As the dust settles on Maine’s 2025 legislative session, it’s clear that the state’s policy landscape was defined less by dramatic headlines about legislative censures, transgender student athletics or the state’s spat with the federal government over Title IX. Instead, it was more defined by the quiet passage of consequential bills. 

This roundup focuses exclusively on legislation that passed, not the good ideas that died in committee or bad ones that were defeated along the way. Some bills expanded liberty, reduced regulatory burdens, and improved transparency. Others imposed new mandates, expanded bureaucracy, or handed over more authority to state agencies at the expense of public accountability. And a few—particularly the budget bills—were so bloated or contradictory that they deserve their own category: Ugly.

From child care reform and energy freedom to top-down election changes and budget-busting tax hikes, these bills reflect a mix of prudence and overreach. 

THE GOOD

LD 202 — “An Act to Increase the Number of Children a Child Care Provider May Care for Without Having to Be Licensed by the Department of Health and Human Services”

Effect: This bill doubles the maximum number of children someone can watch without a family childcare license, from two to three, or four if at least two of the children are siblings.

Analysis: By increasing the number of children that unlicensed childcare providers can watch, this bill will reduce the cost of childcare for Mainers everywhere and provide further support to gig workers and stay-at-home moms.

LD 337 – “An Act to Repeal the Sunday Amateur Sports Law, the Law Allowing Municipalities to Permit the Operation of Movie Theaters on Sundays and the Law Imposing a Fine or Imprisonment for Playing Games and Sports with Admission Charges on Memorial Day”

Effect: This bill repealed several laws, including one that required municipal approval for amateur sports events charging admission on Sundays, another law banning sporting events charging admission before 3:30 PM on Memorial Day, and another requiring municipal approval of movie theaters operating on Sundays between 1:00 and 11:30 PM. These are so-called “Blue Laws” that are outdated and largely not enforced by any municipality in Maine despite being in state law. 

Analysis: This bill removes several unnecessary restrictions on businesses and sports during Sundays and on Memorial Day, allowing Mainers more freedom in holding sports events and watching movies whenever they want.

LD 556 — “An Act to Preserve Heating and Energy Choice by Prohibiting a Municipality from Prohibiting a Particular Energy System or Energy Distributor”

Effect: This is one of the best bills passed by lawmakers this session. It stops municipalities from banning people or businesses from using certain heating or energy systems, preserving energy choice for Maine consumers. 

Analysis: This bill preserves consumer choice by eliminating the ability for municipalities to pick and choose what energy and heating systems locals can use in their own homes, allowing both individual choice and cost savings for consumers.

LD 631 – “An Act to Allow a Home Distiller to Distill and Share Homemade Spirituous Liquor”

Effect: This bill allows people to own home distilleries and make spirits for their own personal use and serve those spirits to family and guests. 

Analysis: This bill recognizes the right of Mainers everywhere who want to experiment and produce spirits for personal consumption.

LD 857 — “An Act to Increase Government Transparency in the Procurement of Goods and Services”

Effect: This bill requires the Director of the Bureau of General Services within the Department of Administrative and Financial Services to publicly preserve all documents related to competitive bidding processes for state contractors and all waivers to waive competitive bidding, which is currently only made available for a short period of time before being removed from the state government website.

Analysis: This bill will increase the transparency and accountability in state government’s procurement practices, allowing the public to more easily hold state government accountable for corruption, nepotism and inefficiency.

LD 1428 – “An Act to Increase Access to Child Care for Maine Families”

Effect: This bill makes it easier to provide child care by waiving Maine’s current outdoor recreational space requirements for providers within a quarter mile of an outdoor public recreation space, such as a park. 

Analysis: This bill makes it easier–especially for urban Mainers–to provide childcare services in their communities, helping to make childcare more accessible for Maine families who need it and potentially enabling new providers to practice in locations where they could not previously due to outdoor recreational space regulations. 

LD 1588 — “An Act to Ensure Transparency in Student Transfer Requests”

Effect: This bill requires school administrative units (SAU) to report to the Maine Department of Education information relating to student transfer requests into and outside of that SAU, and also requires the commissioner to publish that information online. This bill was approved in both houses but not enacted in the Senate, as it was placed on the special appropriations table due to the minor potential costs associated with SAUs reporting this data to the DOE. The fiscal note makes clear that costs associated with publishing this data can be easily absorbed by the Maine DOE. There is hope it will achieve enactment early next session.

Analysis: This bill, if finally passed off special appropriations, would increase the transparency in Maine’s school system by showing the usage rate of the student transfer system, as well as highlighting the relative demand for public schools in the state. This will also increase the transparency at the district level and highlight the number of transfer request denials certain districts may be making. The Legislature considered numerous bills this session related to modifying the student transfer process, but the DOE does not make this information readily available for lawmakers or the public. 

LD 1777 — “An Act to Reduce Costs and Increase Customer Protections for the State’s Net Energy Billing Programs”

Effect: This bill created significant savings for Mainers by stabilizing the tariff compensation rates and implementing a net energy billing project charge on the energy projects themselves to offset the cost to consumers. While this is allegedly intended to save money for ratepayers, the bill also directs the Governor’s Energy Office to redesign large swaths of the program in the future, opening the door for future abuse. It’s included among the good bills in this analysis because it should result in savings to ratepayers. However, lawmakers could have–and should have–been much more ambitious by repealing the program in its entirety, and without directing the bureaucracy to redesign the program. 

Analysis: This bill will generate savings for Maine ratepayers and stabilize certain parts of the currently volatile net energy billing program. However, it kicks the ball into the court of the executive branch on larger distributed net energy billing reforms, and fails to fully fix the problem. The program should be scrapped entirely, not redesigned. Maine ratepayers should not have to underwrite the expansion of clean energy projects. 

THE BAD

LD 427 – “An Act to Regulate Municipal Parking Space Minimums”

Effect: This bill attempts to address Maine’s housing crisis by imposing new state level mandates. It disallows municipalities from requiring more than one off street parking space per dwelling unit in designated growth areas. It additionally mandates that municipalities must allow parking requirements to be satisfied through offsite parking agreements with parking facilities within a quarter mile of a property.

Analysis: While this bill correctly acknowledges land use regulations like parking requirements as a partial cause of housing price inflation, it incorrectly attempts to impose top-down, one-size-fits-all mandates that ineffectively address the actual problem. Due to the high diversity of density, land use regulations and housing demand throughout the state, it is unwise to impose statewide mandates like this on Maine towns. 

LD 536 – “An Act to Establish Net Neutrality”

Effect: This bill imposes state-level net neutrality mandates on internet service providers in Maine, restricting network management practices like throttling and paid prioritization, and subjects violations to enforcement under the Unfair Trade Practices Act—despite ongoing federal jurisdiction and legal uncertainty.

Analysis: This bill pursues the goal of stopping internet service providers from discriminating against certain content providers, but unwisely. This unfairly reaches across state lines and reduces flexibility for internet service providers. Many of the terms in this law can be considered quite vague, and it is difficult to tell exactly what behavior is allowed or disallowed under this legislation. Internet service providers are a national market, and this type of regulation is more properly handled at the national level rather than creating a confusing regulatory patchwork throughout the states. 

LD 589 – “An Act to Establish a State Minimum Hourly Wage for Agricultural Workers”

Effect: This bill applies the state’s $14.65 minimum wage to agricultural workers, bringing them up from the federal standard of $7.25. 

Analysis: Several farming groups testified against this bill due to the negative impact it will have on an industry already facing steep labor shortages and where work is both highly seasonal and unpredictable. The bill puts farmworkers’ jobs at unnecessary  risk, as well as farmers’ livelihoods.

LD 598 – “An Act to Require Minimum Pay for Reporting to Work”

Effect: This bill mandates that employers must automatically pay workers a minimum of two hours’ wages when they report to work but are sent home due to shift reductions or scheduling changes.

Analysis: This bill will significantly hurt the restaurant and retail industries and small businesses, denying them the flexibility they need to be able to operate within the razor-thin margins those industries often demand. Maine is known as Vacationland, and many businesses in Maine are small restaurants that need flexibility to operate and turn a profit. This across the board compensation floor is likely to hurt their bottom line.

LD 837 – “An Act to Require Positions Taken by the Public Advocate to Be Consistent with the Cost-effective Implementation of the State’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions Obligations”

Effect: This bill requires the public advocate’s representation of the interests of the general public in energy policy advocacy to be consistent with the state’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals.

Analysis: This robs the public of a major voice in government, as many of the major policies the public advocate and others have spoken out about are the costs of greenhouse gas emissions reduction programs. This law makes it so the duty of the public advocate is no longer to represent the interests of ratepayers, but rather the “clean energy” industry and the deployment of solar, wind, and other energies. New Englanders as a whole are facing significant growth in their electricity bills due to renewable energy mandates and state policies like net energy billing. Forcing the public advocate to support these programs instead of representing ratepayers will deprive the people of a voice in advocating for their own financial interests.

LD 1543 – “An Act to Establish the Maine Green Schools Network”

Effect: This creates a new bureaucratic framework within the Maine Department of Education to prompt and fund climate change agendas. This includes emissions reductions for the schools and skills development career exploration for particularly “climate ready” fields.

Analysis: This wastes state money in putting yet another item on the already full plate of Maine public schools, forcing them to consider environmental career encouragement and increasing energy efficiency, “environmental literacy,” and similar jargon over student achievement in common subjects where Maine continues to decline compared to peer states.

LD 1938 – “An Act Regarding the Regulation of Tobacco”

Effect: This bill disallows retailers to sell tobacco products through vending machines, doubles penalties for even incidental tobacco distribution, extends regulations on electronic smoking devices to include even components and accessories, and bans smoking in all hotel and motel rooms.  It even bans tobacco retailers from giving away tobacco products.

Analysis: This bill hurts tobacco retailers, imposes concerning and potentially draconian penalties for incidental violations of tobacco regulations, and even regulates what consenting tobacco smoking adults do in the confines of their own hotel rooms. If a tobacco retailer decides to give a loved one a pack of cigars for Christmas, they might be breaking this law. Someone not employed as a tobacco retailer may do so, however.

LD 1977 – “An Act to Amend the Laws Governing Elections”

Effect: This enacts a wide array of election law changes, most notably allowing the secretary of state to commandeer other agencies as “provisional voter registration” agencies, repealing the requirement for the Secretary of State to implement a system to collect and log public concerns about the conducting of elections by limiting that system to specific statute violations, and enables municipalities to limit public access to observe absentee ballot inspections.

Analysis: This bill poses several threats to public transparency and the checks and balances within our election system. It provides overly broad power for the secretary of state to commandeer other agencies for voter registration purposes, removes the public’s ability to directly engage with our state’s top election official through legal channels, and undermines transparency in potentially controversial absentee ballot inspections.

THE UGLY

LD 166 – “An Act to Prohibit the Sale of Tobacco Products in Pharmacies and Retail Establishments Containing Pharmacies”

Effect: Bans any retail establishment containing a pharmacy from selling tobacco, making violation of that regulation a civil violation.

Analysis: This will seriously harm Mainers’ freedom of enterprise and association. Many grocery stores contain both tobacco products and pharmacies, and forcing them to pick one or the other will further treat smokers like second-class citizens. It is additionally contradictory with other policies, since Maine’s new budget relies heavily on a tobacco tax increase to balance the budget. Yet this bill will likely reduce that revenue source while cutting out an avenue for legal adults to purchase their preferred tobacco products. 

Budget bills: LDs 609 (Part 1) and 210 (Part 2)

Effect: These bills–the first a triennial bill modifying spending in 2025, 2026, and 2027, the second containing additional spending and new taxes in the new biennium–are the general fund budget bills for Maine. The new tax and fees increases included in Maine’s next budget include:

  • Taxes:
    • A tobacco tax increase from $2.00 to $3.50 per pack
    • A cannabis tax increase from 10% to 14%
    • A new 5.5% streaming service subscription tax 
    • An arborist licensing fee increase from $75 to $180
    • A paint tax increase from $.25 to $.75 per gallon
    • A hunting and fishing license fee increase of $5
    • A concealed carry permit fee increase of $15
  • Spending:

Analysis: The budget is a tax-and-spend plan that adds over $500 million in new spending without any measure of real reform. It grows government but ignores long-term sustainability. Lawmakers missed the chance to fix structural issues and instead doubled down on expanding programs like MaineCare and taxing Mainers even more. If revenues tighten in the months ahead, there’s little doubt that the Democratic majority in Augusta will continue to devise new ways ot nickel and dime Mainers of their hard-earned money. 

Conclusion

Whether Mainers see this session as a win or a warning depends on their appetite for higher taxes, heavier regulation, and expanding bureaucracy. The legislature delivered a mixed bag overall—some reforms will ease everyday burdens, but others will tighten the state’s grip on families, employers, and consumers. 

What’s clear is that Augusta’s appetite for growth—in both the size and scope of government—shows no sign of slowing. Mainers concerned about liberty, transparency, and fiscal sanity should stay vigilant, because if this session proved anything, it’s that our state government’s appetite for their money is ever-growing.