Last year, the Maryland General Assembly focused on transportation projects delayed since the 2017 session, an opioid epidemic that had claimed more than twice as many lives in 2017 than in 2016, and the local impact of a national focus on Confederate-era statues. That issue came to the forefront after a Charlottesville, Virginia, march on August 17, 2017, by white supremacists ended with the killing of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was run over by a car driven by a neo-Nazi. While it had already been in the planning stages, right after Heyer was killed—in the dead of the night—Maryland quietly removed the statue of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, who had ruled against Dred Scott in 1857. While for many, a painful chapter in Maryland’s past had been removed from public display, no one could have foreseen that Maryland was about to endure an extremely heartbreaking 2018.
A Year of Tragedy
Last March 14th, a 17-year-old killed a classmate, Jaelyn Willey, at Great Mills High School in St. Mary’s County—Maryland’s first student-student shooting fatality on a school campus. On May 10th, Baltimore County Executive and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Kevin Kamenetz died of a heart attack (Ben Jealous then won the Democratic Party’s nomination). On May 27th, the second major flood in three years (and the third in seven years) roared through Ellicott City, killing Eddison Hermond. On June 13th, University of Maryland freshman offensive lineman Jordan McNair died from heatstroke after the coaching staff waited almost a full hour to call paramedics (several coaches, were placed on paid administrative leave, including Head Coach DJ Durkin, who was eventually fired). On June 28th, Jarrod Ramos, long disgruntled by a 2011 Capital-Gazette article about him (and the dismissal of his defamation lawsuit in 2015), went to the newspaper’s headquarters with a shotgun and killed editors Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen and John McNamara, reporter Wendi Winters, and sales assistant Rebecca Smith. It was the first major attack on a newsroom in American history. An exhausted Governor Larry Hogan, himself recovering from cancer treatment, raced to crime scenes and police barricades and memorial services seemingly round-the-clock. “That’s our hometown newspaper, and it was a shock to all of us,” Hogan told What’s Up? Media. While most of these events occurred after Maryland’s 2018 General Assembly session ended, legislators responded after the Great Mills High School shooting; a record 3,101 bills were submitted by the end of the session, many targeting crime-related issues ranging from reducing violence in Baltimore to increasing school safety in general. On April 24th, Hogan signed into law three new gun regulations, including banning bump stocks— “rapid-fire trigger activators” that accelerate fire in semiautomatic weapons—allowing judges to seize guns from people planning to cause harm, and requiring people convicted of specific domestic violence offenses to prove they do not have a firearm. The governor also signed two other major laws in 2018, one to provide free community college to qualified applicants and another to usher in the “Maryland Model” of health care by “adopting the first alternative payment model to shift hospital payments to full global budgets,” according to Seema Verma, Administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). It’s all part of a record $45 billion budget, which is up from $43 billion the year before.
What’s Ahead in 2019 School Funding
Maryland’s budget for 2019, extending into the fiscal year 2020, is expected to top a record $47 billion. Education, health care, and transportation projects will once again lead the way as budget priorities. In fact, by the time a new Maryland legislature is seated in January, one issue will have already been decided regarding school funding from Maryland’s six casinos, a topic highlighted in last year’s legislative session preview. Voters will determine in November if the state should be mandated to spend 100 percent of casino revenue on K–12 education. This could supplement school funding from casino revenue by up to $500 million annually when fully phased in over a four-year period.
Opioid Crisis
The biggest issue left over from the 2018 legislative session is the horrific opioid epidemic. Maryland remains one of the top five states in opioid-related deaths nationwide with totals that have exceeded the national average since 1999. The Maryland Department of Health said that fentanyl, combined with heroin or cocaine, was responsible for a 20 percent increase in opioid-related deaths in 2018 (after setting a record in 2017). Maryland is expanding its crackdown on those who provide these drugs. After Hogan suggested suing opioid manufacturers and distributors, Attorney General Brian Frosh called for an outside law firm to help go after them by providing special litigation counsel in his ongoing investigation.
Marijuana
Last year, State Senator Richard Madaleno sponsored a bill to legalize recreational marijuana and levy a nine percent tax to pay for community college tuition and treatment for opioid dependency, among other things. It didn’t pass, but the General Assembly did approve an increase in the number of medical marijuana-grower licenses from 15 to 22. While Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jealous was advocating legalizing marijuana as part of his criminal justice reform plan, a General Assembly bill that would have decriminalized possession of one ounce of marijuana (up from the current ten grams), proposed by Baltimore County State Senator Bobby Zirkin, did not advance after passing in the Senate. Ten grams “was a number picked out of the sky by the House Judiciary committee,” Zirkin told The Baltimore Sun. Other states have decriminalized amounts ranging from 21 to 42.5 grams.
Transportation
In August, the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) announced a new reconstruction project that will start in Wicomico County at a 60-foot-road intersection on U.S. Route 50 costing $3.14 million that won’t finish until the 2019 legislative session ends, one of several recent Eastern Shore state highway initiatives. These and other related projects will become commonplace under the 2040 Maryland Transportation Plan to be unveiled in 2019 as part of a 20-year strategy to “modernize Maryland’s multimodal transportation system,” according to MDOT. Every five years the department updates its identification of specific aviation, bikeway, bridge, pedestrian, port, road, and transit projects that will be funded. A more immediate concern is old Ellicott City. Estimates of what it would take to make the city safe have gone into the tens of billions of dollars—and even that might not work, some say. There are several reconstruction ideas being considered, including destroying some of the remaining historic buildings along the Patapsco River and designing a river walk to accommodate future flooding. There may be a new face in store for a city that dates back to 1772 and boasts the ruins of the Patapsco Female Institute and such Civil War-era history as a makeshift Union army base and the theater where a young John Wilkes Booth allegedly first performed.
The General Assembly will also take interest in the final report of the investigation into the death of University of Maryland football player Jordan McNair. Those include allegations by The Washington Post that the school had rejected a plan to place the health care of its football players in the hands of an independent body so that doctors, rather than coaches, would decide if an athlete needed immediate medical attention. The rest of the agenda for 2019 will come into focus “after the general election, given the turnover in the legislature,” Alexandra Hughes, Chief of Staff to House of Delegates Speaker Michael Busch says. Indeed, after November, old Ellicott City might not be the only Maryland landmark with a new face, since this is shaping up as one of the most intriguing midterm elections in Maryland’s history, with the looming fight over redrawing Maryland’s electoral districts in 2020 waiting in the wings for the next body of legislators.
Mark Croatti teaches Comparative Politics at The United States Naval Academy and The George Washington University. He is also the Director of The Hall of Presidents Before Washington at the Westin Annapolis hotel. He has covered state politics for various publications since 2004.
