Republican Bobby Charles claims he has released his personal financial disclosure as he continues his campaign to be Maine’s next governor.
But in reality, Charles’ campaign has declined to provide the same level of information that is typically included in a financial disclosure statement for state officials.
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Maine shoppers are navigating the largest grocery price surge in a half century. In a state where nearly half of residents struggle to pay for basic needs, Mainers are feeling the pinch while national grocery corporations are maintaining stable or growing profit margins and food and beverage sales grow each year.
Some of Maine’s rural counties could be hit hardest by Medicaid cuts, according to data The Maine Monitor received from the state under a public records request.
In 2025, Republican lawmakers in Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which requires some people who qualify for Medicaid to work in order to receive health benefits.
The requirements go into effect in January.
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Because of his late entry into the U.S. Senate race against Republican Sen. Susan Collins, Democrat Troy Jackson hasn’t yet had to file a quarterly FEC report or his Senate personal financial disclosure.
The extended timeline means voters may not have a clear window into his finances until early voting has started, whereas they can currently see more detailed information about Collins through her annual Senate financial disclosure and her July FEC quarterly report data.
Maine Monitor elections reporter Matt Junker looks at what we know and what we don’t know about both candidates’ finances.
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As Maine’s Senate race heats up, there has been a similar attack launched against both Republican Sen. Susan Collins and Democratic replacement candidate Troy Jackson: lobbying ties in the family.
Maine Monitor elections reporter Matt Junker asked both campaigns what they make of the critiques, and examined the different rules at the state and federal level.
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Preliminary counts for enrollment across Maine’s seven public universities and law school show that student enrollment could exceed 28,000 this school year, continuing an upward trend in enrollment driven by online learners.
Online learners have fueled enrollment growth at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, which preliminary numbers show is now the third biggest public university.
The enrollment boost comes as higher education institutions across the nation face looming enrollment cliffs due to declines in the number of students enrolling in college after high school and a shrinking number of students graduating high school.
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Maine’s extreme risk protection order law, or red flag law, was passed via ballot referendum last fall, making Maine only the second state in the country to enact such a law through citizen action.
The law allows both law enforcement and close friends or family members to directly petition the courts to take weapons away from a person at risk of harm to themselves or others.
A total of eight red flag orders have been filed since the law went into effect six months ago, three by law enforcement and five by family members. Law enforcement officers are continuing to favor the pre-existing yellow flag law, which passed in 2020 but saw little use before the mass shooting in Lewiston in 2023.
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With Lyme disease on the rise in Maine, physicians are eager for a Lyme vaccine to assist patients. One is on the horizon, but its future availability is up in the air because the Trump administration has effectively eliminated the federal committee that would provide guidance on the new vaccine.
According to vaccine law experts and former members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, there is no way to know whether the Lyme vaccine will receive the needed recommendations for the rollout to be accessible to consumers.
“All the rules are out the window,” said Paul Offit, a physician who previously served on the advisory committee. “I don’t know how this plays out.”
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Residents of a mobile home park in Eliot have dealt with discolored water and periodic septic problems for more than two decades, according to interviews with eight residents, state documents and emails reviewed by The Maine Monitor.
The problems seemed to get worse after an out-of-state company bought the park four years ago. At the same time, the rent has gone up, jumping from $465 a month in 2021 to $639 this year.
In January, one of the residents reached out directly to the state’s top housing policy expert for help. Others followed suit.
“Our lot rent is increased yearly without the park being maintained,” one wrote, describing roads in need of replacing, streetlights in need of new bulbs and raw sewage in some yards. “Our water is deplorable with the nonstop fixes and or boil orders we receive.”
Officials from the governor’s office, Maine’s manufactured housing regulator, the state’s drinking water division and the attorney general’s office then came together to marshal a response. The park’s owners told The Monitor they were unaware of the scale of problems at the park and have worked quickly to address them.
The situation at Marshwood Estates offers a window into how entrenched some of the infrastructure issues are at aging mobile home parks and how confusing it can be to find help in the face of unresponsive management. But it also shows how things can change when there is a coordinated response.
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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.
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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.
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.
You can read the story for free at themainemonitor.org.
A pregnant resident of Lincoln County, with the backing of a grassroots organizing group, filed a lawsuit against MaineHealth on Wednesday to prevent the closure of a labor and delivery unit at MaineHealth Lincoln Hospital in Damariscotta. MaineHealth’s board of trustees is expected to vote on the closure Thursday morning.
The lawsuit seeks an emergency injunction to prohibit the board from taking a final vote.
If the unit were to close, the Damariscotta hospital would join a growing list of hospitals in rural areas across the country that are closing their labor and delivery units. More than 140 rural hospitals nationwide have stopped offering maternity services since 2020 and less than half of all rural hospitals in the country have maternity units, according to The Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. Maine has seen the second-highest rate of maternity unit closures since 2020 in the country.
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On June 10, Tom Hill was at his office in Sydney, Australia, when his phone pinged with a notification: the U.S. Senate Democratic primary race in Maine had been called. Before trading closed, Hill quickly bought stakes on the financial trading platform Polymarket, wagering that Gov. Janet Mills would lose.
Hill, who has never been to Maine and “didn’t even know that there were Maine elections going on that day,” made $17 in just a few minutes based on the outcome of an election on the other side of the world.
He isn’t the only one making money on Maine’s elections this year. More than $42 million has been wagered on markets affiliated with Maine’s elections on Polymarket and Kalshi, another financial trading platform. There is more money at stake in Maine’s Senate contest on Kalshi than in that of any other state besides Texas.