Hill-Sponsored Primary Legislation


legislationSeveral bills sponsored by Dawn while a member of the Maine House are featured below. The links at right will give you a list of bills where Dawn was the primary sponsor in a given legislative session. From the resulting lists you can access documents providing more details on each bill. You can also access the Maine Legislature lawmaker site advanced search page directly.

Legislation Sponsored by Dawn Hill

Featured Sponsored Bills from 123rd & 124th Maine House Representatives

From consumer protection, to environmental protection; from protecting children to using business instinct in the creation of smart law; and from public safety protection to taking a stand against Washington bureaucracy, Representative Dawn Hill successfully created enduring and important legislation, gaining respect among her legislative peers.

The following represent just a few of her legislative highlights:

LD 340 - Summary - This legacy law, passed in the House of Representatives by a large margin (Roll Call #44), will protect Maine's shorelines, from illegal tree cutting in the shore land overlay district of rivers, lakes and coastlines. Violators who illegally cut these trees, often for water views or to "add property value" to their existing shore line frontage, will be required to pay a fine for the cutting and also pay for a reforestation plan as well as replace trees and under-story vegetation removed with ones as similar to species and size as feasible. The law was created, to protect Maine's precious shore line and to act as a deterrent from land owners/developers who have the mindset they are willing to violate the law and "pay a fine for a million dollar view." The Maine League of Conservation Voters deemed LD - 340 as one of its "ground-breaking" pieces of legislation for 2007 and the Maine Municipal Association termed the law as "municipal friendly." The law will serve to protect Maine's quality of life and natural resources which so many have come to love.

LD 1727 - Summary - In Maine, it has been law to both certify that your dog has a rabies certificate AND that your dog be licensed in the municipality in which you live. However, there was never a connection between vaccination and the licensing process. Hill's statute requires veterinarians to send a copy of the rabies certificate to the Maine Department of Agriculture, which in turn forwards it to local municipalities. This allows local animal control officers (ACO) to know if a vaccinated dog is also licensed. The law promotes public safety in that local ACO's can determine that a licensed dog does in fact have a rabies certificate, regardless of collar status. LD-1727 was deemed "municipal friendly" by Maine Municipal Association in that all revenues generated by its implementation, go in part to the local ACO, the local clerk and the Maine Animal Welfare Fund without raising additional taxes.

LD 2079 - Summary - Visual sexual exploitation of children for self gratification in a "private setting" is illegal in Maine, but until recently, doing the same in a "public setting" was not. The oversight in the law which was brought to the attention of Rep. Hill by LT. Alexander of the Ogunquit Police Department was corrected in Hill's legislation. A revision of the statute corrected the existing Maine statute to mean that if a perpetrator of visual sexual aggression against a child commits an illegal act in public, then the child falls under the same protections as they would in private locations for the same type of offense. Prior to the change in law, police were powerless to charge a suspect for such predatory behavior advanced on a child in a public setting.

HP 1654 - Summary - Throughout Maine, there are literally thousands of miles of water frontage and shoreland along the ocean, lakes, marshes, rivers, ponds and tributaries. The US government promised to identify those areas very clearly because FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is tasked with identifying floodplain areas that are prone to possible dangerous flooding. In particular, the banking industry, when processing a mortgage for a property owner, must check with the flood plain maps to ensure that their client's property is not located in a flood plain, else they require that owner to purchase expensive flood insurance. The problem is that many of the flood plain maps in Maine are 30 years old and inaccurate resulting in millions of dollars of insurance premiums purchased unnecessarily, at the expense of Maine landowners.

Maine property owners must prove at their own cost that they are not in a flood plain, when they suspect a federal map is wrong - an additional cost due to incorrect mapping.

Hill's HP (house paper) was filed as a Resolution, insisting that FEMA, which falls under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security, fix the federal and state maps as promised and budgeted for previously by law makers in Washington. The resolve received bipartisan support in the Maine legislature and will be presented to the Maine Congressional and Senate delegation for consideration by Washington law makers in the near future.

The Maine Municipal Association listed FEMA's inaccurate flood plain mapping of Maine as one of its top concerns and incorporated Hill's Resolution in their recent Federal Issues Paper. The paper sets MMA's top priorities for Maine's Congressional delegation to focus on.