OUR REPRESENTATIVES
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Governor
Janet Trafton Mills was sworn in as the 75th Governor of Maine on Wednesday, January 2, 2019.Governor Mills is the first woman governor of Maine. In her historic victory, she earned more votes than any governor in state history and is the first governor since 1966 to win a majority of the vote for her first term.
As Governor, she has led Maine through a global pandemic with nation-leading results, including one of the highest vaccination rates and one of the lowest death rates in the country, protecting the lives and livelihoods of Maine people.
Now, she is leading Maine to a strong economic recovery. Under her leadership, Maine’s unemployment rate has dropped below three percent, Maine has recovered all the jobs lost during the pandemic, and the state’s economic growth has been 11th best in the nation during her time in office.
Working closely with Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, she increased the Rainy Day Fund to a record high $896 million and delivered one of the strongest inflation relief measures in the nation – sending $850 to most Maine taxpayers.
Governor Mills has also expanded health care to more than 90,000 Maine people, fully funded schools for the first time in Maine history, fully restored municipal revenue sharing, raised the minimum teacher salary, delivered free community college, cut taxes for Maine retirees, and provided significant property tax relief for Maine people, among many other bipartisan accomplishments.
Through her Maine Jobs & Recovery Plan, she is now focused on addressing Maine’s longstanding workforce shortage, investing millions of dollars in job training programs and initiatives to build more housing for Maine people.
Governor Mills was born and raised in Farmington, Maine, where she still proudly lives today. The granddaughter of Aroostook County potato farmers and the daughter of a long-time high school English teacher and the U.S. Attorney for Maine, she learned the value of hard-work at an early age, venturing out early every morning to deliver newspapers along her route and serving meals in the evening at the local diner. She graduated from Mt. Blue High School in Farmington, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and the University of Maine School of Law.
She first entered public service as an Assistant Attorney General, where she prosecuted homicides and other major crimes. After a few years, she was elected District Attorney for Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford Counties, making her the first woman to be elected as a DA in New England.
In that role, Janet saw firsthand how the criminal justice system frequently failed victims of domestic violence. Frustrated by the legislature’s failure to take action, Janet co-founded the Maine Women’s Lobby to advocate for battered and abused women, and won election to the Maine House of Representatives herself in 2002.
In 1985, she met and married the love of her life, her husband, Stan Kuklinski, a widower with five young daughters ages four to sixteen. Janet and Stan moved back to Farmington, and she became a full-time mom to five daughters who she helped raise while working full-time herself. She is now the proud grandmother to three grandsons and two granddaughters.
After a devastating stroke, Stan passed away in 2014. In the last year of his life, Governor Mills learned firsthand what thousands of Maine families go through every year—a complex and confusing health care system, rejection letters from insurance companies, and unaffordable prescription drugs even for those lucky enough to have coverage. This is one of the reasons why Janet is so determined to ensure that every Maine person and every Maine family has access to affordable, high-quality health care.
Prior to becoming governor, she served as the Attorney General of Maine – the first and only woman to hold the job. As Attorney General, Janet has made it her mission to stand up to those who have tried to exploit Maine people—from fighting dishonest mortgage lending companies to help keep Maine people in their homes, to fighting big Pharma for their role in creating the opioid crisis and then using that money to purchase overdose-reversal kits that have saved more than 1,000 lives, to fighting to protect health care coverage for young adults.
As governor, she is fighting to see that every Maine person has affordable, high-quality health care, that Maine has a strong economy with good-paying jobs in every part of the state, that every Maine child has access to a world-class education, and that Maine is a place where families can put down roots and raise their kids.
She is a pragmatic problem-solver, focused on bringing Democrats, Republicans, and Independents together to find consensus and move Maine forward -- strongly believing that no one has a monopoly on good ideas.
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US House Rep - District 1
Chellie Pingree never anticipated a life in politics. Living on the offshore island of North Haven, Maine, she raised her kids and ran a small business. She served on the school board and as the local tax assessor, a job no one else in town wanted. But in 1991, when she was approached about running for State Senate, she jumped at the chance.
She scored a remarkable upset, defeating a popular Republican, and went on to serve four terms in the Maine Senate. But throughout her political career, from Augusta to Washington and beyond, the lessons she learned on North Haven have always been her guide: Be accountable to your neighbors, and always use your common sense.
Chellie Johnson (she has legally changed her name from "Rochelle") was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1955, the youngest of four children. Her father, Harry, worked in advertising and her mother, Dorothy, was a nurse. Chellie moved to Maine as a teenager, attended the University of Southern Maine, and graduated from the College of the Atlantic, in Bar Harbor. After college, she moved to North Haven, an island town of 350 people twelve miles off the coast of Rockland, to raise her family and make a living.
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State Senate District 35
Senator Mark Lawrence is serving his sixth nonconsecutive term in the Maine Senate, representing District 35, which includes the towns of Eliot, Kittery, Ogunquit, South Berwick, York and part of Berwick.
Senator Lawrence is a practicing attorney from Southern Maine, with a distinguished career in public service. He was first elected to the Maine House of Representatives during his second year of law school, where he served from 1988 to 1992. He then served four terms in the Maine Senate from 1992 to 2000, with two years as the President of the Maine Senate.
Following his career in the Legislature, Mark served as York County District Attorney from 2003 to 2010 before opening up a private practice in South Berwick.
Aside from his legal work, he is an active member of his community. Mark is one of the founding members of the Laudholm Trust in Wells and has worked to secure funding for Land for Maine’s Future. He lives in Eliot with his wife, Tina, and daughters, Céline and Hayley.
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State House Rep - District 146
Rep. Gerry Runte is serving his first term in the Maine House of Representatives. He is a member of the Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee.
Rep. Runte and his wife, Michelle, who has deep family roots in Maine, settled in York eight years ago. Prior to moving to Maine, he was raised in a career Army family, served in the Army and moved frequently during his career in the energy industry.
Rep. Runte has served as a member of York’s Energy Steering Committee and Planning Board and chaired the York Climate Action Plan Steering Committee. He is deeply interested in contributing to the ongoing revision of Maine’s electricity regulatory structure and implementing Maine’s climate action plan.
Rep. Runte has four children, two of whom recently graduated from York High School. He holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in engineering from Penn State University.
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State House Rep - District 147
Rep. Holly T. Sargent is serving her first term in the Maine House of Representatives. She is a member of the Education and Cultural Affairs Committee.
Rep. Sargent is the founder and CEO of Doing Good While Doing Well, a consulting firm focused on building bridges among nonprofits, social entrepreneurs and philanthropists. She is also the founding director of the Harvard Women’s Leadership Board. Previously, Rep. Sargent served for nearly 20 years as the senior associate dean for strategy and external affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. She has also served as the executive director for development of the Rhodes Trust, the global NGO overseeing the Rhodes Scholars.
An active member of her community, Rep. Sargent has served as the president of the York Rotary Club, vice chair of the Community Auditorium Building Committee and founder of the York Chapter of Together Women Rise. She is a member of the International Women’s Forum of Maine, serves on the board of the Maine Recovery Fund and is an honorary board member of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.
Rep. Sargent has also served her faith community as the senior warden and chair of the capital campaign for St. George’s Episcopal Church. She is a former member of the Diocesan Council of the Episcopal Diocese of Maine.
Rep. Sargent and her husband, Robert, live in York and have two grown children.