Maine’s municipal welfare spending, known as General Assistance, has been dominated by the city of Portland over the last four and a half years, according to records from the Department of Health and Human Services obtained via the Freedom of Access Act.
The city of Portland accounted for $79.6 million of all General Assistance welfare spending in the state of Maine from Jan. 1, 2019 to June 30, 2023 — and 70 percent, or $55.7 million, came from taxpayers throughout the state.
During that time period, Portland’s welfare spending consumed 72.8 percent of all General Assistance spending in the state, which totaled $109.3 million.
General Assistance is a program that provides the poor and indigent with vouchers to purchasing housing and life’s basic necessities.
The welfare program is administered at the municipal level, but Maine law requires the State to reimburse those cities and towns for 70 percent of the spending.
The State’s share of General Assistance spending amounted to $76.6 million, and $55.7 million of that went to Portland. At the same time, Portland taxpayers were on the hook for $23.9 million.
These figures do not include the hundreds of millions of taxpayer-funded state and federal benefits that have flowed to the city through one-off spending bills and emergency rental assistance bills. They also do not include state-administered welfare programs like Food Stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Medicaid.
Although you would expect the city with the largest population and the most homeless shelters to spend more than its peers on welfare, Portland also vastly outspends other Maine cities as a proportion of total population.
During the last four and half years, Portland has spent $1,164.93 per resident on municipal welfare.
The next biggest spender is Bangor, which spent $171.67 per resident.
But the $5.5 million the city spent in total only comprised 5 percent of total welfare spending.
In other words, Portland is spending 6.8 times more on the welfare program per resident than Bangor, which also has a visible homelessness problem.
Statewide, Maine taxpayers spent $79.71 per resident of Maine on municipal welfare.
If you take Portland out of the mix, though, that statewide per capita figure drops to $22.84 per resident.
That means that taxpayers are spending, on a per resident basis, 50 times more on General Assistance welfare in Portland than in every other city or town in Maine.
Amid the ongoing migrant crisis, Portland is also the municipality that has disproportionately paid to house and feed thousands of jobless, homeless migrants who have arrived in the city.
Most of those migrants are General Assistance recipients, which explains in part the Portland’s outlier welfare spending.
Portland does not keep track of whether a General Assistance welfare recipient is an asylum applicant or an illegal alien when it administers the welfare benefit.
In terms of total welfare spending, welfare spending per resident, and welfare spending as a share of the state total, no city in Maine even comes close to the towering sums of taxpayer dollars Portland has spent fighting poverty since 2019.
Here’s the data from DHHS:
