{"id":7422,"date":"2016-12-15T07:00:22","date_gmt":"2016-12-15T12:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=7422"},"modified":"2016-12-14T17:58:45","modified_gmt":"2016-12-14T22:58:45","slug":"larry-hogans-alternate-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=7422","title":{"rendered":"Larry Hogan\u2019s Alternate Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco.<\/em><\/p>\n

Everyone knows that elected officials sometimes disagree on issues.\u00a0 They may have differences of philosophy or values.\u00a0 They may emphasize different sets of conflicting data.\u00a0 They may prioritize one thing over another.\u00a0 But how many of them actually make stuff up and use that as a basis for policy arguments?<\/p>\n

One does.\u00a0 His name is Larry Hogan.<\/p>\n

The Governor\u2019s target is a law passed by the General Assembly over his veto known as the Maryland Open Transportation Investment Decision Act of 2016<\/a>.\u00a0 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\u2019s capital budget.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The score of each project included in MDOT\u2019s capital budget would be released publicly.\u00a0 But the law makes clear that the scores themselves would not determine a project\u2019s fate.\u00a0 MDOT would have the final say over which ones get funded.\u00a0 The law says explicitly that \u201cthe 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.\u201d\u00a0 The law also says, \u201cNothing in this Act may be construed to prohibit or prevent the funding of the capital transportation priorities in each jurisdiction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sounds harmless, yeah?\u00a0 Not to Governor Hogan.\u00a0 He is calling the law \u201cthe Road Kill Bill\u201d and has released a huge list of transportation projects it would allegedly cancel<\/a>.\u00a0 The Governor said in a public statement<\/a> that the law was a \u201cdisastrous 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\u2026 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.\u201d \u00a0He has launched a fierce social media campaign to repeal it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And yet the plain language of the law itself would not kill any transportation projects.\u00a0 Not a single one.<\/p>\n

Think that\u2019s bad enough?\u00a0 It\u2019s even worse.\u00a0 One of the projects the Governor says the law would kill is the Watkins Mill\/I-270 interchange in Gaithersburg<\/a>.\u00a0 This is a top priority for MoCo\u2019s state legislators and was a significant reason for their support of a 2013 transportation funding increase.\u00a0 And yet the Hogan administration indefinitely postponed it<\/a> and later mulled cutting exit ramps to save money<\/a>.\u00a0 Only after the MoCo delegation introduced legislation to mandate funding the project<\/a> did MDOT relent and reluctantly put it back on track.\u00a0 And now the Governor is falsely blaming the transportation scoring law for killing a project that his own administration tried to kill!<\/p>\n

Folks, what we have here is not a failure to communicate.\u00a0 It is a failure to live in reality.\u00a0 The Governor\u2019s attacks on this law are contradicted by the plain language of the law itself.\u00a0 It does not kill ANY projects.\u00a0 In fact, it explicitly preserves MDOT\u2019s ability to decide which projects get funded.\u00a0 This dispute is not about killing projects at all.\u00a0 What it\u2019s really about is that the Governor can\u2019t stand any law that subjects his decisions to public scrutiny.\u00a0 And this concept is so alien to him that he is willing to make false statements in public about what the law actually does.\u00a0 This is not a matter of right vs left or Democrats vs Republicans.\u00a0 It\u2019s a matter of making stuff up to justify what you want.<\/p>\n

Now what other soon-to-be GOP officeholder does this remind you of?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco. Everyone knows that elected officials sometimes disagree on issues.\u00a0 They may have differences of philosophy or values.\u00a0 They may emphasize different sets of conflicting data.\u00a0 They may prioritize one thing over another.\u00a0 But how many of them actually make stuff up and use that as a basis for policy arguments? One does.\u00a0 … Continue reading Larry Hogan\u2019s Alternate Reality<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[151,1197,38],"tags":[1545,968,1164],"class_list":["post-7422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adam-pagnucco","category-larry-hogan","category-transportation","tag-adam-pagnucco","tag-larry-hogan","tag-maryland-department-of-transportation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4mKJE-1VI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7422"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7427,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7422\/revisions\/7427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}