The Portland City Council will be discussing plans to implement a city-wide Clean Elections Program so that publicly funded candidates can afford to run against candidates that take donations from wealthy or corporate donors.
Councilor Anna Trevorrow has crafted a plan for implementing clean elections that has won the support of Maine Citizens for Clean Elections and was approved by a straw poll of city councilors at the April 3rd, 2023 City Council workshop meeting.
Anna’s proposal would allow clean candidates to collect a number of $5 qualifying contributions to qualify for the program. Once qualified, clean candidates would get public funding to run municipal elections for Mayor, City Council, and School Board in Portland.
We’re close to getting the Clean Election Program we voted for, but we’re not there yet.
We need Portland residents to submit testimony to make sure that the City Council passes the Trevorrow Plan instead of cutting funding for the program or making it uncompetitive or unusable for real campaigns.