Dear Editor:

For most towns and cities in Maine, the school budget is the largest expense a community faces year after year. And the big ticket item in the school budget, just after personnel, is usually energy to run the district facilities. Heat and lights. And as energy expenses increase, as they do year after year, the town must turn to its taxpayers to foot those bills. 

Enter Representative Chloe Maxmin, now running for our Senate District 13 seat. With fresh ideas gleaned from doorstep conversations with her constituents who were feeling the drain on their own pocketbooks, Chloe introduced in the last session legislation designed to transition schools to home-grown renewable energy and energy efficiency which would result in substantial savings to the community...savings that could be applied to expand educational opportunities for schoolchildren or to improve the health and welfare of the community. Going hand-in-hand with the school energy initiative was Chloe's proposal to create a green jobs training initiative that would feed the growing need for employees in the renewable/alternative energy field and especially attract young workers and their families to the state. Chloe brought together a diverse coalition of individuals and groups to create and put forward the ideas. These are solutions to long entrenched problems that are wins all around. 

Chloe's priority is to listen to the people in her district to understand their needs and also harvest their ideas and bring them to the table to enact public policy. This is the ideal I believe our democracy was founded on...a government for the people and by the people…and Chloe lives that ideal daily as a public policymaker. To my mind Chloe is just the ticket for District 13; just the ticket for Maine. She's got my vote on Election Day, November 3!

Anne D. (Andy) Burt

Edgecomb