Give someone a firm deadline, and they tend to get their assignments in.
Legislators are no different. Last Thursday at 5 p.m. was the deadline for submission of bills in the House of Delegates, and 326 pieces of legislation were thrown in the hopper.
All told now, there are 1,844 pieces of legislation under review, although that reflects dozens in which the House and Senate bills are the same, cross-filed in ? legislative parlance ? to speed up action. Another 291 bills are seeking to tap state bond money. There are over $150 million in requests for a pot of money that is likely to be only $15 million to $20 million this year because school construction has soaked up much of the debt capacity.
Slow poke
Senate President Thomas Mike Miller continues to poke and prod Gov. Martin O’Malley. After the Executive Nominations Committee postponed a hearing on appointments originally set for Monday, Miller observed from the rostrum, “The executive is a little slow coming down with names.”
Yet after three weeks in office, O?Malley has named all but four of the 21 Cabinet secretaries, and three of those may be filled by the Ehrlich appointees who continue to run their departments. But the Senate has held hearings and confirmed only seven of them. With a week longer in office than O?Malley, the Senate has only completed action on a handful of bills. Last Monday, senators introduced more than 200 bills, but the Senate calendar said the bills were introduced three days earlier, on the “legislative day” of Feb. 2, the official deadline.
When O?Malley does fill out his Cabinet, which could happen this week, he could take a cue from the Senate and say he actually made the appointments on an “executive day” last week.
Laptop management
Among the new crowd of earnest-looking young men and women staffing the O?Malley administration, Matt Gallagher leads a small group instituting the statewide version of CityStat, the detailed performance management review system that won awards. Last week, House Appropriations Committee members wondered how StateStat would work on the much vaster and more complicated state government.
Gallagher admitted that in early days of CityStat, managers “were unaccustomed to the level of disclosure and unaccustomed to the level of attention from the mayor and senior managers.” State program directors too would take some getting used to the new scrutiny, he said.
He emphasized the program, which uses extensive computer spread sheets projected on screens, could be very lean, mean and portable. “Have laptop, will travel,” Gallagher said.
Honoring the dead
Both chambers honored veterans last Monday night with a reading of the names of the Iraqi war dead.
In the Senate, the honors were done by a new Prince George?s senator, Donald Peters of Bowie, a former captain in the Army Reserve who served in Desert Storm.
As Peters read the list of 27, listing rank, name, age ? lots of 19 and 20-somethings ? and legislative district, he asked the senators from those districts to flip their voting buttons. “Half the board was lit up,” referring to the tally boards on the sides of the chamber, Peters said later. “It was really profound.” These were not just faceless warriors dead on foreign soil, but constituents.
Afterwards, as members spoke to him, Peters said, “I was impressed with the number of the senators who had talked to the families,” expressing condolences.
Len Lazarick is the state house bureau chief of The Examiner, he can be reached at [email protected]
