual. i've heard others say we shouldn't do anything until the independent commission finishes its work. they are right the findings of the commission may result in conclusions that need a policy remedy and we will welcome the commission's conclusions when they are ready. about fixing the wall to address a single attack does nothing to anticipate those other acts of violence which we might with wise actions prevent. actions which might also restore
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our sense of personal safety, actions whose time i believe has come because for the sake of the communities, individuals and families now suffering immeasurable pain for the sake of our state, doing nothing is not an option. [applause] throughout my time in office i tried to bring people together, lawmakers and law enforcement, public health and others to achieve enduring reforms that strengthen public safety and
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that protect our constitutional rights and honor the long-standing outdoor traditions. and you have agreed. together we've enacted laws that allow judges to remove weapons from people under domestic violence orders, to ensure that survivors of domestic violence are notified that the abuser tried to buy a firearm, penalties for straw purchases of firearms. incentives for the safe storage of firearms, funding to help make the schools safe and an extreme protection law that remove weapons from someone that is a danger to themselves or others with appropriate due process protections. these commonsense measures were not easy to achieve the end with a product of discussions, but together we got them done and to
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me they are the type of pragmatic and responsible solution that we can also achieve this session. in recent months, my office has talked with republican and democratic lawmakers and people with organizations listening to ideas and concerns and trying to develop a balanced approach to this issue. what i heard from folks all across the state as they recognize the problem of gun violence. they see it in acts of domestic violence, suicide and mass shootings. and each person had ideas about what we could do to address the problem and each of those ideas was different. what was not different, what was largely agreed upon was an overarching belief that violence prevention is important, that we
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have to strengthen our mental health system and that dangerous people should not have access to firearms. out of those discussions, tonight i'm announcing that i will be filing legislation to address these three major areas of concern. protections that would honor the rights afforded by the state and constitution to safe and legal gun ownership and that will uphold the states long-standing outdoor heritage. first let's talk about prevention. many states have approached the issue through the broad lens of public health in order to understand and address long-term trends. maine is not one of those states and i would like to do something to change that. right now data has kept
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separately and police reports id medical examiner files, vital records, emergency department records those things are not easy to understand and analyze. but tonight i propose we establish a prevention program at the cdc as a central hub to bring together all this information already collected by diverse entities like healthcare, education, social services, criminal justice agencies bringing together the data that will allow us to identify patterns of public health and prevention measures to reduce suicide and homicide in maine. let's do a better job of preventing violence and make maine a safer state. as i mentioned earlier, maine was almost unanimous bipartisan support enacted in extreme from
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an individual determined by a mental health professional to be a risk to themselves or others. law enforcement first must take a person as protective custody at which point they undergo a mental health evaluation and a judge issued a decision on whether to temporarily remove their weapons. it's come under some scrutiny since the shooting which is appropriate. it's always right to question whether they are adequately serving their intended purpose and whether more if anything can be done to change or strengthen them. for example, some question the necessity of a mental health assessment, so it only makes the removal of weapons more
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difficult. but it protects due process rights and makes it less subject to being struck down as anyone were to challenge it. it's been used 94 times in the past 97 days since october 5th about once a day since the shooting. about 15 times more often than it was used two and a half or three years before it was first implemented. the law is being used and it is working. it's not to say we shouldn't strengthen the law.
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access to the services can still be a serious struggle. i want to expand behavioral health services particularly for those in crisis. so i propose that we establish a network of crisis centers across maine so that any person suffering a mental health crisis can get prompt and appropriate care instead of being alone or languishing in an emergency department over jail as is too often the case and i want to establish a center in lewiston. [applause] and we will find it in the forthcoming supplemental budget. my bill will direct the department of health and human services to expand these receiving centers over time into
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a broad network to provide greater access to services for people. we know they work. my administration with your support opened the first center in portland in february, 2022. in 20 months after that, nearly 3,000 people visited the center to get help and resolve a crisis. since then we announced plans to create a hybrid crisis receiving center that offers such as well. crisis centers work. let's build on them. now let's talk about how to keep weapons out of the hands of people that shouldn't have them. we know that in the case of a lewiston shooter, law enforcement offices were not able to take them into protective custody to initiate the extreme risk protection law to remove the weapons. whether they could have or should have done something
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different is a question that is heavily scrutinized. it also reveals a gap that must be addressed. what happens in this circumstance when a law enforcement officer knows where a person is, knows they are in trouble, causing trouble but is not able to take them into protective custody and still believe they pose a likelihood of serious harm to themselves and others. my proposal will close that gap by allowing law enforcement to seek the approval of the judge in unusual circumstances to take a person that's protected custody and is deemed dangerous by a medical practitioner and judge remove their weapons pending a full court hearing.
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what about preventing dangerous people from getting a weapon in the first place? i think we can address this. when a person is subject to our extreme risk protection law, their name is entered into a national database of persons prohibited from having firearms that includes people subject to a domestic violence order among other things in other words people we all agree shouldn't of a dangerous weapon. this is a process that works well if the individual attempts to buy a gun and is federally licensed firearms dealer the local gun shop or l.l. bean for example they are the dealers required through the national instant criminal background
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check system. if that person is in and prohibited and the system flags them, the sale was denied but it's not you process that works well and that the same person can walk out of a gun shop and go to the facebook marketplace and buy through private commercial sales the same weapon they were just denied that they are not legally allowed to have. in 2016 the question of universal background checks was put through the referendum it's whether they wanted to close the so-called private sale loophole. at the time people rejected and that food has framed my approach quite frankly but now in the aftermath of the violence we have seen, i've asked myself whether this approach is still
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the correct one. i've arrived at the conclusion i don't know how we can allow people who legally cannot have guns to buy them through a private sale and pose a risk to themselves or the public and i do not know how we can hold commercial sellers to a higher standard while allowing the private commercial sellers to advertise guns for sale without any restrictions. [applause] in my conversations with people i believe they agreed people who can't legally owned guns shouldn't have such easy access to them and i believe the time has come to address the issue of private gun sales so i propose
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two things. one, that we require any sale of a firearm that is advertised through facebook, craigslist, the gun show or other means require them to be checked against the system used by licensed firearms dealers and in doing so ensure that when a gun is sold through the advertised sale it can't be at sold to someone prohibited from having a firearm. secondly, you are probably wondering what about sales that are purely private, it's a good question and that's when i thought about a lot because these are the kind of transfers that are most often from one family member to another, from one neighbor to another. in other words, the type of
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sale. we have to acknowledge someone could sell a weapon privately and unadvertised without knowing whether they are allowed to own a weapon. so i want to encourage people to make sure if they are selling a firearm to someone they don't know, they should know that person is allowed to own a gun and that's something we can do in a way that respects our long-standing tradition of passing down family firearms from one generation to the next or one law-abiding gun owner to another. now please forgive me in advance. right now it's a crime, a misdemeanor for someone to intentionally or knowingly sell a firearm to someone who's a prohibited person intentionally or knowingly.
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whether or not you actually know. i don't think that is quite the right approach because the bottom line is you should know and most would want to know. let's change the law to reflect that. i am proposing that we expand the law and in prove it by adding the term recklessly to intentionally or knowingly making it a stronger standard and easier to successfully prosecute someone to someone that's prohibited, not allowed to have a gun and on top of that that we toughen the wall to make it a felony, not just a misdemeanor. what does all this man and mean impracticality? it means if you are transferring a firearm to a relative or friend you know is allowed to own one, you have nothing to worry about, nothing changes.
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the long-standing tradition remains the same. it also means if you are selling to a stranger, you should have a licensed firearms dealer to make sure because i'm sorry i just didn't know. it isn't going to fly like it used to and you wouldn't want a felony charge and possible prison time that comes along with it nor the one to make a sale to someone that then goes out and does something terrible. now i know it's quite a bit of stuff so let me recap. let's strengthen by establishing an injury and violence prevention program. let's expand our crisis mental health system and keep weapons out of the hands of people by strengthening the extreme risk protection law and by requiring those that advertise for sale
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check the system and by toughening the law that already makes it illegal to transfer a firearm to a prohibited person. prevention, mental health, keeping weapons away from dangerous persons. that's what my proposal boils down to. i recognize that on the one hand this legislation may be too little to those that believe that more is needed while on the other hand it may be too much to those that believe the opposite. violence is not a simple problem. and the remedy is not a simple single measure into these proposals i believe represent progress and they do not trample on anybody's rights. they are practical, commonsense measures. they are not extreme or unusual. they are not a cookie-cutter version of some other state law.
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they are true to the cultured and long-standing traditions while meeting today's needs. if you are a law-abiding citizen, you have nothing to fear. if you are a collector of firearms in maine you have nothing to fear. if you like to hunt deer, bear, duck, pheasants, coyotes, you have nothing to fear. and if you are a 14-year-old boy bowling with your dad on a weeknight, you should have nothing to fear.
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if you are a 35-year-old father of two that got his bachelor's degree out from a bite to eat with friends you should have nothing to fear. over the past few months, i've been to too many funerals expressing condolences for the loved ones of too many lost too soon and upset with myself and my own conscience reflecting upon what is right to remain in the wake of lewiston and the tragedy of the suicide and domestic violence that are all too prevalent in our society.
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reflecting on not only what you may think is right or best, but what those that disagree believe is best as well. the issue of guns in america so often marred with acrimony and divisiveness to polarize people of goodwill pardoning our uncharitable opinions of one another and widening a great divide that only seeks to immobilize and obscure reasonable solutions. let us not lose our way and the rhetoric that too much the company is the debates. let us have respectful vigorous discussions.
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it's worth doing for the victims of yesterday for the survivors of today and the vulnerable of tomorrow. it's worth doing for peyton brewer ross, brian mcfarlane, joe walker, max hathaway, thomas ryan conrad, michael delorean the second, jason walker, tricia, william young, bob violet, lucy violet, billy bracket. for cynthia and david for the people that took their own lives into those who were killed by an
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abuser for the family and friends who now have to live with an unimaginable that comes to violence and those that survive the violence but those that can never fully heal. as i close, i cannot escape the troubling fact that violence has become all too common in our culture. acts of brutality, anger, glorified and normalized in video games, tv shows, films and social media.
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a bitter and angry towards one another, acts that are part of a culture that too often promotes violence as a way to address but never really resolved differences. as a society, we've got to consider how we can reject the vitriol that consumes us and how we can tune out the rhetoric and recognize the humanity and dignity of others and lead with grace, compassion and understanding in our own private and public lives. we can't legislate off of this. instead i think the true solution lies in our heart. and the lessons we in part to our children and our daily interactions with each other, in our spiritual faith and people
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who despite many differences truly have more in common than we know, we walk the same roof, breathe the same air striving for purpose, happiness, the chance to love and be loved and perhaps to make a small positive difference in our short time on this earth. my friends, we cannot this month, this spring alone heal every damaged heart or broken life and protect nor can we prepare every broken bridge and replace.
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neither will we let it define us and to believe in each other every day we are still a civil, safe and welcoming state with a backbone strong. we are who we always have been. he people with a deep and abiding sense of right and wrong determined to look out for one another knowing how lucky we are to live in this beautiful state. so we will repair this violence on our communal soul just as we rebuild with a cohesive will and consciousness in the future and the states with unpredictable storms and unpredictability of climate change with of the
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security and collective safety based on the principles of the golden rule, protecting others as we would protect ourselves and in the end the nation and fundamentally we would continue to look within ourselves and to each other for the confidence, courage and compassion to face the future to whether things we've never done before and defeat the dangers of today and prevent the disasters of tomorrow as we replenish our souls and renew our indomitable sense of hope. one people made up of many. the one purpose, the broad vision to be the best we can.
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i know that we can because we are, all of us the people in the great state of maine and the state of our people is good is strong and as always is a privilege to serve as your governor. thank you. [applause]
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