By Adam Pagnucco.

What’s the old saying about lying and telling the truth?  There are lots of variations, but most of them go something like this:

It’s easier to tell the truth than it is to lie.  That’s because when you tell the truth, there’s only one version to remember.  But when you lie, you have to keep all the details straight and say it the same way every time.  Otherwise, you’ll get caught!

Governor Larry Hogan has probably never heard of this.

As we have noted before, the Governor is waging an all-out campaign to repeal the General Assembly’s transportation project scoring law.  The law requires the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) to score every major state transportation project on a variety of criteria, but gives the administration ultimate authority to fund projects of its choice regardless of their scores.  The Governor despises the law because it creates potential for embarrassment – he would have to publicly defend any decisions to fund low-scoring projects.  So he has falsely claimed that the law requires him to kill projects and said falsely that it was passed without hearings.  The Governor even released a list of projects that the law would allegedly kill even though the plain language of the law contradicts him.

One of the projects the Governor says will be killed is the widening of I-81 in Washington County.  His kill list describes it as “I-81 Reconstruction from West Virginia line to Pennsylvania line.”

A week after saying that I-81 and dozens of other projects would be killed, the Governor showed up in Hagerstown to announce funding for – you guessed it – I-81 widening.  The Hagerstown Herald-Mail reported:

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan came to Hagerstown bearing gifts on Thursday, announcing more than $115 million in funding commitments for local and regional projects.

The largest chunk, $105 million, is for the first phase of widening of Interstate 81, which recently got underway to widen the heavily-traveled interstate to six lanes from the West Virginia line to Md. 63 near Williamsport.

The first phase of work is from U.S. 11 in West Virginia to Md. 63, including the Potomac River bridges in between…

Another $5 million has been budgeted for design work for the second phase of I-81 widening, Hogan said, allowing the project to progress north to the Interstate 70 interchange.

The Governor’s office issued a press statement reiterating that work on I-81 would proceed.  Neither the Herald-Mail article nor the press statement noted that the Governor had already said that I-81 would be killed by the transportation scoring law.  There were no caveats in the article or the press statement such as “I-81 will proceed so long as the scoring law is repealed.”  Let’s note that the project kill list and the press statement about I-81 were issued only EIGHT DAYS APART.

In which of two alternate realities does the Governor live?  The one in which a major transportation project is killed by a new law?  Or the one in which the project proceeds without obstruction?  It seems to vary by the day.

This is no longer about transportation policy, folks.  You can’t rant and rave at a press conference that a project is going to be killed and then show up a week later like Santa Claus to announce that it’s going to be built.  Reasonable, sane and trustworthy people don’t behave like that regardless of their political beliefs.  That raises a critical question.

Is Larry Hogan capable of telling the truth?

By Adam Pagnucco.

Everyone knows that elected officials sometimes disagree on issues.  They may have differences of philosophy or values.  They may emphasize different sets of conflicting data.  They may prioritize one thing over another.  But how many of them actually make stuff up and use that as a basis for policy arguments?

One does.  His name is Larry Hogan.

The Governor’s target is a law passed by the General Assembly over his veto known as the Maryland Open Transportation Investment Decision Act of 2016.  The law was intended to open up the opaque process used by the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) to decide which transportation projects to fund in the state’s capital budget.  The law requires MDOT to use a scoring procedure to evaluate future proposed major projects using measurements of safety and security, system preservation, quality of service, environmental stewardship, community vitality, economic prosperity, equitable access, cost effectiveness and local jurisdiction priorities.  The score of each project included in MDOT’s capital budget would be released publicly.  But the law makes clear that the scores themselves would not determine a project’s fate.  MDOT would have the final say over which ones get funded.  The law says explicitly that “the Department may include in the Consolidated Transportation Program a major capital transportation project with a lower score over a major capital transportation project with a higher score if it provides in writing a rational basis for the decision.”  The law also says, “Nothing in this Act may be construed to prohibit or prevent the funding of the capital transportation priorities in each jurisdiction.”

Sounds harmless, yeah?  Not to Governor Hogan.  He is calling the law “the Road Kill Bill” and has released a huge list of transportation projects it would allegedly cancel.  The Governor said in a public statement that the law was a “disastrous bill which will absolutely be responsible for the elimination of nearly all of the most important transportation priorities in every single jurisdiction all across the state… It will wreak havoc on the entire state transportation system and usurp important authority away from local governments and away from the executive branch of state government, giving authority instead to lobbyists and special interest groups.”  He has launched a fierce social media campaign to repeal it.

And yet the plain language of the law itself would not kill any transportation projects.  Not a single one.

Think that’s bad enough?  It’s even worse.  One of the projects the Governor says the law would kill is the Watkins Mill/I-270 interchange in Gaithersburg.  This is a top priority for MoCo’s state legislators and was a significant reason for their support of a 2013 transportation funding increase.  And yet the Hogan administration indefinitely postponed it and later mulled cutting exit ramps to save money.  Only after the MoCo delegation introduced legislation to mandate funding the project did MDOT relent and reluctantly put it back on track.  And now the Governor is falsely blaming the transportation scoring law for killing a project that his own administration tried to kill!

Folks, what we have here is not a failure to communicate.  It is a failure to live in reality.  The Governor’s attacks on this law are contradicted by the plain language of the law itself.  It does not kill ANY projects.  In fact, it explicitly preserves MDOT’s ability to decide which projects get funded.  This dispute is not about killing projects at all.  What it’s really about is that the Governor can’t stand any law that subjects his decisions to public scrutiny.  And this concept is so alien to him that he is willing to make false statements in public about what the law actually does.  This is not a matter of right vs left or Democrats vs Republicans.  It’s a matter of making stuff up to justify what you want.

Now what other soon-to-be GOP officeholder does this remind you of?