The line formed quickly in the hearing room. It wasn?t free ice cream being dished out or a free tank of gas being pumped, but hot-off-the-copier reports on budget cuts.
The people in line came mostly from departments and universities. They are paid with tax dollars to keep their agencies and institutions from losing too many tax dollars as their budgets get scrutinized.
The four subcommittees of the House Appropriations Committees spent more than 100 hours each combing over the 2,500-page budget in mind-numbing detail. Budget analysts, mostly in their 20s and 30s, provide legislators with recommendations for cuts or restrictive budget language that must be fended off in hearings by department secretaries and division chiefs, mostly folks in their 40s and 50s.
Sen. Richard Madaleno, D-Montgomery, who used to be one of those analysts, called the budget hawks some of the least-known powerful people in Annapolis.
The process produces intensive oversight of the operations of state government ? often leading to specific directions for changes in agency operations ? but it results in paltry savings. The House is proposing $166 million in cuts, only one-half of 1 percent of a $30 billion budget.
Tribute to Joe
More than 800 people showed up at Baltimore?s Hyatt Regency Thursday night to honor one of the most universally liked men ever to serve in political office, former Attorney General J. Joseph Curran.
Son-in-law Martin O?Malley kept his remarks short. “I?m only on the program to introduce Katie Curran O?Malley,” said the governor.
District Court Judge Katie O?Malley recalled her father as a man who would make the long drive home to Baltimore every night when he was in the Senate to be with his four kids. Yet there he would be in the kitchen when they got up in the morning, listening to WBAL radio and making them breakfast. He would make each of his three beautiful teenage daughters the winner of his morning beauty contests.
MC Dennis Sweeney, a Howard County Circuit judge who was a deputy to Curran, recalled how he was deputized to enforce the orders in 1987 from newly elected Gov. William Donald Schaefer to get rid of all the traitors who had worked closely with his primary opponent ? Curran?s predecessor, Attorney General Stephen Sachs. “The office wasclear of any Sachs people,” Sweeney assured Curran, but both of them knew it was a subterfuge to make Schaefer happy.
Curran got a touching tribute from all the federal judges in Maryland, delivered by U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett, a Republican who ran against Curran in 1994.
Michael Enright, a former Curran aide who is now O?Malley?s chief of staff, called Curran “St. Francis of Assisi with a law degree.”
Senate President Thomas Mike Miller pushed the boundaries of good taste. “They told me this was going to be a roast,” Miller said. He mocked Curran?s upright reputation with tales of hookers testifying on legalization of prostitution. “Joe?s idea of a little action is when his prune juice starts working,” Miller said.
Len Lazarick is the State House bureau chief of The Examiner, he can be reached at [email protected]
