There?s a rough week ahead for Gov. Martin O?Malley.
He got a preview last week.
Senate budgeters began whittling at his budget.
O?Malley?s newest initiatives on college tuition, stem cell research, Chesapeake Bay cleanup andhealth insurance for people who are uninsured may wind up on the cutting room floor in both chambers.
The Board of Revenue Estimates on Thursday is slated to release its official estimates for state coffers next year. Lawmakers are making their budget cuts, expecting the board will “write down” predicted revenues by at least $100 million, meaning spending figures must be trimmed as well.
Leaders of the Senate Budget Committee met with reporters for a background briefing a day after they held a closed session with the governor. The mood was somber.
O?Malley is clearly not relishing the delay of new programs, but that?s what the senators are prepared to do as they look for $300 million in reductions from proposed spending growth.
Trim, slice, pare
A budget subcommittee Friday whacked $18 million from the added $23 million for stem cell research and sliced $6.8 million from university budgets.
Further cuts in university funding, as contemplated by some House appropriators, could endanger the extension of the tuition freeze that O?Malley has promised.
Today, a second Senate subcommittee will pare the agency budgets it oversees. The full Senate Budget Committee on Tuesday will make decisions on larger issues, such as holding off funding the Chesapeake Bay fund approved in November and cuts in aid to counties.
By the end of the week, final cuts will be approved, and the budget will be sent to the Senate floor.
Tuesday?s election results also may be unpleasant for O?Malley if Hillary Clinton, for whom he campaigned heavily, does not pull off do-or-die victories in Ohio and Texas.
Does not compute
Hundreds of information technology guys and gals swarmed the legislative halls Wednesday.
If the legislature had taken the time in November to hear from these computer types, it?s hard to imagine the computer services tax could have won passage. Executive after executive talked about how the 6 percent sales tax on services that had never been taxed before is leading them to rethink business plans.
“I do have choices,” said David Ronis, chief information officer at Martek Biosciences in Columbia, a $300 million company that makes advanced food additives for infant formulas.
“It doesn?t take long to relocate our IT resources,” he added especially with ongoing operations in South Carolina, Kentucky and Colorado.
Maryland is hot to promote the biotechnology industry, but much of the research, development and production cannot happen without the IT to back it up. The state also is considered a hub for informatics, the science of information processing and the engineering to develop it, a discipline with applications to many industries.
The National Security Agency at Fort Meade is a huge consumer of highly cloaked IT innovation.
While the feds themselves are exempt from state sales tax, the subcontractors selling to the prime contractors are not.
A bill is proposed to exempt these subcontractors, but along with the widely supported efforts to repeal the tax, it runs into a high brick wall: How do you replace the $200 million in revenue it?s supposed to haul in?
Guess what, the IT guys say.
The $200 million won?t exist if many of these jobs migrate to Virginia, Pennsylvania or Delaware.
Democratic Baltimore City Del. Hattie Harrison, a 35-year House veteran who gets around using a wheelchair scooter, slowly pulled herself to her feet on the House floor Friday to sadly report on the passing not of a former colleague, but of a lobbyist, the estimable Jim Doyle, an elegant man from a different time.
He represented insurance companies and financial institutions, but he also had newspapers as clients and a firm commitment to the First Amendment. I had the good fortune to work closely with Jim along with other editors from the press association working on improving Maryland?s Open Meetings Law in the early 1990s.
Through months of work on a task force and two sessions of the General Assembly, Jim?s guidance helped us eliminate some of the most closed-door provisions of the old law and create the Open Meetings Compliance Board ? overcoming the fierce resistance of local elected officials.
Len Lazarick can be reached at [email protected].
