COMMUNITY PROFILE:
This district serves the community of Orono (partially).
There are 5,466 actively registered voters within this district:
CURRENT REPRESENTATIVE:
Laurie Osher, a Democrat from Bangor. Rep. Osher has served in the state legislature since being elected in November 2020.
Rep. Osher is the Legislature’s representative to the HIV Advisory Committee and serves on the Secretary of State’s State Calendar Working Group. She is one of the leaders of the Legislature’s Progressive Women’s Caucus and is the leader of the Legislature’s LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus and Jewish Legislators Caucus. She is also a member of the Council of State Governments East’s Agricultural and Rural Affairs Committee, a coalition of neighboring states and provinces working together to address regional issues in agriculture and its impacts on the rural economy.
Osher moved to Maine in 1999 to be a research and teaching faculty member at the University of Maine in Orono after earning a PhD in Soil Science at the University of California, Berkeley and working as a Research Associate with the Environmental Protection Agency. Prior to attending UC Berkeley, she worked for the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service in Alaska, Colorado and California, the United States Agency for International Development in Peru, the USDA Soil Conservation Service in North Carolina and with an environmental consulting firm in Massachusetts. In 2009, she founded Osher Environment Systems, a small business that advises and assists clients to make their homes and commercial buildings more energy efficient.
Outside of the Legislature, Osher is the Community Resilience Specialist at Eastern Maine Development Corporation. In this capacity, she assists communities in Penobscot, Aroostook and Piscataquis Counties to be more resilient to extreme weather events. She works with town managers, select board members, town counselors and community volunteers to identify issues of concern, propose solutions, plan projects and write grants to fund them. Osher serves on the boards of the Maine Jewish Film Festival and A Wider Bridge. She served on the Orono Town Council from 2017 to 2022.
Rep. Osher serves on the agriculture, conservation and forestry committee which covers the Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry; agricultural development; agricultural fairs, products and marketing; animal control and welfare; harness racing; food policy; food safety, inspection and labeling; dairy industry; pest management and pesticides regulation; industrial hemp; state parks, historic sites, public lands and submerged lands; Maine Land Use Planning Commission; geological surveying and mapping; Maine Forest Service; timber harvesting; industrial hemp; the Land for Maine’s Future Program; and Baxter State Park.
Information for this lawmaker’s biography has been compiled from numerous public sources, including pages maintained by political parties, individual lawmakers and the Maine Legislature.
Contact this lawmaker: Laurie.Osher@legislature.maine.gov or 207-944-6743
ELECTIONS 2024:
This seat is on the ballot during the 2024 election cycle. Running for the seat are Laurie Osher (D) and Thomas Casey (R).
View contributions to each candidate, campaign expenditures and campaign filings on the Maine Ethics Commission website.
On Election Night in November, this section will also feature live results for this race.
LEGISLATIVE WORK:
The following chart is a compilation of legislation sponsored by Rep. Osher during the 131st Legislature. To learn more about each legislation and see where it is in the legislative process, click on the bill ID in the first column. View each vote cast by Rep. Osher.
For those viewing this page on mobile, you can view more columns by scrolling left-to-right through the embedded table. That same material is available by clicking the Bill ID.
AI Disclosure: The bill summaries appearing below have been generated by Claude Haiku, an Artificial Intelligence model from Anthropic, which describes itself as an AI safety and research company. BillTrack50, which has compiled the summaries, has extensively tested the accuracy of the information but does not guarantee that every summary is completely accurate and comprehensive. You should always read and rely on the bill text that is provided by the Maine Legislature, which is accessible by clicking on the Bill ID in the table. (A button to flag AI-generated errors to the BillTrack50 team is available on each bill page.) We encourage readers to view our ethics policy, which includes our policy on the newsroom’s use of AI.
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