by Becca Shaw Glaser November 30, 2021, The Free Press

Just before Thanksgiving, a recovery center in Augusta was encouraging folks to come to the center’s Thanksgiving feast. My first reaction was, ‘No! We’re in the worst of the pandemic in Maine, they shouldn’t host this; they should at least make folks get vaccinated or tested before going.” But then I thought, it’s events like this that help keep people safe and alive, connecting with a community, particularly a recovery community; hosting the feast is the right thing to do. That’s when I compared the numbers from these twin pandemics; that’s when I saw that over the same time period, Knox County’s overdose deaths are almost double its COVID deaths.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been absolutely devastating. It has now killed an estimated 5.2 million people worldwide, 775,000 in the U.S., 1,303 in Maine, and here in Knox County, since March 2020, 15 people. It feels completely wrong to compare suffering, but our other pandemic needs a monumental boost in attention, resources and care. In 2020, the substance use pandemic killed 17 Knox County residents, and 10 more died between January and September this year.
Last year, overdoses killed 504 people in Maine, an average of 42 per month; this year, it’s even worse: in the first eight months, the state average has climbed to a devastating 50 overdose deaths each month. Despite our recent, frightening increase in COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations, Maine still has one of the lowest per capita COVID death rates among all 50 states. But Maine has not done so well with regard to overdoses. We have one of the highest per capita overdose death rates in the country. According to the most recent comparison data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Maine’s overdose death rate in 2019 made it the 13th deadliest among all U.S. states.

Until we as a society stop with the shaming, the stigmatizing, the criminalization; until we as a society transform how we do everything, until we tax the super-rich out of existence, until we house and feed everyone regardless of substance use or ability to pay, until we provide safer substances, supervised use sites, trauma
therapies, and more, more, more, people will keep being killed by the substance use pandemic. The American Rescue Plan Act has given Maine county, city and town governments funds with a lot of latitude for deciding how to use them. Given how distressing the overdose pandemic is in Knox County and all over
Maine, some of these local funds must be used to support recovery and harm reduction.

In 2019-2020, Most of the Rescue Money Went, as Usual, to the Rich and the Corporations

After decades of a politics of austerity, during the COVID- 19 pandemic we’re finally seeing our money being foisted over by the federal government to potentially go to our communities. With so many unmet needs, it’s not surprising that folks locally, and all over, are tussling over the various pots of American Rescue Plan Act money, which have been divided up among state, city, town, and county governments. There’s a lot of disagreement, but one thing is for sure: it would be immoral to use the ARPA money to further reward those who are already well-off, like the 2019-2020 bailout “stimulus” packages did. In a 2020 article, “‘Doomed to fail’: Why a $4 trillion bailout couldn’t revive the American economy,” The Washington Post analyzed who benefited the most from the COVID relief bills passed under Trump’s tenure. Of the $4 trillion in those bills, more than half — $2.3 trillion — went to businesses which in many cases didn’t
even have to show that they were impacted by the pandemic or keep workers employed. Disgustingly, 43,000 business owners with yearly income above $1 million received an average benefit of $1.6 million. Only one-fifth of the money in those bills went to help workers and families.

So far, the bills passed (or proposed) under Biden seem better at getting their priorities right, but they are still woefully inadequate at addressing some of our most significant crises. Locally, with the ARPA funds, we have an opportunity to do a better job than what the federal government has done so far of supporting those who most need it.

The Knox County Saga: In which Broadband Supporters, the Sheriff’s Department, Police Union and Jail Staff Compete with Housing for the Houseless

Knox County has been given $7.7 million out of the ARPA pot of gold. Seems like a lot, but it’s nothing compared to the needs we have. The three Knox County commissioners initially acted hastily with the money, deciding to give over $400,000 to county employees, primarily to reward those working in the punishment economy. The very first decision they made with the money, on June 30, was to give a $200 per week “retention bonus” for the rest of the year to county employees who are in the Fraternal Order of Police, despite a recently
negotiated labor contract; they also voted that day to give these bonuses to every employee in the Sheriff’s Office, including the sheriff, who makes some $90,000 per year, as well as those others in the department who make $75,000-plus. The Knox County Commissioners’ next priority with the ARPA funds was to give the same bonus for those in the National Correctional Employees Union, again without regard to yearly income.

While bonuses for low-wage “essential employees” might have been a more acceptable use of the money, giving it to well-paid workers is not. Further, there are ways of showing appreciation and of increasing retention that don’t include handing over money from a small, finite fund when others are suffering more. Working in the incarceration sector can be traumatic and difficult, and many of those workers don’t actually want to be the ones evicting people in the cold or locking people up for substance use or mental health issues; money alone can’t erase the internal conflicts and other challenges for those who work in these fields. While the Knox County Commissioners had moved quickly to reward those working in the incarceration sector, it was not until September 14, two and a half months after the police and corrections bonuses, that they acted to give dispatch
workers, emergency management and IT workers the same weekly bonus, backdated.

The commissioners recently announced that they will not make any more decisions about ARPA spending until at least January 2022, and will go through a more standard budget process for the decisions. As usual in politics, this had been preceded by full-flavored controversy. Much of the controversy revolved not around the bonuses, but rather around the town of Rockport’s request for $750,000 in “seed money” for working alongside Midcoast Internet Coalition, a local, nonprofit, community-owned broadband project. This request was, in
essence, in competition with projects like the Knox County Homeless Coalition’s proposals for creating more housing for the houseless and the housing insecure. Although the commission should not have stopped supporters of Midcoast Internet from speaking at their public meeting, and although I strongly support the broadband project in general, I think the Midcoast Internet Coalition is lobbying in the wrong place. Why? $7.7 million is not a big enough pot of gold to go around; we simply must practice triage with the money. And perhaps most significantly, the state of Maine now has $129 million from the ARPA on hand specifically earmarked for expanding broadband; on top of that, the recently passed Infrastructure Bill sends out $65 billion more for broadband nationally. Rather than continuing to play tug-of-war with the other more vitally needed
projects locally that have less robust funding streams than broadband now does, Midcoast Internet should focus its energy on state and federal broadband funding.

The ARPA Money Should Be Used for the Most Important and Most Underfunded Crises: Housing, Food, Heat, Harm Reduction, Recovery, Emotional and Physical Health

Every time I look at Facebook (i.e., obsessively), people are desperately looking for housing in the midcoast. Just a few days ago someone wrote, “We have two months until the house we rent is sold.” Someone else had written, “There’s NOTH- ING out there!! The friggin motels won’t even do weekly rates. Everything is nightly… Looks like we are sleeping in the car!!!!… I’d sleep in my car if it wasn’t for my son whose a senior with nowhere to go.” A person replied, “People are renting rooms and campers because there are no rents unless you go up by Augusta.” The Knox County Homeless Coalition is trying to help, but they have
a long waiting list and are having a harder time than ever finding shelter for people. There plain are not enough available places for people to live (despite the fact that Maine has so many extra homes just sitting empty, because there is no political will to do anything about wealth hoarding). Like the substance use pandemic, the housing crisis deserves to be on the top of the list for ARPA funding.

Is there money coming specifically to address the countrywide housing crisis? Maybe, but even if it does come, it won’t be sufficient. The Build Back Better Act, which has not yet passed, and could end up scaled back even more by those Democrats who are basically Republicans (Maine’s Jared Golden voted against it in the House), currently includes $150 billion for “affordable housing.” While it’s great that it would create an expanded voucher program for rent and down-payment assistance, it would build only 1 million rentals and single-family homes. For the entire country. What good is a rental voucher when there is nowhere to rent? Without vigorous funding of rehabbed housing, more new housing, and the relinquishing of second and third homes, short-term rentals, etc., the housing crisis will continue.

If the BBB actually passes, it may lead to some tremendous transformation in regard to child care, poverty, family leave, and more, but, so far, none of the major federal bills passed gives anywhere near the resources needed to address our overdose pandemic, our emotional health needs, our housing crisis, and other major issues.

With so much new funding floating around, it’s possible I may have missed some major funding related to the substance use pandemic in Maine, but so far I’m only seeing a few million here and there. On November 23, Maine Senators Angus King and Susan Collins proudly touted “$2,302,864 from the U.S.
Department of Justice to combat the opioid crisis and confront substance abuse disorders in Maine youth” as if it were some incredible gift. But compared to the $1.3 billion Maine will be getting for highway maintenance and construction from the Infrastructure Bill, Maine youth are getting a tiny, moldy crumb.

We in Knox County and other areas of the state have the chance to start addressing our underfunded crises with the ARPA funds. I’m sure all of us would love there to be more to go around, but it doesn’t seem like the oligarchs in charge are going to tax themselves and the billionaires out of existence anytime soon, nor address the shocking military budget (which by some calculations takes up about half of the federal budget each year), so we’re stuck with an unfortunate situation where we’re once again fighting over crumbs.

I beg those of you who get to decide where our collectively created money goes to to think in terms of triage, in terms of the hierarchy of needs, and in terms of the long term: who in the community most needs this support, who is most likely to die, what other money is already earmarked, what do we need so we can leave the ruins of a wildly unfair society in the past and move towards comprehensively caring for each other?

Becca Shaw Glaser grew up in midcoast Maine and, for better and worse, moved back a bunch of years ago. She currently lives in Rockport. Co-editor and author of Mindful Occupation: Rising Up Without Burning Out, her writing has also been published in The Maine Commons, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Mad in America,
Spoon River Poetry Review, The Rumpus, Columbia Journal, and many other publications.