Many of the people fired from state government since Gov. Martin O?Malley took office have not had a good year, for understandable reasons, but Rachael Gingrich has had a particularly bad one.
Gingrich, 28, lost her sister in a fatal car crash in January. On Valentine?s Day, her husband told her their marriage was over. The next month her grandmother died.
“But I still have my job,” she would say to herself.
On April 30, Gingrich, the former president of Montgomery County Young Republicans, was told she would lose her job as special assistant to the executive secretary of the Maryland Transportation Authority. She said a veteran employee told her, “Rachael, you?ve done a really great job. We fought really hard to keep you, but the administration wanted you gone.”
Despite being encouraged to appeal her firing as political, she said she had not seriously considered it ? until she saw Thursday?s Examiner story about Greg Maddalone, a transportation department administrator who successfully appealed his firing to an administrative law judge.
When she heard candidate O?Malley in October saying his administration would treat people on the basis of qualifications, “we all had half a hope that he would come in and evaluate people accordingly,” Gingrich said.
It is ironic that Greg Maddalone, often identified as the professional ice dancer he was, was the first to successfully buck his firing for political reasons ? exactly the kind of behavior he was accused of helping to engineer himself at the Maryland Transportation Authority by a special legislative committee, which is still suing to get more testimony from him.
It was additionally ironic that Administrative Law Judge Susan Sinrod said Transportation Secretary John Porcari did almost exactly what former Gov. Robert Ehrlich?s aides had supposedly done. The final report on the committee?s investigation said, “Certain terminations were made without regard to qualifications, performance, or any review of the employee?s personnel file.”
It is not clear how many people have been fired. On May 29, Senate Republican Leader David Brinkley asked the Department of Budget and Management for “a summary of all separations of at-will state employees” since O?Malley took office. He wanted the information by June 11 for a meeting of General Assembly leaders.
Budget Secretary Eloise Foster told The Examiner that her office had called to tell him the information could not be put together in time because “this is a busy time for us.”
“We?re going to try to be as responsive as we can,” Foster said.
