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An Augusta District Court wrongly terminated a New Mexico mother’s rights to her child because she couldn’t find affordable housing in Maine, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled Tuesday. 

Despite noting the mother had gone “above and beyond” to meet the requirements set by the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, Judge Cynthia Montgomery ruled in 2024 that the mother’s inability to move to Maine made her an unfit parent. The judge terminated her parental rights as a result. 

On Tuesday, the Maine Supreme Court disagreed and vacated the termination ruling, writing that the mother’s “failure to relocate was not a willful refusal to accede to a condition imposed by the Department; it simply reflected the practical impossibility of compliance.” 

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The Basin Oyster Project’s long-term goal — to restore wild oysters up and down the Maine coast – is lofty. But the project’s more immediate aims are limited: to get oysters to survive and spawn on their own in 800 square feet of water in the Basin, a deep, protected saltwater inlet on the New Meadows River, creating a self-sustaining reef. 

Wild oysters were once prevalent along the coast of Maine, but had largely disappeared by the early 1900s, victims of overharvesting by European settlers, pollution and rising sea levels, which brought in cold water and predators. 

While oyster farming — where oysters are carefully bred in hatcheries and grown in regulated nursery tanks or ponds — has become popular in Maine, the wild oyster population remains small and fragile. Restoring them to the wild at scale, said Jeremy Bell, a program director with TNC who helped with the initial planning stages of the project in 2017, is an uphill battle. 

“We were not even sure that it could be done in Maine.”

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Wendy Brennan agreed to participate in a study of arsenic exposure’s ties to cognitive skills development in children primarily because her young daughter wanted the free t-shirt offered to participants. It was 2009, and the family had lived on their property in Mt. Vernon for eight years. Brennan felt no reason to fear the results, she said. Researchers came to test their drinking water, Brennan’s daughter got her reward — a black t-shirt with a lightning bolt on the front and the word “spark” printed below — and Brennan learned that her family’s well tested nearly six times above the Federal Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum exposure guidelines for arsenic.

“I pride myself on being a good mom,” Brennan said. “One of the first things I thought was: ’I was giving my baby arsenic with her formula, and I was unaware.’”

Brennan was not alone in her lack of awareness: just 53 percent of Mainers on well water had tested their water for arsenic as of 2023, the latest figures available. The number has not moved much since 2014, when around 48 percent of Mainers on well water reported having tested it for arsenic, and is far short of the goal set by the Maine Center for Disease Control of 65 percent of wells tested by 2020. 

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As Maine’s aging population grapples with complex health needs and rural hospitals struggle with workforce shortages, the state is looking for ways to modernize how health care services are offered in rural areas. What Maine needs, state officials wrote in a request for funding from the federal Rural Health Transformation Program, is “a new approach to delivering rural health care.”

This will likely include the use of artificial intelligence, but exactly what that looks like remains to be seen.

The five-year, $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program was congressional Republicans’ last-minute addition to President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer –– an attempt to address the fallout over the bill’s call to cut Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion over 10 years.

Maine is set to receive $190 million from the program in year one and has said it plans to use the money to recruit more health care workers in rural areas, strengthen community-based care, reduce transportation-related barriers, support regional collaboration and more. It was also originally hoping to use some of the funds to help hospitals and clinics pay for low-income, uninsured patients’ treatment. But the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, which oversees the Rural Health Transformation Program, said no, KFF Health News reported.

CMS, with Dr. Mehmet Oz at the helm, has pushed states to use the money for “bold, creative plans,” including the use of new technologies.

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Seagrass shelters the young of many marine species, improves water quality and stores some of the excess carbon released by the burning of fossil fuels. Beds of seagrass also absorb wave energy, reducing erosion and buffering coastal communities from storms.

These underwater meadows used to grow abundantly along the Maine coast. But they’ve declined significantly in recent decades. 

Researchers with Team Zostera are diving in Casco Bay as part of an effort to better understand the plant — and to potentially restore it to places where it has been lost. 

You can read the story for free on The Maine Monitor's website.

Hotel Ursa — a private-public partnership at the heart of the University of Maine’s campus — has failed to meet its annual operating income goals, putting the state’s flagship university on the hook for more than $1.5 million over the last three years, according to financial records obtained by The Maine Monitor. 

UMaine’s contract with Hotel Ursa requires the university to make up the difference if the hotel does not earn a certain amount of net operating income each year. The shortfall payments stand to increase each year over the 25-year contract, which was signed in 2022.

Now the flagship university plans to offset these payments by renting 37 rooms at the hotel to house students this academic year. UMaine will pay more than $1 million in rent each year for three years, according to the lease agreement.

UMaine officials stand by the university’s partnership with the hotel, describing the business as an asset for the campus and town of Orono. Students and a professor had mixed responses, describing the deal as a burden during an already-tight budget year.

“If they run it badly, we pay. That seems like a terrible deal to me,” Faculty Senate President Brian McGill said.

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Washington County residents gathered Wednesday to air fears and frustrations over Eastport’s economic and environmental future at the first of two public hearings on citizen‑initiated ordinances that could halt early preparations for an underwater artificial intelligence data center in the Bay of Fundy’s Western Passage.

The first hearing focused on an ordinance prohibiting data centers larger than 25,000 square feet in Eastport and its coastal waters.

The second hearing addressed a measure that would require voter approval for any new industrial or commercial development exceeding 25,000 square feet on land or 10,000 square feet in the ocean if the permanent ban passes. Both proposed ordinances include a retroactive effective date of June 1, 2026.

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The MaineHealth board of trustees voted Thursday to close the labor and delivery unit of MaineHealth Lincoln Hospital in Damariscotta after months of discussion and community pushback. 

The unit is set to close on Dec. 18, and services will be moved to MaineHealth Mid Coast Hospital in Brunswick, according to a statement from the health system.

The closure will mark the 12th maternity unit in Maine that has shuttered since 2015, leaving Lincoln County, Waldo County and Sagadahoc County without hospitals that deliver babies. The decision means fewer than half of Maine’s 34 hospitals will offer a place to give birth.

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A group representing customers is seeking to understand why Central Maine Power is requesting higher returns than its multinational parent company Iberdrola has previously said is necessary for its U.S. holdings.

On Wednesday, the Maine Public Utilities Commission asked the electric utility to hand over internal documents from Iberdrola, which could offer insight into its financials. 

“This appears to be the first time that any multinational corporation in the U.S. has been forced in a rate case to divulge its own internal math,” said Seth Berry, a former Democratic state legislator who now leads Our Power, a nonprofit that advocates for affordable clean energy in Maine and is participating in the case as an intervenor.

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A ​South Portland resident is suing federal agents for allegedly violating his First and Fourth amendment rights amid an immigration enforcement surge in January.

It’s the first lawsuit filed under the Federal Tort Claims Act against the United States for the actions of immigration agents during “Operation Catch of the Day.” 

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As premiums rose and tax credits expired, the number of people enrolled in the state’s health insurance marketplace dropped by thousands from 2025 to 2026. Now, thousands more Mainers are expected to lose their Medicaid coverage when a new federal law takes effect.

But no one knows exactly who will lose their Medicaid coverage or where they live, making it difficult for providers to predict what could happen when the new eligibility rules start rolling out in three months.

“It's really a perfect storm,” said Kate Ende, policy director for Consumers for Affordable Health Care.

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The Democratic primary for Maine’s 2nd Congressional District seat concluded more than a month ago, with social worker Paige Loud finishing last in the four-person race with around 10 percent of the vote. But Loud’s effort to settle debts, both campaign-related and personal, has continued well past the June 9 election — and raised questions this week about whether her approach was out of step with campaign finance rules.

Post-election fundraising is common, for winning and losing federal candidates alike, as they work to retire their campaign debts and recoup personal expenses. Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas won a case before the Supreme Court in 2022 that struck down previous restrictions on how much money and how long after an election campaigns could fundraise to reimburse a candidate for a loan they made to their own campaign. 

What makes Loud’s continued fundraising stand out is the way she has turned to crowdfunding site GoFundMe for donations, and the evolving messages she has shared with potential donors as part of that effort. Her page initially implied she would be using the donations to pay off debt related to campaign expenses, but after a reporter from The Maine Monitor reached out with questions, she updated the language to say that this particular fundraising effort was solely to help her cover personal expenses, including rent and health care, from her time as a candidate. Personal expenses like this are generally not subject to the same limitations and reporting requirements as campaign expenses.

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Maine is in the process of adjusting how it regulates the manufactured housing industry and helps support residents of mobile home parks. The changes come as a growing number of communities across the state have been purchased by out-of-state investors and follow a report that found deficiencies in the state’s ability to respond to complaints. 

The Maine Manufactured Housing Board, which has been responsible for upholding mobile home park community standards and manufacturing quality for almost 50 years, had its last meeting in early June and was dissolved on July 29. Its four-person staff has been moved out of the Department of Professional and Financial Regulation and placed under the relatively new Maine Office of Community Affairs, where it will continue investigating violations of state rules. 

While the new regulatory structure has yet to be fully defined, issues related to manufactured housing and the 480 mobile home parks registered with the state will be handled administratively within the office, rather than by an adjudicatory board that includes people in the manufactured housing industry. Mobile home residents and housing advocates are hopeful the move will create a more efficient way to address challenges related to mobile homes, seen as one of the last affordable housing options in the state. But some who work in manufactured housing worry that cutting the board from the regulatory structure will mean losing industry knowledge. 

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Since it opened 10 years ago, the Maine Arts Academy has seen a large percentage of its teachers leave annually, often in the middle of the school year, raising concerns about the workplace and the impact on students. 

The high school was created to allow students to study performing and visual arts, and it started off small: During its first four years, it had between three and seven teachers annually. But, each year, the school saw a turnover rate of 100 percent — meaning the equivalent of every teacher on staff left.

As the teacher workforce grew, the rate of turnover decreased but averaged 23 percent annually between 2021 and 2025.

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Policing experts told The Maine Monitor that officers are taught to avoid firing on cars except in very rare circumstances. Yet the shooting in Biddeford was the 20th time federal immigration agents have shot or claimed to have shot at a moving vehicle since the start of last year.

In Maine, local, state and federal law enforcement officers have shot at vehicles at least 24 times since 2002, according to a Maine Monitor analysis of attorney general’s office reports.

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A group of nearly 600 Democrats nominated former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson to be their U.S. Senate nominee in Bangor on Saturday, ending an unprecedented scramble to replace former nominee Graham Platner on November’s ballot just days before a state deadline. 

Jackson won 566 votes of the 571 cast by party delegates at the Cross Insurance Center, defeating lone remaining challenger Saundra Pelletier, a biopharmaceutical executive and political newcomer. Jackson will now face Republican incumbent Susan Collins in November. 

“This is the absolute honor of my life to accept the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate,” Jackson told the crowd in a speech after the results were announced, taking aim at Collins and styling himself as a fighter for working Mainers against corporate interests and the wealthy. 

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Nationwide, opioid-related overdose is the leading cause of death among people recently released from jail or prison. Overdose rates among this group are also significantly higher compared with the general population. 

But in Maine and elsewhere, people leaving jails have historically been left to navigate the transition back to their communities on their own.

People with a criminal record — oftentimes one closely tied to their addiction — find it more difficult to find stable housing, a job, a doctor and reliable transportation. Research has shown that if people leaving jail are able to meet these needs they are less likely to return to custody. 

Navigating this transition requires not just the funding and staffing needed for a treatment program in the jail but robust re-entry planning and connections to a support network on the outside. A growing number of recovery centers in Maine are looking for ways to help with this re-entry work. But coordination between jails and recovery centers varies across the state.

In the fourth of four stories supported by the Pulitzer Center, Maine Monitor health reporter Emily Bader looks at the work some jails are doing to connect prisoners with resources on the outside — and what gaps remain. With photos by Greta Rybus. 

You can read it for free at themainemonitor.org.

Just last week, a dozen different people had declared their candidacy to replace Graham Platner as the Democratic Senate nominee and it appeared that Saturday’s convention could be a long, multi-round affair with a collection of recently defeated Democratic primary candidates and lesser-known political newcomers making their case at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor. 

After last weekend’s county-level nomination meetings produced 500 of the delegates from around the state, at least one thing has become increasingly clear: Former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson has all but locked up the nomination.

But, like so much in recent weeks, the future is not entirely set in stone — and some voters and candidates have raised questions about whether the party’s approach has been as transparent and inclusive as promised. 

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