In Maine, Worry About Upcoming Winter Costs Rises

Mainers are pretty well laid back and quite resourceful. We usually take things in stride, work hard and pay our due. We help our neighbors when we can. On these end of summer days there is a thread of worry running through the fiber of existence here. What will this winter bring? Can we afford to survive?
Nightly news reports in summer usually focus on weather, events and current news involving crime, health issues and government. It has become common this summer to hear a reporter covering pellet stove sales, firewood price increases and daily oil price reports. People are scared.

There are reports of restaurants and businesses closing and people losing their homes to foreclosure. Yesterday the devastating news came that my friend since childhood is in the process of moving back to our town, leaving what was to be her last and best home, miles and dreams behind. It is close to being foreclosed upon. My neighbors, who are in their late 50s, are moving out of their 2-story home of his childhood and into their son's empty home.

It is a double wide modular that has remained vacant since the airline the young man worked for shut its Bangor Maine division and moved the family away to Arkansas a year ago. The wonderful old home is going to be torn down unless a miracle happens. There is talk that my neighbors elderly parents may shut up their own little retirement home and move into a spare room for the winter to cut heating costs. These are two couples who have worked for years, one husband is a postal worker and they feel this kind of stress. How will things look for the rest of us?

Food cupboards are putting out pleas for food now. They can not meet the demand and we are three months away from the days of hard frost and first snow. Our town food cupboard provides food to hundreds of people. They are allowed to come once a month to pick out a quota of goods according to family size. This is meant to be a stipend to help them carry on for a few days while looking for work or waiting for food stamps to come in. It is heartbreaking to have a woman break down and cry when helping her load her car trunk. She never dreamed she'd have need of this type of help.

When senior citizens speak to one another there is genuine fear in their eyes. It has come down to food or fuel with many of them. How many are truly faced with danger that winter brings? Ill health due to poor diet, out and out starvation, cold homes and faulty heating systems? How many will stop taking needed medication because they can not afford all the mounting costs? How many will lose homes to fire from wood stoves that they simply can not handle or properly care for? They deserve better than this.

Governor John Baldacci announced a 12.6 million dollar advance Friday, August 15, 2008, which is supposed to reallocate funds from "future projects" to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program for one. The funding will also "invest in weatherization, low income heating assistance and alternative modes of transportation."

The plan also includes a voluntary 4 day work week for state employees. It would be nice to trust this funding that the governor is proposing. He is quoted in the Bangor Daily Newspaper as saying that if a special legislative session is called to deal with the effects of high energy costs it will "cost the state of Maine $40,000.00 a day." Baldacci has exercised his power as governor and developed this so called strategy. We will see.

Mainers have learned not to get our hopes up. Our taxes and costs of living are always going up. The house across the road may come down next summer. The hope that the younger generation will be able to move back and afford to live here diminishes ever more. The hope that the two young men raised in this house can afford to live here in Maine as working adults grows dimmer still. The neighborhood is growing quieter day by day.