Maine Gov. Janet Mills committed an apparent social media blunder on Monday evening, posting images of Portland, Maine’s notorious Marginal Way homeless encampment along side images of Maine lakes and mountains.
“Some local travel these last few weeks,” she wrote from her personal Facebook account, adding a challenge for her followers to identify where those locations were in Maine.
Screen captures of the images circulated quickly among Maine politicos, with many wondering if the images of bedraggled tents on public land wound up in the post accidentally.
But Mills appeared to confirm that she had posted the images on purpose in a comment on the post, telling a follower “yes” when asked whether the tent pictures were from the Marginal Way encampment.
[VIDEO: ‘Millsvilles’: The Maine Wire Visits Portland’s Drug-Infested Tent Cities…]
The encampment, which has grown considerably in recent weeks, came into existence as the result of deliberate choices by state and local leaders to provide a central location for the unhoused.
The location has become an open air drug market, with residents using heroin in broad daylight, brandishing weapons, and menacing local businesses and their patrons.
Last month in a radio interview, Mills was asked whether she had visited any of the sites and her administration planned to do to address the ongoing humanitarian crisis, especially as Maine winter bears down on the state.
She responded that she was looking to lawmakers to come up with “creative proposals” to fix the problem.
Mills was asked on camera by WGME whether she would accept the Portland Police Chief’s offer to take her on a tour of the visit the site during her visit to Portland.
“Gotta go,” she responded.
"Gotta go."
— The Maine Wire (@TheMaineWire) October 5, 2023
Governor Janet Mills walked away from a @WGME reporter yesterday when asked about touring Portland's homeless encampments. pic.twitter.com/MWqRz9xfta
Mills isn’t the first New England pol to publish something embarrassing on social media in the late evening.
Most notably, in 2013, former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown replied to a critical journalist “Bqhatevwr“.
<span class="dsq-postid" data-dsqidentifier="22625 https://www.themainewire.com/?p=22625">3 Comments
We can add a new stop for cruise ship passengers who normally choose to visit L.L. Bean, Portland Head Light and Kennebunkport so they can see the real Maine created by agenda driven, incompetent, political hacks.
Stop taking in illegals and there may be room at shelters and in subsidized housing.
Opening mental health hospitals again would be a big help to some of these people living in tents.
The mere costs of caring for MH/SUD patients by closing Pineland and others and pushing those patients to live in the real world was a huge misguided mistake. Just as with AMHI, maybe the courts will take over the problem and implement a “consent decree” that forces Maine Housing and all the Housing Authorities and all the municipal DHHS/HHS shelters to come together and just build the facility(ies) and hire the staff that will address this problem head-on. Back when Pineland closed, social service agencies weren’t ready for the swamp they now have to swim in.