Message to Ken Schisler: Start dusting off your resume.
In announcing his transition team as he becomes governor, Baltimore Mayor Martin O?Malley made icy comments about Schisler, chairman of the embattled Public Service Commission, which he blames for a 72 percent increase in electricity costs.
“We will have a new Public Service Commission ? and we will very shortly ? that?s more professional,” O?Malley said Thursday. “There were few agencies that failed quite so badly as the Public Service Commission.”
Lt. Gov.-elect Anthony Brown will chair O?Malley?s transition team and City Solicitor Ralph Tyler will be its executive director, O?Malley announced at a news conference at City Hall.
O?Malley pledged not to make political firings of the state?s thousands of employees, as he has criticized current Gov. Robert Ehrlich for doing.
” ?Are you going to be going after Republicans? Are you going to be purging people from state bureaucracy?? ” O?Malley said he has been asked. “That?s not what we?re about at all. We?re going after professional people regardless of party. … People who are there and just doing their jobs, they just need to continue doing their jobs.”
But O?Malley said the utility-regulating PSC has not been professional and therefore should be replaced.
He also had little positive to say about State Superintendent of Schools Nancy Grasmick, an Ehrlich ally, saying he had not spoken with her in more than a year.
The PSC has been an arguing point between Republicans and Democrats during the gubernatorial campaign, with the Court of Appeals firing the latest salvo in September.
Maryland?s highest court ruled that state lawmakers did not have the right to fire the PSC, whose members were terminated in June because the Legislature, controlled by Democrats, believed the agency had not done enough to keep electricity rates down.
The Legislature overrode a veto by Ehrlich, who appointed four of the five commissioners, to fire the PSC.
But the high court ruled the legislature may not “simply fire the gubernatorial appointees it does not like,” the judges wrote.
Nevertheless, O?Malley said getting rid of the PSC is part of bringing “professionalism” to state government.
“We anticipate recruiting good people from throughout the state, including the city of Baltimore now that it?s been restored to the state of Maryland,” he said.
