Gov. Martin O?Malley repeated to his new Cabinet recently what he was once told by former New Orleans mayor Marc Morial: If you want to hide something important, put it in your budget or your city charter. Nobody ever reads those.
That?s not what O?Malley necessarily intended last week when he released 21 reports from his transition work groups amounting to more than 1,000 pages and posted them all online (www.gov.state.md.us/pressreleases/070222.html#reports). Hidden in plan sight, you might say.
“I have been reading these reports for the last month,” the governor reported. He said the reports “will serve as the foundation for making our state government work again” and gave his Cabinet secretaries 45 days to come up with an action plan to respond to the documents. In same cases, such as the report on health care, more than 130 people helped prepare the document, though at 22 pages, it is among the shortest.
This article begins a series that gives an Examiner-length version of key items in the reports, boiling down hundreds of thousands of words. Those words range from the rhetorical flourish of the “grand challenge” found in the report on the environment and its depiction of a potential “environmental train wreck” to the more mundane and bureaucratic ? the six-month backlog in elevator inspections at the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, for instance, that explains why the licenses on some lifts in the State House complex have expired.
“The baby boomers are coming,” shouts the report on aging, with the headline framed by two lightning bolts, a testament to the clip art available on modern computers.
Not surprisingly, the transition committees often echo key themes of the O?Malley campaign. The health panel lists as its top priority the developing of a comprehensive plan for the uninsured.
But others go way beyond O?Malley?s positions, such as the transportation panel: “We strongly recommend the O?Malley administration plan for a major revenue increase, perhaps as soon as the 2008 legislative session.” The committee talks about not just a 5-cent-per-gallon increase in the gasoline tax, but possibly indexing it to inflation or adding another penny to the sales tax for transportation.
