Deputy Director of Development Services (Economic Development) for the city of Augusta<\/a> (pop. 19,136), started in March of 2013.\u00a0 Part of Luke\u2019s current role is to start new businesses, and attract existing businesses to relocate to Maine\u2019s capital city.<\/p>\nDuring his position as Director of Economic and Community Development, for the city of Westbrook (pop.17,494 as of 2010), he encountered some rough issues, such as the dispute between IDEXX and Pike Industries (Pike and IDEXX have had a long conflict over blasting at the quarry and are awaiting court approval for a consent agreement that the Westbrook City Council.)\u00a0 However, he also encountered great resolutions, such as working to help obtain a $125,000 grant for the city to put toward the demolition of the Maine Rubber plant.\u00a0 Under his direction, Westbrook boasted the lowest commercial vacancy rate in the Greater Portland area.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Steve Woods, host of TideSmart Talk with Stevoe, talked Maine politics and economics with Keith Luke the Deputy Director of Development Services (Economic Development), for the city of Augusta. The two talked about how bad news travels faster than good news and how Augusta has recently only been in the news for negative things. Luke knew in 8th grade he wanted to pursue a career in politics and his first job out of college was at the United Way working with future Mayor Brennan. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}