A group of Maine legislators plans to launch an effort to impeach Gov. Paul LePage, it announced Thursday.
The lawmakers are accusing the Republican governor of blackmailing Good Will-Hinckley, a private organization that runs the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences, into rescinding an offer of employment to Democratic House Speaker Mark Eves, the Bangor Daily News reports.
"You don't talk about impeachment or think about impeachment unless a crime has taken place. In this case, we believe a crime has taken place," independent Rep. Benjamin Chipman, one of the six representatives who met to discuss impeachment proceedings, told local news station WCSH6.
The school's board offered Eves the president position a few weeks ago, and he was scheduled to take over July 1, but the school announced this Wednesday that it had withdrawn its offer, according to the Portland Press Herald.
Eves claims the board did so only because LePage threatened to withhold $530,000 in state funding from the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences, a charter school for at-risk youth, if Eves were president. The Harold Alfond Foundation, a private charity, had previously committed to providing the organization with $4 million in grants, but wrote to school officials last week expressing concern about the ?likely? loss of state funding. The foundation worried that without state funding, the school would not be able to meet various goals required for it to obtain the grants.
LePage has vocally expressed his opposition to the hire, citing Eves' anti-charter-school voting record as a reason he is unfit for the job. In a Thursday statement he doubled down on his position, calling the hiring a ?back-room deal between cronies.? He went on to say:
I will not stand for it and neither will the Maine people. Speaker Eves has been an ardent foe of charter schools for his entire political career, then he turns around and gets hired to run a charter school -- whose board is chaired by Eves? own State House employee -- for a cushy job worth about $150,000 in total compensation. To provide half-a-million dollars in taxpayer funding to a charter school that would be headed by Maine?s most vehement anti-charter-school politician is not only the height of hypocrisy, it is absolutely unacceptable