Governors want to spend their time working on important initiatives and their biggest headaches. Yet they are always being surprised and distracted by the inevitable crises that arise unanticipated from the octopus of state government.
As he struggles with budget shortfalls, Gov. Martin O’Malley has turned some of his attention to unforeseen problems with the State Police, generally viewed in Annapolis as a well-run and respected agency.
In July, there was the revelation of covert surveillance of anti-death penalty and anti-war groups that occurred during the Ehrlich years under the State Police superintendent O’Malley replaced. The governor didn’t even get a heads-up in July when the police released the telling e-mails of spying on the peaceniks and death penalty opponents.
Then, in early September, the Legislative Black Caucus and civil rights groups went berserk over the State Police regulations implementing the new law requiring broader collection of DNA samples from criminal suspects. A legislative hearing is planned later this month.
Finally, early Sunday morning, a State Police medevac helicopter crashed in Prince George’s County, killing four people including the pilot, two emergency medical technicians and a patient. The incident resurrected all the questions about maintenance, training and patient transport that a legislative audit had raised in August.
Chopper down
At a Sept. 9 hearing, a phalanx of State Police officers parried questions from skeptical legislators, but despite their poor record keeping and other administrative flaws, they were shielded by what auditors called their “extraordinary helicopter safety record.”
No more.
A member of the National Transportation Safety Board blasted the lack of a terrain-sensing system on the aircraft that would have warned the pilot of the trees he hit. A whistle-blowing pilot said the downed aircraft was involved in a serious but unreported crash in 2000.
A blog for helicopter pilots — yes, there’s a blog for everything — has been abuzz with speculation and tales of the hazards of night flying in a downpour that makes the pilot feel like the windshield is going to implode.
Though some lawmakers were skeptical in their grilling of the officers for 90 minutes, Dick Johnson, a former helicopter pilot who has become a gadfly on the State Police medevac crash, testified for five minutes, the only member of the public to speak.
Johnson has been bird-dogging the program for years, and the fatal crash highlighted issues he has repeatedly identified. Besides all the problems with the maintenance and aircraft, why were two patients with non-life-threatening injuries being transported by air at night in bad weather?
Scrutiny for new helicopters
The State Police aim to purchase new helicopters for about $120 million. After years of maintenance problems that have kept a third of the fleet on the ground at times, maybe that’s what is needed.
But there is likely to be more intense scrutiny of Maryland’s much-praised shock trauma system and the medevac helicopters as a key component, especially in the light of the budget predicament.
O’Malley had been scheduled to fly to Austin, Texas, on Friday to give a keynote address about his StateStat program at a conference on managing government performance. Instead, he videotaped the speech and attended the funeral of EMT Trooper 1st Class Mickey Lippy, followed by the funerals on Saturday of pilot Steve Bunker and local EMT Tanya Mallard.
It’s what governors do when life-savers die in the line of duty, but the performance of the State Police medevac program will likely be on his mind.
O’Malley’s performance
The governor’s own performance was measured in a Sept. 20 Rasmussen Reports poll. It contacted 500 likely Maryland voters by phone using its automated recorded survey.
Rather than offer favorable versus unfavorable, as many polls do, the poll gave respondents the choice of excellent, good, fair and poor.
Voters gave O’Malley 8 percent excellent, 26 percent good, 35 percent fair and 29 percent poor. But is “fair” fairly good or is it fairly poor? It sounds somewhere between not great and not terrible. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.5 percent
Slots results
The Rasmussen results on slots were less ambiguous, with 54 percent of respondents saying they would vote for the constitutional amendment to issue licenses for video lottery terminals. Revenues “would be used primarily to fund education programs,” the poll question said, using the ballot language that slots opponents criticize as so misleading.
In the poll, 35 percent were against, and 11 percent were not sure.
