With four weeks to go before the election, the Maryland legislature?s investigation into the personnel practices of Gov. Robert Ehrlich?s administration is about to end the way it began ? with partisan charges and counter-charges.
In drafts of the special committee?s final report released Monday, Democrats charge that Ehrlich appointees violated state law and constitutional rights in firing nearly 340 employees for political reasons.
Once again calling the investigation “unnecessary, expensive and fruitless,” Republicans said these were “false allegations” and that the majority “ignored the facts and the law for the purpose of preserving its decades-long monopoly.”
The majority report was drafted by Special Counsel Ward B. Coe and will be reviewed by the Special Committee on State Employee Rights and Protections, which includes all four Democrats who chair Senate committees.
Based on more than a dozen hearings, the final report asserts that prodded by Ehrlich and managed by his appointments office, the administration assembled a list of likely Republican appointees who would be loyal to the administration and then identified state employees who could be replaced. In many cases, the fired workers had good ratings and were not in high-ranking positions.
In some cases, the appointments office told state Cabinet secretaries who they should terminate, and these “terminations were carried out in an irrational manner.”
The majority report makes 10 recommendations based on its findings. They include clarifying who can be fired by the governor and creating a new class of management employees who cannot be terminated for any reason not related to merit, including political affiliation. It also wants a law to prevent firing an employee so that someone else can be hired for political reasons, and would allow employees to sue the state if their rights are violated.
Most of the recommendations would require new laws, and the report also asks the Legislature to study the number of at-will management employees, thousands of whom can be fired without cause.
Ehrlich administration spokesman Henry Fawell said the committee members spent “19 months and $1 million chasing their tails,” and that the governor agreed with the minority report.
The Republicans said the Democrats in the budget process “improperly targeted certain state employees ? for political reasons,” just as they “illegally terminated the commissioners of the Public Service Commission.”
The minority challenged almost all the substantive criticism of the report, and said: “The Ehrlich administration acted lawfully, carefully and consistently with the best practices for public employee personnel management” in “reducing and reshaping a bureaucracy.”
