So, we have wrapped up Maine’s second regular session of the 131st legislature. Hundreds of bills have been enacted that will profoundly impact our community.
While the supplemental budget includes funding for 55% of K-12 public education costs, the cost to the homeowners in our 3 towns is immense. The demands put on our schools by this same legislature are overwhelming our system, causing teacher and administrative exodus and damaging our children.
Our housing is undergoing extensive changes due to this congress and our representative Traci Gere. She sponsored a bill to create affordable housing in York County, turning three vacant York County courthouses into affordable housing.
Traci speaks to the York County “extreme housing shortage” while supporting the importation of 75,000 migrants over the next 5 years into Maine via the Office of New Americans.
Maine has become the 19th state in the country to have an Office of New Americans. This new state office makes no distinction whatsoever between legal immigrants and the thousands of illegal aliens who have breached our southern border and settled in Maine at taxpayer expense since Janet Mills took office. These are unvetted, mostly poor, non-English speaking foreigners who need food, housing, medical care, transportation and education.
At last count RSU 21, in the upcoming school year, will have at least 33 new children speaking at least 9 different languages, and who do not speak English. We should consider ourselves fortunate in that there is currently only an expected increase of 33 such children here. In the Westbrook school district, according to superintendent Peter Lancia, more that 500 of the 2,300 students – over 21% of the student body require targeted support in English as well as social services.
Is this the future of RSU 21? We need to begin to connect the dots between open borders, free stuff for foreigners and skyrocketing taxes. Unlike Westbrook, which voted down a 9.6% increase in their school budget, the people of Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Arundel, all of whom must be wealthy, were very happy to vote in the RSU 21 school budget with its 6.91% increase.
If you are not overjoyed to welcome these New Americans and pay for all their needs with your tax dollars, you can no longer sit idly by. We must wake up and pay attention to who the candidates are for school board and select board.
And we cannot vote in people like Traci Gere who do not care for the people of our community and do not have the backbone to fight for our interests in Augusta.