Category Archives: Larry Hogan

Washington Post Poll Shows Hogan Vulnerability

By Adam Pagnucco.

Governor Larry Hogan loves to discuss his high approval ratings in polls, which have usually been in the range of 60-70%.  But a new Washington Post poll that examines his reelection prospects shows that they are well below his approval numbers and provides hope to Maryland Democrats.

The Post poll of March 16-19 has sample sizes of 914 adults and 841 registered voters.  The margin of error for those two groups is 4 points, growing to 5.5 points for a half-sample and 6.5 points for the 317 respondents who live in Maryland’s D.C. suburbs.  These margins of error must be kept in mind when reading the poll –  effectively, only large gaps are meaningful for small sub-groups.

With that significant caveat in mind, let’s examine data on Hogan’s reelection prospects.  The Post asked respondents the following question: “Thinking about Maryland’s Governor’s race in 2018… if Larry Hogan ran for re-election as governor, do you think you would vote for him OR for the candidate nominated by the Democratic Party?”  Among adults, 39% said they would vote for Hogan and 36% said they would vote for the Democratic nominee, an advantage of 3 points for the Governor.  Among registered voters, 41% said they would vote for Hogan and 37% said they would vote for the Democrat, a margin of plus 4.  So far, this looks very much like Hogan’s 4-point victory in 2014.

But the sub-group results are more interesting.  We compiled the Post’s sub-group data on this question in the presentation below.

Let’s recall the margin of error estimates above.  Margins of 10-15 points or less for small sub-groups are probably not very meaningful.  That said, many of the Governor’s strengths are predictable.  He does well with Republicans, Conservatives, Whites and rural residents.  He is weak among Democrats, liberals, African Americans and Prince George’s residents.  One item that stands out is his strength with seniors, with whom he has a 17-point advantage.  Seniors are among the most reliable voters in any election.

Now let’s compare the geographic results of this poll with how the Governor actually performed in 2014.

The Governor appears stronger in the poll in Baltimore and the Washington suburbs, but weaker elsewhere than in 2014.  This could be statistical noise due to large margins of error.  But it could also be the result of tax fatigue in some Democratic strongholds, like Montgomery (where voters recently passed term limits by 40 points) and Prince George’s (where the County Executive proposed a 15% increase in property taxes two years ago).  It’s hard to believe that the Governor is actually weaker in Anne Arundel and Howard, both of which have Republican Executives who are strongly favored for reelection.  (And a random question: what pollster combines Baltimore City and County in one estimate?  C’Mon, Man!)

The big takeaway from the poll is this: Larry Hogan will not be coasting to reelection.  Maryland is simply not wired that way.  It has too many Democrats, African Americans, liberals, immigrants and people who are either employed by or do business with government at some level to give any GOP statewide incumbent a blowout win.  From a purely political perspective, the Governor deserves credit for his focused message of tax cuts, job growth and reform (like redistricting) while trying his best to avoid distractions from the right, the left and Washington D.C.  His approach gives him a path to victory in a rather blue state.  But if the Democrats begin preparing now, play smart and field a good candidate for Governor, Larry Hogan can be defeated.

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Hogan Exploits Rape for Politics

By Adam Pagnucco.

Governor Larry Hogan is now exploiting the rape of a Rockville high school student to get a political edge over General Assembly Democrats.  It’s a clearly deplorable tactic.  But will it work?

Two big stories are colliding at the moment to further inflame the volatile issue of how to deal with illegal immigration.  First, the House of Delegates has passed a version of the Maryland Law Enforcement and Trust Act, a bill to limit state and local cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) so that immigrant communities will not hide from police for fear of arbitrary deportation.  Second, two students at Rockville High School have been arrested for raping a 14-year-old at the school and were subsequently alleged by ICE to be present in the country illegally.

Governor Hogan reacted with the Facebook post below, saying:

The post garnered 700 shares and 500 comments in its first five hours, accomplishing its purpose of throwing gasoline on the fire of the immigration debate.

The implication of the Governor’s post is that Montgomery County does not currently cooperate with federal authorities.  But in fact, it does.  The Washington Post’s Bill Turque summarized the county’s immigration policy a month ago:

Montgomery police operate under a 2009 directive that bars officers from conducting “indiscriminate questioning” of suspects, witnesses or prisoners about immigration status. Once in custody, all prisoners are fingerprinted, and arrest information goes into state databases, where it is available to ICE. If the agency identifies an undocumented prisoner, it can send the county a “detainer” notice, asking that the person remain in custody for at least 48 hours beyond the scheduled release date.

The county complied with detainers until 2014, when the Maryland attorney general’s office issued an opinion advising localities that they could be liable for damages by holding prisoners past their release date.

Since then, Montgomery officials said, the county honors detainers only if they are supported by a federal court order or warrant. It will also provide ICE publicly available release dates of undocumented immigrants who have committed felonies and whom the agency is seeking to deport.

The county has released hundreds of prisoners to ICE since 2012, though the pace of releases has dropped since the county stopped honoring 48-hour detainers.  The amended version of the House-passed Trust Act resembles county policy.  On the Rockville High School rape suspects, County Executive Ike Leggett said, “The county — consistent with our longstanding policy — will cooperate fully with ICE to see that the two are deported to their countries of origin.”

Why would Hogan insinuate that Montgomery County does not cooperate with federal law enforcement to protect its citizens?  Hogan knows that there is little support in the community for protecting violent criminals from deportation.  A new CNN poll finds that 60% of Americans believe the government should be “developing a plan to allow those in the U.S. illegally who have jobs to become legal residents,” but it also finds that 78% of Americans believe that “the government should attempt to deport all people currently living in the country illegally who have been convicted of other crimes while living in the U.S.”  Big majorities of every demographic group measured support the latter statement, including 64% of Democrats.

Depicting Maryland’s largest local jurisdiction as soft on crime is bad enough.  Exploiting a rape for political gain is even worse.  Such tactics expose just how hard the Governor can throw his elbows in partisan combat.  Forget about engaging with General Assembly leaders to develop good public policy; the Governor has never been interested in that.  But the cold political truth is this:

If Hogan can get away with characterizing Democrats as protectors of rapists and other criminals, he wins.

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Will You Be Paying Dan Snyder?

By Adam Pagnucco.

The Washington National Football League franchise is perhaps the only organization in America that could make Donald Trump’s White House seem like a smoothly running model of efficiency.  The club’s savage firing of its General Manager, the subsequent exodus of red chip starters like Pierre Garcon, DeSean Jackson and Chris Baker and the failure to sign star quarterback Kirk Cousins to a long-term contract have brought the franchise to its worst point in decades.  But here’s the kicker, folks.

One of these days, whether you want to or not, you could be paying for all this.

Daniel M. Snyder, the current majority owner of the Washington franchise, has often been described as the worst owner in pro sports.  Part of this is because of the team’s woeful performance on the field.  Snyder has owned the franchise for 18 years, over which it has compiled a 125-162-1 record, six winning seasons and only two playoff wins after winning three Super Bowls under the prior ownership.  The club just posted its first two consecutive winning seasons since 1991-1992 and the owner reacted by annihilating the team’s architect.  But it’s the franchise’s activities outside of the stadium, characterized by team President Bruce Allen as “winning off the field,” that are truly eye opening.  Consider this.

  • The team sued 125 season tickets holders between 2004 and 2009 to force them to honor their purchase contracts even though many were in financial distress. One of them was a 72-year-old retiree who claimed that the team’s judgment against her would force her into bankruptcy.
  • In 2006, the team tried to profit from 9/11 by selling “Pentagon Flag Hats” which featured “the team’s trademark curly ‘R’ in gold with a patch in the shape of the Pentagon and the colors of the American flag sewn on the side.” The club was the only one in the NFL to try to sell such merchandise.

  • Unhappy with negative coverage, Snyder has been buying up local media for years. It’s hard for journalists to criticize the team when they are on the owner’s payroll.  Snyder reacted to a harsh article by the Washington City Paper’s Dave McKenna by suing the newspaper and the journalist, an action he later dropped.

We could go on and on and ON.  But we know what you’re thinking.  I’m not a fan of the team, you might say.  Why should I care?

Because soon you could be paying for all this.

Dissatisfied with his twenty-year-old stadium in Landover, Snyder is now in the hunt for a new facility somewhere in the D.C. area.  The District of Columbia, home to the franchise in its glory years, is an iffy possibility given that the current Mayor has branded the team’s nickname as “offensive.”  Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, an enthusiastic dealmaker, is “in a hurry” to land the team before he leaves office.  And Maryland Governor Larry Hogan has said, “We will do whatever it takes to keep them.”  That could lead to a bidding war, and an expensive one at that.  NFL teams have extracted billions of dollars in public subsidies for their stadiums over the years.  Las Vegas has offered $750 million in tax money to the Raiders to entice them to move from Oakland.  And St. Louis, which just saw the Rams move out, still owes millions in bond payments on its now-empty football stadium.

Hogan loves corporate welfare, having approved millions in disbursements to Marriott and Northrop Grumman.  But those companies at least employ thousands of people in Maryland.  Snyder’s franchise is headquartered in Ashburn, Virginia and his millionaire players are almost all Virginia residents.  NFL teams are dubious candidates for public investment at best since most of them play just ten home games a year, but the Washington team’s Virginia ties make subsidizing it even more questionable.

So what can you do about this?  Snyder is only 52 years old, so he could be the team owner for decades to come.  But Hogan is another matter.  If the Governor insists on throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at this poor excuse for a franchise, you will have the last word in next year’s election.

Just do what Dan Snyder does and fire him!

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More Hogan Hypocrisy

Can we please stop pretending that Gov. Larry Hogan is a swell bipartisan guy?

Larry Hogan has been railing against gerrymandering in Maryland for some time. So it should have been an easy lift when seven Democratic U.S. House members asked him to support national redistricting reform.

Hogan turned them down flat.

If Hogan was really cared about fairer methods of drawing congressional districts, he would have said he’d be glad to do it. Or, at least, that he would be happy to support their bill for national reform if they’d support his efforts in Maryland. But not our Larry.

If you didn’t get the message, his public comments made crystal clear that Hogan only cares about redistricting reform because he thinks it will benefit Maryland Republicans. As he turned down national redistricting reform, he touted that several Democrats could “lose their seats” under his proposed reform.

This is part of a larger Republican pattern. Republicans fought redistricting reform tooth and nail in Arizona, trying to get the initiative overturned in court and then suing to overturn the plans passed by the nonpartisan commission. In Florida, a court recently imposed a new plan to overturn a gerrymander enacted by Republicans in violation of a reform initiative. Republicans have enacted congressional gerrymanders in major states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas.

In contrast, Democratic California has a reformed commission system. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo pushed through a redistricting reform that will go into effect with the next census. A rare bright spot for bipartisanship was acceptance by both parties of a reform plan for the state legislature (but not Congress) in Ohio.

Republicans like Hogan favor redistricting reform in Maryland not because it is generally the right thing to do but to gain advantage. Put another way, our governor cared enough go out of state to campaign for Chris Christie for president but he can’t be bothered to support national redistricting reform because that is a “federal” issue.

As when he threw his public tantrum to defend Trump, Hogan has shown his very partisan colors. It’s really time that the press and commentators stopped pretending otherwise.

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Hogan and Senate Republicans Throw Tantrum in Support of Trump

Maryland Democrats have been trying to link Gov. Larry Hogan to Donald Trump. Now, Hogan has done it for them.

Following his pattern of avoiding all politically touchy issues when at all possible, Larry Hogan refused to comment on Trump’s travel ban because it is “the sole purview of the federal government.” An interesting view expressed by the same guy who proudly declared that Maryland would refuse to accept Syrian refugees. Among other issues, the ban resulted in a 5-year old Maryland boy being separated from his mother and held for hours.

Hogan continued his pattern of avoidance by not responding to Attorney General Brian Frosh’s request to sue the federal government on this issue. No doubt Hogan thought this was a clever way to say no while saying nothing, but Frosh upped the ante by taking Hogan’s silence as permission.

Hogan’s silent freeze out ended in a tantrum when the General Assembly voted to give Attorney General Brian Frosh the authority to sue the federal government on this and other issues. Article V of the Maryland Constitution permits either the Governor or the General Assembly to give the AG license to sue.

After he abdicated his responsibility on a difficult issue, Hogan immediately lashed out at the General Assembly for taking action to defend the State on this and other issues:

At a news conference later Friday, Hogan called the Senate vote “unfortunate, rank partisanship.”

“I don’t know why you have to change the rules now that we have a Republican governor, but they’ve been doing quite a bit of that lately,” he said. “I would rather not see that kind of political operation going on and just focus on the problems in the state.”

No change in rules. Just take a moment to read the Maryland Constitution. Don’t get mad when the Assembly exercises its rights just because you chose duck and cover.

Again, remember that for Hogan, Syrian refugees are a Maryland problem but detained child is “federal issue.” Quite a change from when Obama was president. Republicans in the Maryland Senate joined the tantrum by walking out during the discussion of the bill.

The Governor and Maryland Republicans have now taken a firm stand in favor Trump and his policies. While the Governor tried to dodge, he ultimately strongly fought the Assembly’s decision to allow AG Frosh to oppose them, breaking his much vaunted amity in order to vocally support the Trump ban along with plans to dismantle environmental protections and take away health care from thousands of Marylanders.

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Hogan’s Transportation Scam

By Adam Pagnucco.

A looming crisis threatens to devastate Maryland’s transportation program.  As much as one-third of the state’s transportation project spending could be at risk.  Key projects will be delayed, perhaps some indefinitely.  Is this because of the transportation transparency law that Governor Larry Hogan wants repealed?

No, not at all.  The real problem is something much more mundane, something Hogan does not want to talk about: a gaping budget hole.

The Transportation Trust Fund (TTF) is a segregated fund used to finance Maryland’s transportation programs.  Its largest sources of revenue are motor fuel taxes, titling taxes, registration fees and other Motor Vehicle Administration fees.  It also receives a substantial amount of federal funding.  Its proceeds are used to finance the Maryland Department of Transportation’s (MDOT) operating expenses as well as MDOT’s debt service and six-year capital program.  This means that funding for transportation capital projects is subject to variations in TTF revenue as well as changes in MDOT’s operating costs and debt service.

Page 43 of the Fiscal Briefing reviewed by the General Assembly last week shows a substantial deterioration in the TTF over the last year.  The briefing states:

The six-year State capital program in the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) fiscal 2017 through 2022 Transportation Trust Fund (TTF) forecast is $1.5 billion lower than in the prior year’s six-year program. Lower estimated revenue attainment, primarily motor vehicle fuel tax revenue, accounts for about half the decrease with higher projections for debt service and departmental operating expense spending accounting for the other half of the reduction in the capital program.

The briefing continues:

MDOT did not use the five-year average annual increase in operating expenses to calculate out-year operating expenses as directed in the 2016 Joint Chairmen’s Report. As a result, MDOT’s forecast likely understates operating expenses by $585 million over the forecast period, or just under 5%, and overstates the amount available for the capital program by $1.7 billion.

Translation: $1.5 billion in forecasted transportation spending, or 15% of the state’s six-year total, has disappeared in one year.  And the administration’s underestimating of MDOT’s operating expenses could cause the capital program to drop another $1.7 billion.

That’s right, folks: one-third of all funding for state transportation projects could be evaporating.

Now let’s be fair.  Governor Hogan does not control revenues for transportation, which are chiefly determined by the state of the economy.  Their substantial drop suggests that the economy is not doing as well as Hogan says it is.  The economy could get even worse if Republicans in Washington repeal the Affordable Care Act – something that would cost Maryland tens of thousands of jobs – and push through substantial cuts to federal agencies.  The Governor is also only in partial control of MDOT’s operating expenses, which include substantial amounts of materials and supplies purchased from private vendors.  Those expenses are squeezing money for transportation along with the revenue shortfalls.

But one thing the Governor does control is his own behavior.  A reasonable Governor acting in good faith would go to the General Assembly and say, “Look folks.  We have a problem here.  Let’s get together and figure out how to deal with it.”  That would be in line with the Governor’s regular calls for bipartisan cooperation.

Instead, the Governor has launched a Holy War against the General Assembly’s transportation transparency law, which merely requires him to justify the projects he chooses to fund.  He falsely claims that the law would require him to cancel projects when it does no such thing and even announced funding for one project a week after he said it would be killed.  Instead of working with members of the General Assembly to remedy a real budget problem that threatens transportation projects, he assaults them on Facebook about a fake problem that he has made up.

One of several Facebook posts the Governor is using to target state legislators.

It’s a scam, folks.  This Governor does not want to deal with an impending transportation crisis that is happening on his watch.  Instead, he is trying everything in his power to shift blame to Democrats in the state legislature.

Don’t fall for it.

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Will Hogan Stand By as Republicans Destroy Health Care in Maryland?

By Adam Pagnucco.

President-Elect Donald Trump and the new Republican-controlled Congress are proceeding rapidly to dismantle the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  The law, a complicated amalgam of policy and funding requirements, has helped 20 million Americans gain health care coverage and has cut uninsured rates dramatically across many racial and ethnic groups.  Its repeal threatens to throw millions of Americans out of health care coverage, including hundreds of thousands of Marylanders.  And so far, Governor Larry Hogan is standing by silently and letting it happen.

The ACA has expanded health insurance coverage in two primary ways: setting up government-run health care exchanges and expanding Medicaid, the federal/state health insurance program for low-income people.  In Maryland, 146,808 people are currently enrolled for coverage through the state’s exchange, Maryland Health Connection.  The latter entity reports that roughly 278,000 more people are covered by the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid.  All told, more than 420,000 Marylanders have obtained health coverage through the ACA and two more weeks remain in the enrollment period.

Marylanders in every county are enrolled in the state’s health exchange.

Maryland Health Connection Enrollment 2017

Under the ACA, the federal government has invested a lot of money in increasing enrollment.  Maryland Health Connection reports that Maryland health care exchange participants receive about $225 million in annual federal tax credits to subsidize their individual health insurance premiums.  The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the federal government spent $5.7 billion on Medicaid in Maryland in Fiscal Year 2015.  These funding sources are now at risk.

Since it is a federal law, some changes to the ACA must pass a 60-vote hurdle to overcome filibusters in the U.S. Senate, where the GOP has just 52 seats.  But budget items are not subject to filibusters.  That means part or all of the above federal funding to support ACA enrollment could be eliminated in a budget passed solely with Republican votes and signed by President Trump.  If that happens, millions of Americans and possibly hundreds of thousands of Marylanders could lose their health coverage.

That’s not all.  The federal tax credits and Medicaid funding under the ACA support lots of jobs and income in the health care industry, and through the multiplier effect, the broader economy as well.  A new study from George Washington University estimates that if the ACA’s tax credits and Medicaid funding are repealed, Maryland will lose 52,000 jobs by 2019.  The study projects that Maryland will also lose $49 billion in business output and $982 million in state and local tax revenues from 2019 to 2023.  All of this would be on top of any federal agency cuts that Trump and the Republican Congress might include in their next budget.

Any Governor would be expected to jump up and down about the prospect of losing tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in tax revenues as well as having hundreds of thousands of constituents lose health care coverage.  But not Larry Hogan.  He has stayed silent as Donald Trump and his Republican colleagues in Washington plan to destroy health care in Maryland.  Hogan bristles at questions from reporters about anything going on in Washington, telling one of them that he was tired of “stupid questions about the Trump administration.”  And yet, the Trump administration’s actions will have gigantic negative impacts on his state that he declines to oppose.

All of this begs the question.  Is Larry Hogan with Donald Trump and anti-health care zealots in the Republican Party?  Or is he with the rest of us?

 

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Hogan’s Campaign Against Public Schools

By Adam Pagnucco.

Governor Larry Hogan is the most dedicated opponent of Maryland public schools in recent memory.  And now, new rankings of states in a respected education publication show how effective he has been.

Education Week, which ranks public school systems by state, rated Maryland’s public schools as fifth in the nation as of 2017.  That’s a decent rank, except when you consider that the publication rated Maryland number one every year from 2009 through 2013.  Maryland scored particularly low on its achievement gap between low-income and high-income students, ranked as 42nd in the country.

The decline in the state’s ranking is no surprise since it’s perfectly consistent with Governor Hogan’s record on public schools.  Consider what he has done in his first two years in office.

  1. He cut public school funding in his first budget.

The Governor of Maryland has enormous budgetary powers under the state’s constitution.  When he submits an operating budget to the General Assembly, the state legislators generally cannot add spending to it – they can only set aside spending for particular purposes or cut it.  Over the years, the General Assembly has established funding formulas for certain spending items in state law, and that includes most state aid programs for K-12 education.  But the Governor identified one program that was not protected by state law – a program that sent extra money to school systems with higher costs of educating students.  The Governor cut half of that money, a total of $68 million, in his very first budget.  Here are the counties that were affected and their dollar losses:

Prince George’s: $20 million

Montgomery: $18 million

Baltimore City: $12 million

Anne Arundel: $5 million

Frederick: $3 million

Baltimore County: $3 million

Howard: $3 million

Others: $4 million

Note that almost three-quarters of the cuts applied to three jurisdictions: Prince George’s, Montgomery and the City.  What do they have in common?  You guessed it: they all voted against Hogan by large margins.

Hogan resisted calls from the General Assembly to restore the cuts, so they passed a law making the program mandatory.  Hogan waved the white flag of surrender, admitting that he did not have the votes to sustain a veto.  If he had gotten them, those cuts would have continued every single year.

  1. He withheld teacher pension aid for counties in his second budget.

Since FY2013, counties have been responsible for paying part of the cost of teacher pension funding, with the remainder covered by the state.  After passage of his second budget, Hogan withheld $19 million in state aid the General Assembly set aside to help counties pay for teacher pensions, a move that threatened their credit ratings.  Here are the counties that were affected and their dollar losses:

Montgomery: $6 million

Howard: $2 million

Baltimore County: $2 million

Anne Arundel: $2 million

Prince George’s: $1 million

Frederick: $1 million

Others: $5 million

Ultimately, Hogan agreed to release the money but only when the General Assembly agreed to provide an equal amount in corporate welfare to Northrop Grumman, one of Hogan’s top policy priorities.  What kind of Governor plays games with school funding in order to get more money for corporate welfare?

  1. He is jamming public school boards with public school skeptics.

As Governor, Hogan has the power to appoint members of the State Board of Education as well as numerous local school boards.  He has used that prerogative to stack these boards with skeptics of public schools.  The President and Vice-President of the State Board of Education, both Hogan appointees, are nationally-known promoters of charter schoolsOther State Board appointees are a religious school principal and “a consultant who works on charter school conversions.”  It is no coincidence that the State Board is now considering an expansion of vouchers for private schools.  Another Hogan appointee is Ann Miller of the Baltimore County school board, who has a history of criticizing LGBT people and immigrants.  Another Baltimore County school board appointee, retired private school teacher and non-voter June Eaton, was asked by the Baltimore Sun “if she had any public school issues that needed to be addressed.”  Eaton replied, “I really haven’t given it much thought. This is all new to me.”

  1. He is pushing hard for tax dollars to be sent to private schools.

At the same time that Hogan has been trying to cut funding for public schools, he is doing everything in his power to send tax dollars to private schools.  Last year, he got the General Assembly to agree to $5 million in funding for vouchers.  Now, he is pushing to expand the program to $10 million.  The Governor continues to support a corporate tax credit for businesses contributing to private schools and introduced a bill that would have allowed charter schools to compete for state public school construction funding.

Hogan’s behavior is straight out of the playbook of Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos: starve public schools and send the money to the private sector.  Hogan even put his own twist on it by using public school money as a bargaining chip to get corporate welfare for defense behemoth Northrop Grumman.  The Governor’s intentions are beyond doubt.  Only one question remains.

Can he be stopped?

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Is Larry Hogan Capable of Telling the Truth?

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?

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Assembly to Investigate Hogan Administration’s War on Christmas

Looks like the War on Christmas finally has its first casualties: ordinary workers who failed to receive the full pay that they earned due to incompetence by the Hogan Administration. Let’s hope cheating workers wasn’t the business sense that Hogan promised to bring to Annapolis.

The following is a press release from the Office of Senate President Mike Miller:

Joint Committee Announced to Investigate Shorted Employee Paychecks
State’s Failed Computer System has deprived employees of full paychecks before the Holiday season

Annapolis, MD – Today, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Senator Thomas “Mac” Middleton (D-28, Charles County), and House Appropriations Chairman Delegate Maggie McIntosh announced the creation of a joint legislative panel to address the mishandling of State employee paychecks in Maryland.

In a hearing before the Finance Committee in mid-December, the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services cited over 1,100 emails from employees about the alarming mishandling of the employee payroll.

While the Department admits to have received over 1000 complaints, they have not released information regarding the size and scope of the problems with the system despite employees who have come forward about paychecks with missing overtime pay, base pay, and a lack of promotional pay. State employees who have brought the matter to the attention of the General Assembly testified about an inability to make their mortgage, health, and other critical payments due to the administration’s irresponsible oversight.

“What has happened here under this Administration is unconscionable,” stated Chairman Middleton. “The Administration was warned that the system was not ready and for two months, employees have been receiving partial paychecks even as we are approaching the holiday season. Some have been forced into terrible situations with many employees getting high interest loans just to make it through something that is squarely the fault of the Governor and his Administration, who have been insensitive as to how important a paycheck is to these public servants.”

The workgroup is similar to a review conducted by the legislature in 2014 around the technology failure of the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange.

“In an effort to save a few dollars, the Hogan administration ignored repeated warnings and put a payroll system in place that is cheating corrections officers and their families out of their pay during the holidays,” said Chairwoman McIntosh. “The administration’s response to this crisis has been to stonewall requests for information, insult the corrections officer’s union and deny the true size and scope of the problem. We are going to get to the bottom of this.”

Members of the workgroup will be announced next week.

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