A Healthy Conversation 3/1/26

Jeff, we live in interesting times, interesting political times, economic times, just life its own self kind of post-pandemic. But this year is a critical year. You know, I think you could say every year is critical, whatever you are, but this is particularly critical in the political and government arena. We've got some big elections coming up. This fall, Maine will elect a new governor. Currently, I think, if... It could be changing on a daily basis, but there's many candidates running for governor. I think there are five candidates running as independent, approximately seven running as Democrat and 10 in Republican. We've had a couple of candidates in the past. We've invited other candidates onto the show. But today, we are very... happy to introduce one of the Democratic candidates, Angus King III. He is here in the studio for a few segments talking about both of his background for running for governor. And then also, I think more importantly for each voter and listener, what his vision is and why he believes he would be the best governor, chief executive, and leader for Maine. So with that, Great to see you in the studio. Thanks for being here, Angus. Steve, great to be here. Nice to see you, Jeff. Great. So why don't we start right at the start in terms of everyone in the state is obviously familiar with your dad. who has been a U.S. Senator. He ran in 2012. I should also disclose that I unsuccessfully ran against him. I ultimately ended up supporting him, and I think he's done a great job for me. But talk a little bit about your background relative to running for governor and touch upon a little bit the, I don't want to say pros and cons, but sort of the personal human aspect of running for high political office when your dad is such an indelible iconic figure who was governor for Maine for years and then U.S. senator. And it's hard, not that you would want to hide from it because I think you should be proud of it, but it's especially hard when you have the same distinctive name, Angus King, the third. So talk a little bit about what that's like and then talk a little bit about your background and the little sort of point to the future on some of your thoughts. Sure. No, that's a good question and a good place to start. I often introduce myself as the most disappointing person in Maine because a lot of people hear that they're about to meet Angus King and then they get excited and then I walk in. But restaurant reservations, you can get arrested as long as you just go with Angus King. Although this is radio and I understand that people don't have the visual thing. You look very much like your dad. So when Angus King the Third comes in for a dinner reservation and they see Angus King, I don't know if they're thinking that your dad has a...

picture of Dorian Gray in the attic, or if they finally get that you are Angus King III, you're your own person, and though your dad has a lot of experience, so do you. And I'm hoping that we can get into your experience and who you are. But maybe sort of starting where Steve is coming from, what have you learned from your dad? Let's sort of get that topic out of the way. Sure. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people ask, isn't it an unfair advantage that you're... your dad is who he is in this race and in this moment. And I answer, it's a lot like asking Wayne Gretzky's kid as he steps out on the ice. Do you think it helped you that Wayne Gretzky was your dad? And the answer is, of course. But it doesn't help you the way you might think, right? When you get out on the ice, you still have to shoot the puck. You still have to skate. You still have to grind it out in the corner. the name on the back of your jersey does not help you there. And I will talk about sort of, I'm doing the work as my own person. But I grew up at the knee and at the dinner table with, I'm biased, but I think one of America's great public servants. And I think there's an enormous advantage to having spent the time with this person who is, I think, an exemplar of integrity, of listening. of being open to good ideas from wherever they're coming, and ultimately a focus on what's best for the people of Maine. I have a question, and I'm going to put you right on the spot. Unfiltered, give me three things that you learned from your dad as a kid, at the dinner table growing up, as he's governor or senator, that would inform our listeners as to how you think. Yeah, always tell the truth. Number two, always think about the long term matters as much as the short term. So everything you do matters for the rest of your life. And the third thing, boy, that's a tough one. I think it's about listening. I think it's about always being open because, again, you never know where the next good idea is going to come from. Our special guest this week is Angus King III, Democratic candidate for governor here in Maine. Let's touch upon your background. And, you know, you've been an executive in energy, you've done policy. What about your background do you think is specific in terms of giving you sort of the foundational skill set to be governor? And the two-part question is, Why has this been the first time or the catalyst for you to enter the arena? Because I don't want to say it's a young person's game. But so what's the business background or academic background that is relevant here and then talk a little bit about how that correlates to being the leader of me? Yeah, thanks. The background, I'll give you sort of a two-second version is a long time ago, I worked for my first job out of high school, was working for Mike Dukakis on his presidential campaign. I then went on to work for Bill Clinton when he was in the White House. But most of my professional career has been in two things. Affordable housing. I built housing all over the country for thousands of people and then ultimately went over and started building wind and solar projects across the country and around the world.

And then here in Maine developed a renewable energy company inside a gas utility, which is a sentence that I think no one has ever spoken before. But I spent it really, I think the translation to government is, I feel like they're your question of why now. I think there are three essential failures right now. Our system has let us down, has let too many people down, right? Costs are too high. Energy costs are too high. Housing costs have doubled. Our education system is underperforming Mississippi and Louisiana right now. So number one, I think our, and life has become too expensive. Mainers are good at making due, but I think we've got a real affordability challenge, and that part of our special sauce has disappeared. The second reason is I think our politics have failed us. I think the division and the finger pointing and the hyper-partisanship has really failed to solve a lot of problems. And at this point, I think we've got a series of fundamental problems that need to be addressed. And we can't go back, you know, but we also can't keep going on the same path we're on. So that felt really important. And the third piece is what the president's doing. I mean, I'm sure we'll talk about it more. You know, I think he is literally... I don't think there are many things you might care about, whether it's housing or health care or climate or immigration or civil rights or a woman's right or national parks or national debt or research or higher ed. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. I think all of those things are under threat, but fundamentally there are two pieces. One is the affordability challenge that I talked about. The tariff policy alone is having a pretty meaningful effect. And the other is a general coarseness that I think he has. layered on to our dialogue and made it so that people have a very hard time having any sort of political conversation. Yeah, I would, you know, until you said that last part, I was going to challenge the first part because obviously the tactical operational elements of the country, all the healthcare energy, those things are. You know, I have a lot of disputes with the current president. But to me, honesty, honor, and character come before those things. That's right. That is the, you know, that is the sort of the moral compass that allows you to approach those challenges. And, you know, last night, I think we all probably watched the State of the Union. We tape this early in the week from when it will be broadcast. And I don't have a problem listening, being friends with Republicans on policy issues that I may disagree with. But the vitriol, and, you know, you used a very gentle term coarseness.

I thought it was obscene. You know, and I think that when you start saying to one political party, these people are crazy. These people, because they have differences, and they're bad people. Either party doing that, I think, is a mistake. I think once you do that, you put something in motion. And if you're the leader of the country and for all intents and purposes, leader of the free world. If you don't have the moral, ethical character to be something where, you know, we always ground things on like, what about the kids? What about the kids? How if you're a parent would you ever want your children to emulate the behavior of... the most powerful person in the world, whether it's lying, whether it's misogyny, or whether it's dismissing people or calling people you compete against crazy or idiots. I think that's the biggest problem I have. Yeah, I mean, I think what has happened is that vitriol or activation of the amygdala, lizard brain. has been a force in distracting Americans from the underlying issues that we really ultimately need to. And one of the things that the governor is going to need to do, whether you're elected, whoever is elected, is to speak to the entire state, all of us, including the people that support President Trump, as obscene and coarse to use the words that have been used today. as he is. We're going to have to come up with a way of being united as a state and as a country. And I think it's safe to say that people's heads and hearts are at a place where the key issues are race, place, and price. And I'm hoping that in the next segment, we could talk about what that means, not just nationally, but specifically for Maine, get into some main specific issues, housing, energy, health care. and the budget. And the other thing I'd like to get into, just to sort of wet your appetite, is the difference between fiscal capacity, what we can do versus fiscal effort, what we want to do, and the divide by party, where one party is pretty clear on the boundaries of government, and the other party wants to have more programs to benefit more and more people. It's all part of a healthy conversation. We're here with Angus King III, who's running for governor of the state of Maine. It's WGAN. We'll be right back. In the studio, we have Angus King III, the Democratic candidate for governor of the state of Maine, hence Tom Petty, which is quite honestly, Steve, that's one of my favorite albums, as Wildflowers and Good to Be King and all of that. And I think Angus King, thank you for joining us. It's a pleasure and it's a true story. It is a true story. So I want to get into a specific issue because it's an issue that's going to be heard in the next week or two. And it has to do with health care in Maine. And to just sort of set the stage for folks, people perceive that Maine hospitals are these big, rich institutions. And they are big buildings, but they're not rich. In fact, I can tell you as a past president of the Maine Medical Association that the Maine hospitals are barely squeaking by. They're barely getting by. Northern Light Health, which owns Mercy Hospital.

barely getting by. They had Inland Hospital and Waterville closed last year because they're barely getting by. And here's why I'm going on this rant. There is a bill that's been proposed, LD-2196, an act to lower health insurance costs to reduce barriers to health care and ensure fair prices for health care. Over the past few days, I've been approached by various stakeholders who were freaking out. And I went very carefully through this bill and through things referenced in this bill. And what this bill would do, it's clever because on the face of it, it seeks to lower health care costs. And we would all agree that things being expensive or unaffordable is a real concern for all of us. But this bill specifically would make it so our hospitals, our main hospitals, can't charge more for commercial plans than twice what they get paid for Medicare. That sounds great because then premiums would come down. By the way, the health insurance companies are not in favor of this for many reasons. On the surface, oh, it's such a populist message. Let's lower the cost. Let's not allow the hospitals to charge more than twice what they get from Medicare. Well, they get 260% now. So that 60% reduction in payment rates will close our hospitals. It really will. I've spoken to people in the know. What are we going to do about that? If you're governor, how are you going to handle a legislature? Should they pass a bill like that? Yeah, look, the first instinct I do want to highlight that you said is medical costs are just too high in our country and in our state. And the whole medical system, I think, is really pretty fundamentally broken. Yep. It doesn't work for hospitals, as you pointed out. Northern Light is underwater. I think Maine health I saw the other day, they had a 1.6% margin. That's a pretty skinny. That's a pretty skinny margin. Oh, no, if this passes, they're going to lay off a third of the staff. Let me repeat that on the radio. If LD-219-6 passes, if you have a job at Maine Health or Northern Light Health, got about a third chance of losing the job. Yeah, and so I think our hospitals are on the ragged edge, and that's ahead of the Medicare cuts that are slated to come in the next, you know, a couple of years under the big, bad bill. So I think our hospital systems are on edge. It doesn't, the system doesn't work for doctors. It doesn't work for nurses. It doesn't work for patients. And I think we've got to do a lot of work on how do we rethink this model. How do we rethink how we're delivering health care in our state? Because right now, again, it's just not working. And I think, you know, doctors, I talk to doctors, they say I spend now half of my time maybe providing actual care. The other half of my time is paperwork. And we've got sort of systems upon systems and regulators and administrators on top of administrators. So Angus King III, how would you fix it? You say that we would benefit from a program. We absolutely would. But what would that program look like? Yeah, I think there are a couple of different pieces I'd want to focus on. The first is actually about the workforce. I think we're actually short on nurses and doctors here in Maine. They got really worked over during COVID. And I think we've got to do a better job to try and make sure that we've got the staff. because obviously when they're understaffed, the stress gets higher and the burnout increases faster. The second piece is how do we think about public health more effectively? How do we think about community health more effectively? Maine, the best thing to do is to not have to go to the hospital, right? Hospitals are expensive places, and right now, Mainers go, as I've read the other day, we go to the ER more than twice the rate of other states.

We've got to figure out how to invest more in community health so that we're doing more preventative work. We're doing more early screening. We're doing more things that keep people healthier or longer, improve their lifespan and health span, but keep them out of the hospital. I think that's an important piece. I think they're also... different interesting models that are being pursued. Trellis is being pursued by Maine Health. I think that's a very interesting model as a way to, again, provide better wraparound care for people, which gives them a lot more daily interaction, a lot more support for their health that keeps them out of the hospital, and ends up bringing lower costs to all of us in the long run. Our special guest is Angus King III. Pivoting a little bit here, you're running for candidate for governor as a Democrat. Your dad is probably the most well-known, I guess, iconic independence in the country. I would say he's literally and figuratively independent. I know firsthand, because I was a candidate running against your dad, that his message very much was about focusing on the competency of the position in the person in not being anchored to sort of ideology of a party. And I agreed with your dad then and now. I'm not a big fan of party politics. I'm not a big fan of sort of the infrastructure and the group think. And particularly with the CEO role of the state, I think that party politics can sometimes get in the way. So if you could just tell our listeners, number one, why are you running as a Democrat as opposed to an independent? And then also what would your approach be to governing? where, you know, if you're a Democrat and you're relying on the Democratic system to be elected, how does that sort of anchor your fidelity to serving 1.4 million Mainers as opposed to like 500,000 who may be Democrats? Right. That's a great question. I am running as a Democrat. The first reason is because I'm a Democrat. The second, though, is I think it's a difficult thing to recreate what my dad did. You have to literally sort of pick the right opponents, and you don't get to pick the opponents. And if the parties nominate sort of very far right and very far left people, I think an independence got a great shot. But I thought for my own political effort, I wanted to have as much, you know, sort of agency. And I'm, I'm a Democrat. So I'm going to run and win the Democratic primary. And how are you going to handle if you win the bifurcation in the Democratic Party? Yeah. So I am a centrist. I am a pragmatic person. And that's what get back to the, you ask the question about what my history is. I've spent my life building things and the only way that you build things, whether it's housing or energy or companies or jobs, is you have to get everybody in the room. You have to get everybody nodding their heads. You have to find common ground with people. And that's the way I think you get things done. You apply a little common sense. You listen. You have a bias toward action. And then you're going to be willing to be accountable for the dollars and the results. I think that's how you get things done. And that's why I'm running.

Because I completely agree that the partisan divisions are, I think, distracting us. I think there's a lot of loud noise on either end of the political spectrum. But I think most people live in the middle where they just want people to get things done. I used to work for Bill Clinton, and he was obviously a governor at one point, and he said being a governor is the doingest job in the country. And I'm someone who has spent his career getting things done. And I'm excited about what we can do. And the advantage is in Maine, I think there's a real opportunity to bring people together. It is a small enough state that you can get all of the right people in the room to talk about how are we going to solve this. I think that was the history until the last 15 or 20 years. And again, again, I don't have a kind of a partisan position on this. But when Paul LePage was governor and when he ran, I don't know if it was his playbook that Donald Trump sort of copied from or if it was just something that happened in both cases. But, you know, calling out the other party, calling out the other people or voters, it feels bad. And when I've run for office in the past and for U.S. Senate, you know, it was also my thought where I wasn't running to represent. one class of constituents or one group or one demographic or one group of people who enrolled. I think if you're leading something, a company, a political party, a state, representation, you owe it to yourself for moral, ethical reasons and the people you're working with to say, if I'm elected, I'm going to represent everyone because that is the best course for all of us. I'm running for the whole state. Absolutely. Great. We're going to take a quick break. We will be back with Angus King III talking more about his background and more importantly his vision for Maine if he's successful running for governor. You're listening to a healthy conversation on WGAN. We will be right back. And we're in studio for somebody that wants to really be the head of the home, Angus King III. He's running as the Democratic candidate for governor of the state of Maine. Welcome to the show, Angus. And I want to get into something that sounds complicated, but it isn't. But I'll lay it out and get your response. And it's a term called fiscal capacity. Fiscal capacity is what a state or a territory or a country can do, what they can afford. And Maine is a state with not a lot of fiscal capacity compared to Massachusetts. Massachusetts where they have big businesses and a lot of people. So we're a small fiscal capacity, but we're also a state that tries to make big efforts, fiscal efforts. A lot of people have a lot of big ideas, paid family leave, this sort of thing. It strikes me that there are some really big needs. Housing, medicine, education. How do you balance the fiscal effort, i.e., the things that we need to do versus the fiscal capacity, which is what we can afford to do? Yeah. I think you've got to be very thoughtful about it, but I'll tell you, I think there's two sides to the ledger. So one of them is how do we help the people who want to do the things that we need? So, for example, affordable housing or renewable energy, right? We have a lot of really smart, really capable people in our state working on those things each and every day. And to me, part of the way that you get there is how do you help people in the private sector who can bring those resources around to actually go and deliver that the thing that you.

want from a policy perspective. Part of the reason I'm running is I felt like there's often a sort of chasm between the policy and the practice. And I, as someone who has lived through the actual practice, who has hands-on experience, I think it's really important that you have somebody who understands how hard it is and how hard sometimes we make it. to build the very things that we want as a society. So to me, that's one really important piece, is how do we make sure that government is responsive when we need it and not in the way when we don't? That's, I think, a really important piece. The other is, as you mentioned, is how do we grow our economy? How do we make sure that we're creating more and better jobs? Because ultimately those people become taxpayers and help fund the programs that are so important in this relatively rural and lower income state. And Maine, last summer, there was a survey that said we were ranked Second, in quality of life, which throws some questions on the survey because clearly it's the best place to live in America. But it also said we are 45th in business friendliness. And I think there are a lot of things that we can do to how do we make it so that it is easier to for a small business owner to grow their company, to add customers and ultimately make their company into a greater success that's going to allow for more jobs and more support for us. A really good example of that is movies. I love movies. I know Steve loves movies. You probably love movies. Movies like The Lighthouse or The Lightkeeper with Willem Defoe. Iconic movie about Maine, Lighthouse and Maine. Not made in Maine. Can't be made in Maine. I think it was made in Canada or New York or some combination thereof. Movies about Maine can't get made in Maine because the taxation is such that the movie makers can't afford to do it. If you're governor, how are you going to change it? How are we going to have movies about Maine and Maine? Yeah, we'll have to sort that out. It does seem like we should be able to find a way to make that possible. No, but seriously, that's a scenario where a lot of people come, maybe during the summer, good season, pay money to hotels, pay money to the restaurants. And yet, our current fiscal efforts are such that we say, nope, can't make movies here. Yeah, as you point out, we are lucky to live in a place where most people in the country think about it for 50 weeks out of the year. And then they come here for two weeks and stay in the hotels and go to restaurants and we get to live here all year round. But we've got to make it easier for them to stay longer and to shoot their movies while they're here. I think that's a good answer. And I thought Jeff was a good question. But I think it's sort of a trick. question because Jeff and I may disagree on this. I've talked about this over the years. I don't think a governor or anyone in the legislature can solve that problem based on the physics of Maine, based on 35,812 square miles, 488 municipalities, you know, 1.4 million people skewed heavily towards older citizens who are retired. The distance. the economics and the fact that we're spread out and we don't have density in our infrastructure creates these economic barriers. So I think it's a good question. Movies and Maine sound great. And I think you as a candidate saying, hey, we're going to work to do it. I think the only way to attack that is to go to the root issue, which isn't politics, but it's government and civics and have a better educated, more aware youth that turn into adolescents, that turn into young.

adults. And until we have an informed electorate that understands this, it's all impulse. It's all reaction. Do you want to lower taxes? Yes, I do. Do you want to provide health care for everyone? Why wouldn't I want to do that? And so I'm not questioning your sincerity, Angus, in terms of... in terms of providing it. I've just said for decades, until we've recognized the fundamental physics of the three axis points of days, dollars, and distance, until we do that, then, I don't know, it just sounds rhetoric, but adjacent to the movie question, I have a TV show question. Okay. It's entertainment adjacent, the West Wing. So you worked for in the Clinton. administration, presumably in around the White House, presumably as special assistant to the chief of staff, you work directly with the president who admittedly had some serious personal flaws, but also he did some incredible things with balancing the budget with, you know, I think he did some incredible things. I look, when I watched the State of the Union last night, I just wish I was watching an episode of West Wing instead with Jed Bartlett. And I had Kobe writing the speech, and I had Sam questioning the viability of doing something. And I had Leo as the moral North Star going, we've got to help these people. Instead of the West Wing, it felt like Beavis and Butthead, or it felt like arrested development where it wasn't coherent. And so I don't know if it's a question or an observation or just me expressing my sadness from last night. But the business. of government is hard. Running something is hard. Having a multi-billion dollar budget is not easy. So anyone that has kind of the impulse of like, yeah, I can do that. No, running things is hard. But I think you have to start. with the people who are the voters, the residents, and the citizens. If they can't recognize the importance, the need of competency, and I use this example all the time, you know, Jeff recently had an accident where he... broke something in his arm, playing sports. And he's also a doctor, so this applies to him in terms of his training. When he went to get help, he wanted to get the most competent person possible. He didn't go to the gas station. He went to an orthopedic specialist. And if he had needed surgery, I'm guessing he would have wanted a really good anesthesiologist. He wouldn't have gone to the bakery to get somebody who knew something about administering Pope or whatever the drug. So competency is so important, but we're not electing people based on their competency. We're electing people based on them speaking to our rage or our anger or our anxiety.

What do you think here in Maine we can do? I've advocated for better civic training that would be party neutral. Most 17-year-olds graduate high school, and they don't know the difference between a referendum and a refrigerator. And so when they go to vote, when they're 18, which I think is a sacred portal young people go through because... We have service people here in Maine, you know, serving and there are people dying. Even though we're not in an active war, people die all the time in training. So if you have the right to vote, it's a sacred right that we all, but if we don't tell kids, hey, you're entering the sacred right. They're just going to either adopt their parents' policies or politics. What can we do? to have a better mean, not a Democratic main or a Republican main or an independent mean, but a better mean where people take more control of their destiny through how they select town council members, county members, state legislature, and ultimately the governor. Yeah. I think right now what we've got is the situation where we have so many fundamentally challenged issues in our state. Mostly they revolve around affordability, but there are different versions of it, right? There's a health care challenge. There's a housing challenge where it's increased by twice in the last seven years. Energy prices have grown at twice the national average. All of these costs keep going up, and I think we've got these systematic... fundamental challenges right now. And I think people actually are engaged. I was at a high school the other day. I met with the junior class, which was all of 13 kids. It was up in Staceyville, Maine. And they were really interested in what was happening in the world. They were completely engaged. And I was really impressed by what they were doing and talked with their teacher afterwards. We're going to get into more about education and more about some simple things. It's a healthy conversation on News Radio WGAN. We'll be right back. In studio, we have Angus King III. He is running for governor of Maine as a Democrat. Quick question, easy question, Angus. If you win, do you promise right here right now to be a guest on a healthy conversation so you can speak to the citizens of the state of Maine as governor? I would be delighted. That's my second campaign promise. Wow, number two. You know, I think we're in a moment where it's going to be pretty hard to know what the world looks like when the next governor takes office. And so I'm trying to be as thoughtful as I can be about the promises. So that's number two. The first one is when you're driving from Portland to Augusta, you're not going to lose a cell phone call. Oh, I love that. So we're in the last segment talking about fiscal things and the physics of Maine, the distance of Maine. In order to have a community, it strikes me that you need a few things, not a million things, a few things. You need housing. You need education. You need schools. And education is a big topic these days. When we moved to Maine, it was about 30 years ago. Maine, I think, was number six in the country. And now, goodness, we've gone down to 45th, I think, is that right? And yet we're spending more per student than ever before.

How can we fix this? Yeah, that is an incredibly important part of why I'm running. I just think that's a completely unacceptable. And Steve, as you were saying, not only I think is the civic piece important and that part of the education, I think it's really important. Maine should be known as the place with the best trained, best educated workforce in America. There's no reason we can't do it. And it's something that I think is, I just think we've sort of taken our eye off the ball over the last 30 years. Some of that is around literal sort of curriculum policy decisions that have been made that were just. Candidly, mistakes. And people make mistakes, and we're starting to reform it, but we're just not there yet. So unfortunately, Maine kids have not learned to read as effectively as they have in other states in Mississippi, in Louisiana, in Florida, and Ohio. So I think we've got to really focus on what do we do for kids so that we can make sure that every child who's in fourth grade is able to read and do math at that level. Because if you fall behind there, you're behind for the rest of your career. You're less likely to graduate, all sort of all kinds of. the bad things happen. So to me, that's a critical central piece. And it's not just, you know, pointing to a teacher and saying, get this job done. It's a, it's an enormous effort by the community. It's enormous effort by the business community. It's working with parents. It's working also with teachers and other people in the schools so that we can make sure that that is a statewide priority that we're going to make sure the kids are ready. What did we mess up? What did we? do to go from 6th to 45th place? And what can we learn from the current number one holder? Yeah. So the best example is Mississippi, where they have literally the Mississippi miracle. And it was an enormous focus on how do we get these kids to read at grade level. There was a teaching program that was introduced, I think, when George W. Bush was president that simply didn't work. Fundamentally, it taught reading the way that people don't actually learn how to read that well. Mississippi and a couple of other states figured it out relatively early and changed not just that teaching method, which again, unfortunately, is still used here in Maine, but they also decided we're going to really turn this around from a community standpoint. We're going to get more people involved. We're going to get libraries involved, businesses involved, and we're going to get the community involved in a way that we're going to focus on making sure that our kids can read because if they can read, Everything else gets better after that. So that's what I think what we can learn is this holistic focus, not just on the specific policy, but on how do we bring people together. The advantage in Maine is we can bring people together. We can make real difference in our state. And that's what excites me about this job is I think there's real opportunity to fix some of these challenges because we can pull the right people together into the room and talk about how do we focus on how do we get a problem solved. Our special guest this week is Angus King the 30s running for governor of Maine as a Democrat. Talking about differences in what we can do, I want to spend a minute talking about our current governor, Janet Mills, who I think has done a really good job.

I should also disclose that I've had conversations and sort of work interactions with Dora Mills who works in healthcare and in the past Peter Mills who headed up the Turnpike Authority. And then Janet Mills herself, a real underperforming family. I'm kidding. They've all done, they've all, I think, served Maine and, you know, citizens of Maine nobly. But you're running as she's termed out. So she's also running for. national office. So I think she's done a good job, but voters often look for contrast. So it's easier when there's a different party that you're trying to unseat. And so to my knowledge, Janet Mills hasn't endorsed anyone for a governor. And my guess is she's waiting to see who the Democratic nominee is and then she'll be supportive. But are there one or two things that you can look at? from Janet Mills' time as governor, on the positive side that you recognize, you say, yeah, what she did is really effective, and I would continue that. And are there one or two things, and I don't expect you to openly criticize her, but are there one or two areas where she did not put as much emphasis or focus that you would and how you would do things possibly different than our current governor, Janet Mills? Yeah, look, the governor, I think, has done a good job and no governor runs with the expectation that they're going to have COVID in the middle of their administration, right? I think that was an incredibly difficult curveball that got thrown, and unfortunately for her took a lot of her time and energy and her administration's time and energy. So that is not something that you run on or plan for, and ultimately she handled that. And then, you know, I think she did a terrific job standing up to the president. This president is creating havoc, I think, kind of wherever he goes. Unfortunately, you don't want the eye of Soron focused on your state for very long. So I'm happy if he's going to look at other states and his attention fortunately gets distracted pretty quickly. And then he often telegraphs his punches at the same time so you can do some planning around it. But anytime you stand up to a bully and you literally get your lunch back. That is a heck of a thing to be celebrated. And I think Maine was lucky for her to be able to stand up and accomplish that. But we now just have a different series of challenges. I don't know that I look at it as doing it differently from what she's done, but we do have this enormous housing challenge where housing prices have doubled in the last seven years. And we've got to figure out a way to build more houses. We have sort of processed ourselves to death here in Maine. And I think there's a lot of work we can do on how do we get to yes, as opposed to how do we get to process? Our energy costs have gone up by... twice the national average in Maine over the last decade. And I've spent a lot of my life working on lower cost, cleaner energy. And again, I know it's hard because I've done it, but I also know it's possible because I've done it. We built this project in my last job where we thought, I thought, if we were going to have more clean air and clean water and clean energy in Maine, we had to get everybody involved in a solution.

So I got utility people and dairy farmers and clean energy and community leaders and thousands and thousands of cows. And we took something that they had a lot of, manure, and turned it into something that we all need, renewable energy. And that job, that project today, it's in Clinton, is creating energy for thousands of homes and factories. It's created some good jobs. It's lowering emissions for all of us. It's doing it all without adding costs to main families. And I think that kind of innovation, but also that kind of ability to bring people together. around a vision, and then ultimately to figure out how you get something done is really, really important in this moment. So having a governor who's had some hands-on experience in the world, especially in housing and energy, which I think are pretty important topics for all of us, I think is going to be really important. Let's delve into housing. I think everybody would agree that there's a housing shortage. A lot of people that run and own businesses say that the root cause of not being able to find good people is lots of housing. Correct. Specifically. How would you increase the housing supply in Maine? Yeah. The first is it starts at the state level. I would say we've got to have a, there apply some urgency and some focus to this is a challenge that we're going to have to get the whole state oriented on. And again, it's how do you get to yes on building? 10,000 units of housing as opposed to what our process is right now there are a number of different agencies in the state that are not particularly well coordinated with one another and so you can have a project move through one get stalled in another and you know take a year in a third and time kills projects And so we've got to figure out a way to be both predictable and responsive at a much faster pace. There are other states that are doing really innovative things to do that. Would you use money from the rainy day fund to increase housing stock? Again, I'm not going to make any commitment about where I'm going to spend money just because I'm really anxious about the amount of money we're going to have and the cuts that are coming from the feds. I think it would be irresponsible to do that. But I think there's a lot of innovation we can do and a lot of innovation we can unleash. We have great developers here in Maine who are ready, willing, and able to build projects if we can find ways to make it easier for them to do it. And how do you do that? I mean, the tree that grows in the Alagash takes 40 years. compared to that same tree in South Carolina, 17 years, compared to Brazil seven years. So concretely, how do we lower the cost of those inputs like lumber? Yeah, I mean, it's about a, I mean,

It's a, to some degree, a national market, lumber has certainly gotten more expensive, but it's it's all of the inputs, right? Every input into a house and the supply chains are global at this point. So it's going to be pretty tough for a governor, I think, to have an impact on the price of a refrigerator. But there are things you can do in how quickly does somebody get through a process? Because ultimately it's those front end costs and the... and the time that it takes is what really makes it very, very expensive, much more expensive than in other parts of the country. Our guest, Angus King III, I think we have about another minute and a half, and this is a big topic, but maybe you can just speak to it for a second. Immigration. Last night on the State of the Union, our president, called out specifically Somalians in Minnesota, which, again, I think was obscene. I don't support... illegal immigrants or undocumented people, they're trying to get in the country illegally, but picking a group of people. And here in Maine, we have a fairly sizable Somalian population. And if I was a little boy or a little girl and I was in a state and I was watching the state of the union and I heard our president demonize a group of people and suggest that they're all lawless. What would your quick philosophy be relative to immigration here and Maine and how would it differ from our current environment? Yeah, what the president's doing is simply un-American. He is casting a fog of fear over our entire state. And as you saw over the last couple of weeks, people were afraid to go to church. People were afraid to go to work. My son is in high school here in Portland. He was afraid. He had classmates who were afraid to go to school. That, if that's what, if that's the world we're living in, that is not the freedom and that is not the country that we imagine. The only upside is we saw Maine pull together. I've stood at a lot of those bridges and a lot of those free corners with people, people who showed up to deliver food, to bring people to work, to do that job. And Maine communities, I think, showed that we really are a strong and together place. And that's the governor. That's the state I want to be the governor. Angus King III. Thank you so much for joining us. It's a healthy conversation with my good friend, Steve Woods. I'm Dr. Jeff Bark, and it's been an absolute pleasure. Have a great week, everybody. Thanks, Angus, great seeing you. Thanks, everybody. Great to be here.