State House Democrats stick it to political reformers (continued)

DIRIGO VERSUS MCLF

The Dirigo Alliance was founded in 1987. It created MCLF two years later as its lobbying arm, but as a separate, nonpartisan corporate entity in order to secure it favorable federal income tax treatment. Donations to nonpartisan groups can be deducted from income taxes.

Dirigo is a coalition of 16 organizations including the Maine AFL-CIO, Equality Maine (the gay rights group), the Maine People’s Alliance, the Maine Sierra Club, and the Maine State Nurses Association. It endorsed John Baldacci in 2002. "They are a Democratic Party front," charged at the time the spurned Green Independent Party nominee for governor, Jonathan Carter, who saw himself as far more liberal than Baldacci. Dirigo has been a smaller and quieter sister to MCLF, pregnant with temporary employees at election time but for long periods in the past staffed full-time only by George Christie.

In addition to its successes with the national-landmark Clean Election Act—one of the few progressive initiated laws in Maine history—and the defense of Maine Rx, MCLF successfully lobbied for a law requiring corporations to report their state subsidies and tax breaks. It also secured legislative passage of a "living wage" law, although independent Governor Angus King vetoed it.

In recent years, Dirigo and MCLF had a strained relationship. Several MCLF former staffers say they had great difficulty working with Christie. In addition to MCLF’s independent ways, the conflict between the two groups bothered the Proteus Fund, say people involved with the organizations, and Proteus promoted the idea of combining MCLF and Dirigo under one director.

When the groups decided to do this, Dirigo’s Christie did not apply for the new job. The combined position requires "a level of commitment" that he could not bring, he says, with a new child in his family.

But Arn Pearson did apply. A magna cum laude graduate of Georgetown Law and an experienced community organizer who had worked for MCLF for nine years, he told the MCLF-Dirigo search committee, he says, that he would be happy to stay on as MCLF policy director should another person be chosen. But when D’Arcangelo was picked, he says, he could not work with her because "she had a difference of philosophy and approach about the role of MCLF." He would have preferred keeping the electioneering of Dirigo as separate as possible from the Clean Election Act monitoring of MCLF—which, he says, unlike Dirigo, had "earned the trust of Republicans."

Following a close vote of the board confirming her selection, D’Arcangelo made her move. McGee, Brown, and Clopp had been taking six weeks off without salary because MCLF’s funders, which had thrown financial resources into Gulf Coast hurricane relief, had postponed making payments on grants. D’Arcangelo told the three not to come back to work.

Pearson agrees with McGee and Brown that in its "outsider" tax-reform lobbying MCLF ran afoul of the Democratic House leadership and "insider" Democratic lobbyists who "have big investments in their relationship with leadership. . . . They do a very good job of protecting their clients within the budget process. They were concerned that the politics of tax reform could upset the balance in the budget."

If these lobbyists obtain a share in the state budget, Pearson adds, "In their world, that’s a victory; in my world, it’s missing the big strategy. If we don’t win tax reform, year after year we’ll be facing budget cuts."

He foresees D’Arcangelo adopting "an incremental and insider approach" to progressive issues.

"I’ve been beside myself how this played out," says MCLF board president William "Bo" Yerxa, who runs Southern New Hampshire University’s Brunswick Center. "I’ve been president of eight to ten progressive organizations, and I’ve never seen a better staff." He supported Pearson for the MCLF-Dirigo director’s job, saying he has "integrity, vision, resourcefulness, and the ability to inspire and lead."

Yerxa is especially confounded by what happened because "Arn was raising money like the Dickens—he doubled the budget." Yerxa, in fact, thought Pearson would get the position: "I couldn’t imagine somebody like him" would be turned down. But several board members pushed heavily for D’Arcangelo.

Pearson has landed on his feet. Former Maine legislator and Democratic US Senate candidate Chellie Pingree, now president of national Common Cause—the "citizen’s lobby"—has hired him as a staff attorney for campaign-finance and election issues.

THE D’ARCANGELO SIDE

Joanne D’Arcangelo, who chooses her words with care, says she got rid of the MCLF staffers because she needed to build her own team with "different skills," and "it’s been a while since we’ve had some victories."

(Pearson bristles when he hears this remark repeated. In just the last year, he says, the group helped defeat the Palesky tax cap referendum and in its State House lobbying "defeated every single bad bill" that would have weakened the Clean Election Act. MCLF also helped cut back corporate tax breaks, he says, and successfully worked to double tax relief given by the state’s property-tax "circuit-breaker" program.)

In a telephone interview, D’Arcangelo first says, "The board gave me that authority" to fire the MCLF staff. When informed that board members say this wasn’t the case, she replies: "The executive director in any organization has that authority," agreeing there was no authorizing board vote.

Tammy Greaton, director of, and lobbyist for, the Maine People’s Alliance, a group that pushes for health-care and other reforms, is a member of the Dirigo Alliance board and served on the joint committee that chose D’Arcangelo, whom she defends.

"Nobody pushed to purge anybody," she says. D’Arcangelo fired the MCLF lobbyists because in the process leading up to her selection, Greaton says, "they were actively campaigning against her. They said they wouldn’t work with her." The MCLF people deny this charge. They admit supporting their boss Pearson, but they consider this normal loyalty.

Greaton adds: "Baldacci and Richardson had nothing to do with our decision. Joanne had a 25-year history in the progressive movement. She is not a conservative. Politics had nothing to do with it."

Marjorie Phyfe, who is a retired social worker and labor organizer, says that no one outside the organization was responsible for the dismissals: "It certainly was not the Democratic Party."

There was "no visible role" to her by the Proteus Fund in her selection, D’Arcangelo says, adding that she will end her Proteus employment. The foundation’s contact person with Maine organizations, Marc Caplan, after first promising on the telephone to respond to the Phoenix’s questions, did not return repeated calls made over a number of days. Other Proteus officials also would not respond to the Phoenix’s questions until, less than two weeks before the end of 2005, the group emailed the Phoenix a brief, cryptic statement saying it would not grant Blueprint Project funds in 2005 to Maine organizations.

Kathleen McGee says the project, to be undertaken over the next five years, will pour $2 million into Maine’s progressive organizations if they can match this money with their own fundraising.

"Proteus funds great stuff, but they have a bias about what that organizing looks like," says a Maine activist who didn’t want to be quoted by name because this person has to work with Proteus. The foundation is a funnel for liberal philanthropists and other foundations to influence state politics—now that Republicans control Washington. Proteus has chosen Maine and Wisconsin for the extra money of the Blueprint Project because in these states, Arn Pearson says, "progressives have a shot at winning power."

The Blueprint Project is still in the early stages, D’Arcangelo says, and it is too soon to discuss how much cash might flow into the state.

Mavourneen Thompson, an MCLF board member and a former Democratic state representative and state ethics commission member, believes the big changes at MCLF occurred "because of the passivity of several members" of the board and "the aggressive and misleading actions" of others.

She saw "no concrete reason to change the leadership and staff of the MCLF." She says Pearson and his associates were, while at MCLF, "very professional, very honest, very trustworthy, and very effective."

The tax reform efforts by the group were made always "in conjunction with decisions made by the tax-reform coalition," she says, suggesting that deals made by some liberal lobbyists to abandon the tax-reform effort were the irregular actions. Thompson is concerned that now "it’ll be a lot harder to achieve significant tax reform, and we need it desperately."

She has been concerned, too, that the people who left the MCLF receive generous severance pay. Some of them are worried that by speaking out they may be denied it. But board member Pfyfe says MCLF intends to pay it. The organization has "a moral obligation" to do so, she says, but it is a question of when: "Our financial situation is tight."

Arn Pearson imagines D’Arcangelo may be in a financial bind because the group’s fundraising was suspended for a month and a half.

One financial demand on MCLF and Dirigo may be her salary. She would not divulge it, but people involved with the two groups say it is in the neighborhood of $75,000 a year, compared to Pearson’s $56,000. When D’Arcangelo was Speaker Richardson’s chief of staff, however, she got $84,500. She would not address directly the question of why she took a $10,000 pay cut.

MCLF’S FUTURE

D’Arcangelo expresses optimism about MCLF-Dirigo’s future. "I’m a good fundraiser," she says of the present cash-flow problems.

On issue opportunities, she mentions the necessity to "preserve Clean Election funding." She needs to study the Cummings bill that would make it harder for independents and Greens to qualify for public campaign funds, she says, and the decision to support or oppose it would be made by MCLF in conjunction with a coalition of other groups. She sees Mary Adams’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) tax- and spending-cap proposal, which is expected to go to a referendum vote in November, as a challenge to be met vigorously. As for tax reform possibilities in the current legislative session, "we need to see what elements we can get grass-roots support around"—noting, however, "this is a very short session."

Others are not so sanguine about the future of MCLF.

Maine’s—and the nation’s—sole Green state representative, John Eder of Portland, is dismayed by the changes at the group. In the last session, he says, like the MCLF lobbyists he was unhappy to see other liberal lobbyists swallowing Baldacci’s budget and convincing progressive legislators they had to gulp it down too.

What happened to MCLF is "a sad situation," says Biddeford Representative Joanne Twomey, one of several reps who recently left the Democratic Party to become an independent—in her case, she says, in part as a protest to Baldacci’s and Democratic legislative leadership’s inability to deal with tax reform. (But she just flipped back to the Democratic Party so the GOP wouldn’t get control of the Natural Resources Committee in a power-sharing agreement with House Democrats.)

Twomey believes the MCLF firings were indeed payback for resisting the governor’s budget and pushing too hard on tax reform—"I was there," she says of the session’s politics. She, too, criticizes liberal State House lobbyists for not promoting tax reform simply "because they want their agenda moved."

"The infrastructure of the state is falling apart" because of program cuts that legislative Democrats have supported, she says. She has seen a listing that shows Maine ranks last in its upkeep of state parks, of the 50 states, she says—"and we call ourselves Vacationland!"

Representative John Brautigam, a Falmouth Democrat who worked for MCLF as a lawyer from 1996 to 2000, calls the staff who were fired "very productive, hard-working people." But he also has praise for D’Arcangelo. Liberals who know D’Arcangelo’s progressive past will be comfortable with her, he says, but for those "who only know her in what she did in the State House, she’ll need to prove herself to them."

Kathleen McGee, who is a career-long organizer for liberal causes and candidates, says her work with MCLF had given her hope that in Maine there would be a unified, powerful progressive movement.

"It’s not so much that I lost my job," she says. "I’ll find another. The deepest pain is the loss of that hope."

Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@prexar.com