A new Republican-led bill introduced on Tuesday looks to amend the citizens petition process with respect to agency rule making in Maine.
Under current Maine State Law, agencies are required to begin appropriate rule making proceedings upon receipt of a petition with 150 valid signatures.
This process was recently invoked by the Natural Resources Council of Maine (NRCM) to prompt the Board of Environmental Protection (BEP) to consider adopting a California-style electric vehicle (EV) mandate.
Had the rule proposed in the petition been approved, 51 percent of new car sales in Maine would have needed to be comprised of EVs of model year 2028 by 2028 and 82 percent of model year 2032 by 2032.
Although the BEP ultimately rejected the proposed rule, the NRCM’s petition kicked off a lengthy and controversial process, as the Board would have had the authority to unilaterally approve these changes without input from elected officials.
Maine law used to require under 38 M.R.S. § 585-D that rule changes related to vehicle emissions standards — such as the EV mandate — be categorized as “major substantive,” but this was repealed by lawmakers in 2005, effectively removing the legislature from the process.
With this portion of the law no longer on the books, the controversial EV mandate was automatically categorized as “routine technical” when it was first taken up by the BEP. Had the measure not been dropped, the agency could have set about rule making without any input from elected officials.
While similar proposals would now again be subject to legislative oversight, as Gov. Janet Mills (D) signed a bill sponsored by Rep. Michael Soboleski (R-Phillips) into law last year effectively reinstating these requirements, the months of debate frequently led to criticism of the citizen petition process itself.
A new bill, also sponsored by Rep. Soboleski, now looks to amend this part of the rule making process.
Under LD 1131 — cosponsored by Sen. Joseph Martin (R-Oxford) and Rep. Katrina J. Smith (R-Palermo) — citizen petitions would need more than only the static 150 signatures that can currently initiate rule making proceedings.
The proposed law would replace the threshold with a requirement that the number of signatures on the petition meet or exceed one percent of the total votes cast in the most recent gubernatorial election (there were 842,447 ballots cast in 2024, for instance, so this bill threshold would raise the threshold to over eight thousand signatures at the present time).
This bill would also automatically classify all rules adopted via the citizen petition process as major substantive, meaning that lawmakers would be guaranteed to have the final say on all rules approved under these procedures.
The State and Local Government Committee will eventually schedule a public hearing for this bill, where Mainers will have the opportunity to voice their thoughts both in person, virtually, and in writing.
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