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LePage served two terms as a Waterville city councilor before becoming mayor in 2003, retaining that post until taking office as governor in January 2011. During his time as mayor, LePage reorganized city hall, lowered taxes, and increased the city's rainy day fund balance from $1 million to $10 million. As he makes a comeback bid, former Maine Gov. Paul LePage is pushing “to phase out Maine’s income tax. He argues that the change is needed to keep wealthy residents from moving to Florida for just long enough each year to take advantage of the Sunshine State’s tax breaks,” the New York Times reports. Littlefield said the report was “obviously an opposition research dump from political opponents.” He did not answer questions from the Bangor Daily News on where the LePages filed income taxes since 2020.
Florida law requires that “when an elector changes his or her residence address, the elector must notify the supervisor of elections” in their home county. In that July 9 post, he also mentioned that he had “registered to vote last week” in Maine after returning from a year-and-a-half sojourn in Florida. LePage’s adversarial history could be contributing to his poor performance in recent polls, some of which show Mills with a double-digit lead in the race.
Back from Florida, Paul LePage declares residency in Maine
He proposed eliminating all funding for the act in his 2014–2015 biennial budget and stated his opposition to a proposal to reform the act by increasing the amount of money that would be distributed. He calls such aid "welfare for politicians" and a "scam," saying that "Our democracy is being corrupted by the role of big money in politics." LePage initially endorsed Chris Christie for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, but after Christie dropped out LePage endorsed Donald Trump just hours after Christie in February 2016. Earlier in February, LePage had urged Republican governors to draft an open letter "to the people", disavowing Trump and his politics. LePage has continued his crusadeto eliminate Maine’s income tax during this campaign, often citing a desire to lure “snowbirds” back from Florida for most of the year. The page continued his crusade to eliminate Maine’s income tax during this campaign, often citing a desire to attract Florida “snowbirds” for most of the year.
The situation spurred statewide backlash including a federal investigation of the alleged intimidation, which concluded that LePage's administration improperly acted with "what could be perceived as a bias toward employers". LePage expressed an intent to reform welfare eligibility requirements, though he did not specify how he would do so. He also supports lifetime limits on welfare support, requiring recipients to perform work in the community, and a tiered payment system that gradually removes benefits as recipients earn more money working, rather than cutting them off entirely at a certain income level. He stated this view regarding the case of Ethan Henderson, a 10-week-old baby who was allegedly killed by his father. He also has expressed support for giving the death penalty to drug dealers whose drugs cause a fatal overdose.
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On March 21, 2013, LePage summoned a dozen state employees of the Bureau of Unemployment to the Blaine House for a luncheon to discuss the state's unemployment compensation hearing and appeals process. Although LePage described the meeting as "cordial", the workers described it as pressuring and used to intimidate them to give more rulings on unemployment claim appeals in favor of businesses, as well as to state that they were doing their jobs poorly. LePage called the accusation "outrageous" and said that David Webbert, the president of the Maine Employment Lawyers Association who made the allegation, was making it up.
By then, they had claimed a homestead exemption on that home, indicating it was at least the permanent residence of Ann LePage at a time when her husband was still Maine’s governor. A Florida tax lawyer told The New York Times this was possible under state law but “atypical” since spouses typically are in homes together. His final budget proposal in 2017 contained a tax overhaul that would have combined income tax cuts and sales tax expansion while limiting Maine’s homestead exemption to people over 65, although that the package was never seriously considered in a divided legislature. After leaving office in 2019 because of Maine’s prohibition on serving a third consecutive term, Mr. LePage obtained a Florida driver’s license and registered to vote in the state.
Former Portland city manager under fire at his current post in Florida
On September 22, 2009, LePage announced that he would be seeking the 2010 Republican nomination for governor of Maine. He won 38% of the vote in a seven-way primary election, despite being outspent ten-to-one by his closest challenger. John Morris, LePage's campaign chief-of-staff, credited LePage's win with a campaign strategy that he referred to as the "three onlys" theme before the June primary election.
Ann LePage began cutting the tax break in June, saying she and her husband no longer live in Florida. While he was governor, Mr. LePage tried to eliminate Maine’s homestead exemption, a proposal that would have denied an estimated 213,000 Mainers benefits similar to those he enjoyed in Florida, according to an analysis by the left-leaning Maine Center for Economic Policy. His opponents in the race for the Blaine House are Democrat Libby Mitchell and independents Eliot Cutler, Shawn Moody and Kevin Scott.
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He has also compared the ACA with Canada's health care system, stating that Canada rations care and that many Canadians come to the U.S. to get treatment because of it, and that similar rationing here would result in deaths. LePage signed a bill to bring Maine in alignment with the Common Core State Standards Initiative on April 1, 2011, making the state the 42nd to do so. By 2013, however, LePage expressed opposition to the standards, citing fears of a federal takeover of education and student privacy concerns. LePage has expressed opposition to the legalization of marijuana, seeing it as a gateway to more powerful drugs like heroin, but has said that if legalization were approved by referendum, he would honor it. However, in 2018 he vetoed a bill to establish retail sales of cannabis in Maine in accordance with an initiative that voters approved in 2016. LePage had previously indicated his interest in the 2022 election based on whether Governor Janet Mills could implement Maine's Medicaid expansion referendum in what he believes to be a sustainable way.
This theme focused on particular aspects of LePage's biography that supposedly set him apart from the other candidates. These were, according to Morris, LePage "was the only candidate who had a compelling life story, ... the only candidate who had a successful experience as a chief executive officer of a government entity, ... the only candidate who was the executive of a prosperous Maine business." LePage ran for governor of Maine in the 2010 election, winning the general election with a plurality, 37.6%, in a five-candidate race. He was re-elected with a stronger plurality, 48.2% of the vote, in a three-candidate election in 2014. During his tenure as the Governor of Maine, he made extensive use of his veto power, vetoing 652 bills as of July 2018, more than the total by all Maine governors over the previous 100 years combined.
If not, I’m going to have to continue working 80 hours a week.” LePage was the first Maine governor to use social media to promote the annual State of the State address, when he used Twitter to send several tweets previewing his February 5, 2013, speech. As Governor, LePage issued 642 vetoes, which broke the record of 118 set by Governor James B. Longley and was more than all his predecessors since 1917 combined. Most of LePage's vetoes have come since 2013, when Democrats regained control of the Legislature from the Republicans. In the 2015 session of the Legislature, LePage promised to veto every bill sponsored by a Democrat, regardless of its merits, in retaliation for the rejection of his proposal for a constitutional amendment referendum to eliminate Maine's income tax. LePage later expanded his veto threat to all bills sponsored by all legislators in order to force needing a 2/3 vote on them for passage. He stated that he feels it is the only way he can "get the most representation that I can for the people of the state of Maine" and that Democrats had convinced Republicans to sponsor bills to get around his initial veto threat.
Since the issue came to light, the LePages have repaid Waterville $227.93 in back taxes and requested removal from the homestead program in the city. There is no penalty attached to violating the Florida statute requiring a voter who moves to notify the registrar in his county. LePage registered as a Republican on Jan. 2, 2019, in Ormond Beach and has apparently never taken steps to indicate to officials in Florida that he’s moved back to the Pine Tree State he governed for eight years after winning office in 2010. It was Gattine’s criticism of LePage’s race-related comments about the opioid epidemic that culminated in the governor’s threat of a duel. But for Gattine and other Mainers, LePage’s behavior was somewhat typical by that point. Over his eight years in office, LePage cultivated a reputation for offensive comments and for adversarial relationships with reporters, Democrats and even fellow Republicans.
Nine days after the U.S. federal government shutdown on October 1, 2013, LePage declared a civil emergency in Maine ending 17 days later. He said that the declaration was necessary in order to cope with the loss of federally funded positions during the shutdown, such as by transferring state-funded personnel to functions originally carried out by the federally funded personnel to minimize layoffs. His move to do so was met with widespread negative criticism, and was labeled as an unnecessary "overreach of power". According to an analysis posted on PolitiFact, only about ten percent of "able-bodied people" age 18 to 64 in Maine were not working, and if unemployed Maine residents who were looking for work were excluded from the count, the number not working drops to 3.6 percent.
LePage has been critical of Maine's citizen initiative process, by which citizens can put an issue to referendum, stating that the process should be reformed to return to a "representative government" and that Mainers don't understand what they are voting for on referendum questions. He has expressed support for requiring petition signatures to be gathered in each Maine county and for requiring a greater total number of signatures to qualify an issue for the ballot. He has called for the abolition of term limits for Maine legislators, who are limited to four consecutive two-year terms, saying that they have resulted in a legislature full of young people with "firm agendas" who pass bills that hurt Maine in the long term. He cited former longtime Democratic House Speaker John Martin as an example of how an experienced legislator would be beneficial for Maine.
Political positions
Then, in February 2020, he said he was considering a bid for a third term, and when he announced his run last year he cited criticisms of Ms. Mills’s response to the pandemic. He switched his voter registration back to Maine in 2020 and publicized pictures of himself putting Maine license plates back on his car. Mr. LePage’s campaign defended the tax moves, saying that Mrs. LePage’s mother had used the Florida home as her primary residence from 2009 until her death in 2015, when the couple removed the first homestead exemption. Mrs. LePage’s mother had scleroderma, a chronic disease that causes hardening of the skin. A house in Ormond Beach that Ann LePage bought in 2008 was sold late in 2017 for $207,000.
State law does not require a Maine driver's license to vote, and establishing residency for voting doesn't mean one has to pay any fees. Dunlap said LePage's remarks "inflame an atmosphere of doubt and fear among the voters." As governor, LePage attempted to roll back child labor laws, proposing a $5.25 subminimum wage. In a speech at the 73rd annual Maine Agricultural Trades Show, he stated his view supporting child labor adding “If the revenues go up, I can go golfing.
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