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A conversation with Samantha Horn, director of Maine’s new Office of Community Affairs
A year after calamitous winter flooding wreaked havoc on infrastructure throughout Maine, local officials are looking for long-term solutions to ward off the increasing and intensifying disasters fueled by climate change.
They’re applying for grants, completing technical reviews and engaging in regulatory processes. But small town governments aren’t necessarily equipped to handle the scale and scope of the projects their communities need.
That’s where the freshly minted Maine Office of Community Affairs comes in: a one-stop shop for Maine communities as they sketch project blueprints, tap into funding opportunities and navigate state and federal bureaucracy.
Last October, Mills appointed the biologist Samantha Horn — a former director of science for the Nature Conservancy and long-time leader in state government natural resources programs — to lead the office.
I spoke with Horn in December. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Emmett Gartner: Could you start by providing a quick overview of your career?
Samantha Horn: I started my professional journey when I was in between college and graduate school, doing field work out in the Northern California forests, and I ran into some pretty difficult natural resource conflicts. People were having a tough time resolving the spotted owl controversy at the time and there was even violence. And I just thought, you know, there has to be a better way for us to manage our conversations around natural resources.
I came to Maine in 1999 and I started working in natural resource agencies, including Inland Fisheries and Wildlife as a biologist and Department of Marine Resources as the aquaculture policy coordinator, and I really got a strong sense of how Maine communities were engaging in discussions around how to make decisions about how we use our land, how we use our water.
I then got the opportunity to join the Land Use Planning Commission, and I feel like that was a real privilege to work in a position like that, where I could think deeply about how we use our land, how people who live in the local area can have a strong voice. And then from there, I went to the Nature Conservancy, then did a little bit of consulting along the same lines.
All of my jobs have been about: How can communities have agency and good discussions about how we use land? Now I've landed in this role, which I'm really excited about. It's housing, it's land use, it's how we conserve lands. It's a coastal program. It's lots of threads, but it's all about how our communities can be healthy.
E.G.: Why is this office needed?
S.H.: The Mills administration has done really amazing work at creating opportunities for communities to get grants and technical assistance on a number of topics related to community sustainability, infrastructure and resilience. What I think is needed at this point is some connective tissue so that communities have an easier time navigating the resources so that they spend more time doing the projects and less time finding the grants.
Folks are asking for updated technical assistance documents or a database to learn about grant opportunities, things that I think are very achievable and are going to make a real difference for communities who sometimes don't have any paid staff, but who are trying their best.
E.G.: How will the Office of Community Affairs differ from the old State Planning Office? (Created in 1968 to provide technical planning and economic development assistance to Maine communities, the office was eliminated by former Gov. Paul LePage in 2012.)
S.H.: I wasn’t in the State Planning Office at that time, so I'm not as familiar, but some of the topics are different. As I understand it, the State Planning Office used to have solid waste included, whereas we have a resilience mission and theme now because of everything we've seen over the last few years with storms in particular.
E.G.: What will the office’s budget be? Has that been clarified, and if so, how many staff positions have been allocated?
S.H.: So that's a decision that the legislature and the governor will make over the coming six months. Currently my position is the only budget item in the office. We will have some folks joining us as part of federal grants and so that will be coming in the next few months, but the majority of the positions will be moved as a function of the biennial budget.
Right now, based on the administration's proposal, the number of positions that would be moved would be low to mid twenties, and then there's additional federal grant-funded positions. So my sense is that when all is said and done, we’ll probably end up in the low thirties for this biennium.
E.G.: Which federal grants did the state receive, and what positions will they fund?
S. H.: A great example is the $69 million resilience grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Part of it will fund the State Resilience Office, and that is intended to be a coordinating hub for a lot of this activity.
There are four positions associated with that office, and one of its functions is to be a coordinator for a network of resilience coordinators in regional planning organizations, so we'll have people across the state who are there to help communities find the resources they need.
E.G.: What expertise are you looking for? If hiring employees from within state government, which agencies will they come from and what will happen to their old positions?
S.H.: Each program is coming as a whole and will continue to do the same functions. The benefit of putting them in the office together is that we can communicate and work across programs.
For example, we might have one community grant program that comes from federal funding, and we might have one community grant program that comes from the state, and we could bring those together to work through a common application process so that communities only need to apply once and have access to multiple sources of funds.
E.G.: Time is such a valuable resource, especially when it comes to application windows for certain grants. Will your office prioritize the communities most vulnerable to climate-related disasters, or communities with less resources in more rural areas?
S.H.: In some of the grant and service programs, vulnerable community status is considered as one of the criteria in the grant programs. As far as the response system to communities, that's a great question, and we have not designed a system yet.
As we go into January and February, we'll be putting more details to what we have in mind. The programs won't land in the office until July 1, so right now it's preparatory planning. We'll be taking this piece by piece over the next few months to build a responsive system. |
