There was little drama at the end of the legislative session Monday night, and that?s exactly what was intended.
The first session of the General Assembly for Gov. Martin O?Malley, was scripted to be in sharp contrast to the bitter debate and contentious sniping under former Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich. House and Senate leaders Speaker Michael Busch and President Thomas Mike Miller, were still at odds over policy, but tried to get along.
“The reason we have such a good session was because of your personality,” Miller said to O?Malley. “This is the first of four very fine years.”
O?Malley “set the tone and temperament for this 90-day session,” Busch agreed, citing the new governor?s appointments and his quick closing of a juvenile lockup and the dangerous House of Correction prison. It was also exactly what O?Malley had promised to do in the campaign.
“Compromise is not a dirty word,” he would remind audiences ? a point of view unlike that of the stubborn incumbent he was running against.
“It was a successful session where we made progress for the people in this state,” O?Malley told the bill-signing crowd. “We found consensus in order to advance the common good.”
“Partnership is the only way that lasting change happens,” he said. But also “we were able to disagree in a way that made people proud” of their representatives.
“It was awfully calm,” said House Ways and Means Chairman Sheila Hixson, D-Montgomery, a 30-year veteran echoing the comments of other long-time delegates. “Yet we did a lot of good things.”
O?Malley mostly got his way on the budget, but it was a spending plan prepared largely by Ehrlich, with time only for last-minute tweaking to add money for O?Malley?s initiatives.
As promised, he significantly increased spending on school construction, froze tuition at public universities, fully funded the Open Space Program and added money to restore oysters to the Bay. More expensive plans to expand health care coverage for children and dependents got pared back and amended onto another bill. He supported a Geographic Cost of Education Index that would?ve helped jurisdictions where he ran best. Though he delayed it for a year, it was killed in the Senate because it cost too much.
