Baltimore’s latest tourist come-on might well be aimed at the city itself, its leaders and its residents.
“Find Your Happy Place in Baltimore,” it suggests. The idea is to steer visitors to happiness-inciting venues throughout the city.
City Hall may not be on the list, its grand, even majestic, architecture notwithstanding. Inside there is little to make those who work there especially happy. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, in particular. She’s trying to close a $121 million budget gap.
She dare not raise the city’s property tax already the highest in the metro area by far. She suggests some dozens of police and fire personnel could go – along with one or two neighborhood fire stations. A bracing reality in these recessionary times. Balancing the budget would have been challenging enough but then came the “Snomageddon,” the double-barreled blizzard that socked the city last winter at a total cost of $36 million. This paralyzing blanket floated down after Rawlings-Blake was in office less than a month.
So she’s making about $50 million to $60 million in various tucks and trims and she’s proposed a bottle tax – of 4 cents per container. Several other taxes will raise another $50 million or so.
Immediately, she was charged with increasing the cost of “groceries.” Listeners were bombarded with paid anti-bottle tax messages. Few are willing to pay more for public services.
As if to underscore the anti-tax, anti-incumbent fever now popping up all over the nation, the city states attorney, Patricia Jessamy, threatened to sue the mayor for what Jessamy said were unconstitutional cuts in her budget.
On the cusp of all this, Baltimoreans learned their former mayor, Sheila Dixon, had billed the city $11,000 for various cosmetic services. Denying this expense would not, of course, balance the budget. But it has rather powerful symbolic significance, on the other hand. If you’d forgotten why you want to throw the bums out, this news item might have been the perfect aide memoire.
Rawlings-Blake and her spokespersons have worked diligently to counter the message. They had tried to minimize the pain. They had made it, more or less, invisible by tucking it into the cost of soda (not milk or juice, by the way).
They were doing their best to ignore election news from around the nation. In May, three-term Republican – yes, he was a Republican – Bob Bennett, of Utah, was defeated.
C. Fraser Smith is a senior news analyst for WYPR-FM and a columnist for The Daily Record.
-June 2010 Print Edition
By C. Fraser Smith - Do we really need a General Assembly session every year?
Yes. It’s a life and death imperative – literally and figuratively.
Delegates and senators meet to address issues ranging from balancing the budget to speed cameras. The budget thing can be a little abstract, despite the doom and gloom that frequently colors it.
Speech cameras and cell phone use are concrete, immediate matters everyone can understand.
“Sometimes we have to perfect something we did the year before,” said state Senator Jim Rosapepe as the 2010 session was ending. “Sometimes we have to make sure something we did the year before is working the way we intended.”
In the 2009 session, he recalled, the assembly Okayed speed enforcement cameras on highways adjacent to College Park and the University of Maryland. Some jurisdictional controversy involving Prince George’s County and the university threatened to block their installation.
“We had to change the law this year to make it clear that we wanted to protect kids who go to the university – some of whom have been killed or injured on these roads,” he said.
Similarly, General Assembly has had to meet every year – with increasing urgency – to deal with spending issues.
Republicans would say Democrats have met to kick the budgetary can down the road, to put off dealing with the difference between income and outgo.
Democrats say the colleagues in their GOP want to layoff a lot of state workers to prove they’re willing to make hard decisions to “right size” the state, to get the state payroll into manageable shape – to finally confront the revenue shortages created by the recession.
Democrats would rather wait. Maybe the economy will improve sufficiently so we won’t have to fire any – or many – state workers. Maybe other distasteful nipping and tucking can be avoided.
The cost of this approach may be greater than anyone knows. Warren Deschenaux, the assembly’s chief fiscal advisor, says the state has adopted an approach in which holes are drilled into the hillside of state programs in search of secreted revenue. In time, he suggests, the honeycombed hill could collapse.
Without the benefit of elegant similes, Republicans agree.
“We came into this session with some very big challenges,” said Delegate Tony O’Donnell of Southern Maryland. “”We had an economic climate where jobs were disappearing, wealth was leaving the state (because of Democratic tax increases) and we had a $2 billion deficit papered over with federal stimulus money.” Little was done to deal with any of this, he says.
“The budget,” said Delegate Sandy Rosenberg of Baltimore, “is balanced in an appropriate way. Candidate (Bob) Ehrlich says he would cut $600 million dollars but doesn’t say where.”
Democrats left Annapolis this year with their arguments unaltered. Unlike many other states where layoffs have been the order of the day, Maryland has had furloughs but relatively few state workers have lost their jobs.
Democrats have done it by drilling those holes into the hillside of state government while hoping for the economy to improve.
If that occurs, kicking the can will seem like a harmless kid’s game. If it doesn’t improve, the sound you hear will be state government imploding.
A Baltimore Point of View
