Taking It Easy in Annapolis? Maryland’s annual state of the state message usually takes on a special significance with a new governor as we wait to see the tone he will set. Controversy in Martin O’Malley’s first speech to the General Assembly was as absent as Bob Ehrlich. It was a low key affair. In contrast with Ehrlich’s hectoring, O’Malley called for civility and cooperation between the governor and the legislature. The fact that there was little to argue with in O’Malley’s workmanlike budget made Speaker Mike Busch and the obstreperous Senate President Mike Miller unusually agreeable.

But is that a good thing for the state? Maybe legislators were tired of fighting with Ehrlich and needed a breather. Civility may be a good thing for cocktail parties, but it isn’t a necessary prerequisite for getting the people’s business done. We pay these guys, women included, to come up with new ideas to solve the state’s problems. It’s in the clash of ideas that progress is made. And if everything is so hunky dory, maybe there aren’t enough controversial new ideas being floated in our capital city.

It’s not as if there aren’t problems that need to be addressed. With all the talk of a structural deficit, there was no attempt made to deal with it in this session. The state’s strong tax revenues, mostly from the hot real estate market, allowed the Governor to dip into the flush rainy day fund to pay for increased school construction and transportation projects.

As Dan Rodricks pointed out in Thursday’s Sun, O’Malley barely mentioned Baltimore in his address. But the problems of bad schools, drugs and crime haven’t changed in the month since O’Malley turned over the city to Sheila Dixon (more on that in another column).

While O’Malley called for civility, another new Democratic Governor, Eliot Spitzer immediately started a fight with the state legislature over his proposals to cut property taxes, radically re-structure New York’s health care system and provide health insurance coverage to 400,000 uninsured children. Unlike O’Malley, he addressed the education needs of his state’s largest city, New York, with his plan to direct unprecedented amounts of new money to the neediest schools.

When I first started in the investment banking business, the bank I worked for proposed to cut its fees to win some business in order to establish itself in a new market. When asked why, my boss explained to the Vice Chairman reviewing the deal that it was a “loss leader”. To which the Vice Chairman replied: “Loss leaders are just losses.”

They may be getting along great in Annapolis, but time doesn’t wait. Civility may be the new administration and legislature’s loss leader. But delaying action is a just a loss for our uninsured and uneducated children and other problems our state faces.

Labels: Governor, Maryland, O'Malley

  6:17 PM •