On November 3, voters in Portland, Maine delivered a stinging rebuke to Mayor Kate Snyder and all but one city councilor by voting overwhelmingly to back four out of five referenda placed on the ballot by People First Portland (PFP). Portlanders supported raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour (62.4 percent), mandating Green New Deal building codes (59.5 percent), banning police use of facial recognition software (65.6 percent), and establishing rent control and tenant protections (58.3 percent). A measure restricting short-term rentals (which take much-needed housing stock off the market for local residents) lost so narrowly that a recount is underway (50.3 to 49.7 percent). All this despite the Chamber of Commerce, well-heeled developers, and the corporate headquarters of Airbnb spending $1,000,000 (nearly all of it in the final month) to defeat the measures. PFP, for its part, raised approximately $30,000 and relied on an all-volunteer effort spearheaded by members from the local Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and coalition partners including the Southern Maine Labor Council (along with a half-dozen union locals), Black P.O.W.E.R. (formerly Black Lives Matter Portland), the Southern Maine Workers Center, Fair Rent Portland, Our Revolution Maine, the Portland Green Party, and Progressive Portland.
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Mayor Snyder and the majority of city councilors campaigned against PFP by warning that, should the referenda pass, they could not be altered by the city council for five years. They warned the referenda would override the city council’s authority and “subvert the open public process.” This claim was always patently ridiculous, but it may have helped propel PFP to victory as voters sought an end run around the council’s failure to act against the rapid pace of gentrification in the city.
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Incredibly, Mayor Snyder and the majority of the city council are now attempting to sabotage the election results. On the advice of counsel, the city council is claiming that the time-and-a-half hazard pay provision — that was clearly spelled out in the minimum wage referendum and was the target of hundreds of thousands of dollars of negative campaigning — should not be implemented until January 2022, instead of December 3, 2020 as the referendum calls for. Faced with the clear will of the majority of voters, Snyder summed up her hesitation to raise essential workers’ pay by commenting, “There’s a lot of interpretation that happens.”