Maryland?s legislative leaders punt problems past the next election, when they will return with renewed ferocity.
Here are a few of them:
» An unjustified subsidy for medical malpractice policies (unwisely supported in part by Gov. Robert Ehrlich) will expire in 2009, as will a temporary cap on the increase of awards for noneconomic damages.
» The ban on enforcing federal and state school improvement plans in Baltimore City will expire in 2007, following the election.
» The legislature shoved the impact of four-fifths of real increases in Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. rates past the election for all ratepayers. A plan relieving only those who ask to be relieved would spare the utility hundreds of millions in debt. While the debt will start accruing July 1, the funds necessary to repay it will not start to be collected until Jan. 1, 2007, after the election.
Steps to evading the facts
Mayor Martin O?Malley resisted a full state takeover of Baltimore schools, halting efforts to reform failing ones. His actions also preserved the system?s structural deficit, caused by seniority pay increases and an extravagant health care plan.
These problems will reappear after the election when the city will stop getting massive education funds delivered by the Thornton plan, phased in over five years.
In the interim, the union contract at city schools denies seniority credit to county teachers seeking to enter the system; allows the shortest work week in the state; includes a unique and mandatory five-step process to discipline teachers; and precludes merit pay and extra pay for teachers in scarce disciplines. It also denies any meaningful authority for principals. Transfer provisions give the most experienced teachers the right to be assigned to the least needy schools.
The utility rate freeze supported by former Gov. Parris Glendening masked the effect of the enforced surrender by BGE to its parent, Constellation, of both its low-cost plants and those designed to serve peak loads in summertime.
Obvious solutions have been avoided: tort reform to produce reasonable insurance premiums, by basing awards on actual, not hypothetical, injuries; teacher certification reform; extra pay for teachers with valued skills; curtailment of seniority increments and extravagant fringe benefits, and management at the level of the individual school building.
For the utilities, it would have been nice if our legislators had told the truth about increases in energy costs and advocated the need to conserve. Instead, they have elected to subsidize consumption of a scarce commodity, even for consumers who do not want the subsidy.
The new law attempts to lock the barn door after the horse has escaped, but its provisions for “rate stabilization” whenever future increases exceed 20 percent are a charter for demagoguery and future “crises.”
Business as usual has now been restored. The legislators? trial lawyer clients have been guaranteed safe haven against tort reform by a tax levied on HMO and homeowners? policies. Control of the Baltimore school system has been returned to an inbred group; the dangerous change agents Bonnie Copeland, the CEO of the Baltimore City Public School System leaves this week, and Eric Letsinger, the former chief operating officer of the school system, fired following alleged misuse of city funds, have been expelled.
Legislators who have given away the store now can play Lady Bountiful forever with future rate subsidies, expanding demand and reducing supply of electricity in the process.
The joy of Democratic legislators and gubernatorial candidates is unconfined; only the voters can bring an end to this charade.
George Liebmann, a Baltimore lawyer, is the volunteer executive director of the Calvert Institute for Policy Research and is the author of “The Common Law Tradition: A Collective Portrait of Five Legal Scholars,” recently reissued in a paperback edition by Transaction Publishers. He can be reached at [email protected].
