A Report from Maryland
Edsall, Barry C. Rascovar, Thomas B.
A Report from Maryland by Barry C. Rascovar and Thomas B. Edsall For the past decade, the state of Maryland has grown impressively in population and wealth, but its government has grown even...
...The tax base has grown along with the populationduring the sixties, the affluent suburbs of Baltimore and Washington added a lot of money to the state tax rolls...
...With a steadily growing and more affluent population, the sales tax-which has been raised gradually over the years to five per cent-will produce $620 million this year...
...Neil Solomon...
...If you don’t count convicted politicians, Solomon is probably Maryland’s bestknown celebrity...
...In his government job, he has a huge agency that has grown like topsy...
...Thus the effective lobbying of the elderly has produced a state office of aging, with a staff of 109 and an annual budget of $10 million...
...The same can be said of reorganization of the state governmentpromised as a way to cut costs, it has often increased them...
...The attorney general’s office has grown from a staff of 38 ten years ago to 2 18 positions this year...
...for service employment, to 38th...
...But the 13,500-employee department, which has a $610 million budget, has proven almost impossible to control...
...A new state lottery now brings in $106 million a year...
...Maryland got $178 million from Washington in 1968 and will get $935 million this year...
...Ten years later, there are 259 positions ostensibly needed to account for the $3 14 million a year Maryland pumps out in Medicaid payments...
...Entire agencies have been created over the past two decades to attack problems that were not present in the public consciousness until recently, such as air and water pollution controls...
...There are a number of reasons why Maryland’s government has grown so big, besides the obvious one, the Barry C. Rascovar and Thomas B. Edsall are members of the Washington bureau of The Baltimore Sun increased availability of federal funds for state programs...
...Eight other state colleges and universities have total budgets of $121 million and enrollments of 31,000...
...He is constantly on television and radio discussing medical developments, promoting his diet books, and generally selling health...
...It’s like Old Man River...
...The state system of two-year community colleges has an annual budget of $48 million and 58,000 students...
...This became a source of revenue that carried Lane’s successors through a dream world of fiscal solvency for the 27 ensuing years...
...Then there are the new buildings the state has built, which have provided new construction contracts, architectural and engineering fees...
...The state created a public defender system with 263 jobs and a budget of $4.2 million...
...Every year it ends up that way, regardless of whether you have a governor preaching austerity...
...Its growth rate from 1970 to 1975 was seven per cent per year...
...It never misses,” says Bosz...
...In a year when Jimmy Carter is facing another $60-billion deficit, Maryland’s acting governor, Blair Lee 111, is in the enviable position of deciding how to spend a budget surplus of almost $100 million...
...Marvin Mandel followed the same politically astute course, preaching belt-tightening while adding state personnel...
...A new Department of Transportation has succeeded in unifying previously autonomous and competing agencies into a single department with a consolidated trust fund...
...Parallel Growth This phenomenal growth in the size and cost of Maryland’s government has been supportable over the last 15 years largely because of the parallel growth of the state’s population and jobs...
...When Richard Nixon first established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the Maryland governor’s office handled the paperwork for the small grants earmarked for local police departments...
...From 1960 to 1970, Maryland ranked sixth in the country in the rate of population increase, fourth in the rate of increase in service jobs, and sixth in federal jobs...
...To head the new department, Mandel chose Agnew’s health advisor, Dr...
...As demands for more services from the state government and for more state jobs have been made, there has always been the revenue to meet them...
...Lee is asking this year for funds from the legislature to build another $78-million worth of new buildings, and when they are finished the upkeep on them will be another $7 million a year...
...It is attempting to attack problems the federal government has refused to touch, including placement of controls on hospital and nursing home costs...
...452 people now work in the department’s central office (once the executive suite of the Martin-Marietta Corporation) which has a budget of $6 million...
...and for federal government work, to 15th...
...This year, the personal income tax will bring in $885 million and is expected to increase next year by eight per cent...
...The University of Maryland, once known as a cow college, now has an enrollment of 40,000 spread over four large campuses, an overall budget of $378 million, and a state payroll of 13,000, up from 3,600 just 20 years ago...
...It has its own agencies to deal with drug abuse and alcoholism, and runs its own kidney dialysis program...
...Since 1968, the state budget has quadrupled, from less than $1 billion to more than $4 billion...
...A few years ago, a governor’s task force reported that the health department was in near-chaos and that Solomon should be fired...
...Federal programs have also added people and money...
...In the last 20 years, state employment has risen by 350 per cent...
...The state’s government, however, has continued to function as if these dramatic shifts never took place...
...The first part of the state government to be reorganized was health...
...In other areas, the state has had better luck with reorganization-but it has been costly...
...An enlarged, unified court system has grown from 229 positions in 1968 to 1,157 this year...
...When Agnew took office in 1967, full of pledges to make government more frugal, he added 2,139 workers to the Maryland payroll...
...From 1970 to 1976 the rate for population growth dropped to 29th nationally...
...This has given officials better control over the direction of transportation in the state, but it has also required a new layer of bureaucracy...
...It has 20 hospitals and health centers...
...Who ever heard of equal employment opportunity in the 1950s...
...The only other major move to alter the state’s tax structures came when Spiro Agnew was just beginning his tenure in the governor’s mansion and did not have to worry about running for reelection...
...In 1969, a Department of Health and Mental Hygiene was created to combine all the state’s medical and healthrelated agencies...
...In the legal community, the state’s largesse has led to numerous opportunities for both young lawyers and for more established members of the bar...
...What’s amazing about all these increases is that they have been accomplished at little political cost to Maryland’s governors-indeed, as the state government has grown, its growth has made each governor more popular...
...Thus while 20 years ago the state had only a commission to deal with alcoholism, it now has several hundred professionals working on the problem and special programs to deal with the alcoholics among the state workers themselves...
...This is an election year for Lee, and he plans to cut the state income tax and the state property tax, increase aid to education and welfare grants, and raise the pay and benefits of state employees, whose numbers are growing at 18 times the federal rate...
...While the rate of growth of the Maryland government was 27th nationally from 1960 to 1970, it rose to first from 1970 to 1975...
...In all three cases, the moves by the state served social purposes as well as creating ideal patronage spots: the public defender system and the attorney general’s office for aspiring young lawyers and the enlarged court system as a place to put the worn out to pasture...
...Since 1950, the year Lane lost to Theodore R. McKeldin, no sitting governor has been defeated...
...In the central office alone, there are 12 jobs in legal affairs, 13 in public relations, 34 in finance-plus personnel specialists, equal opportunity specialists, environmental specialists, and of course support staff to assist each new.,specialist...
...Now every agency has its own equal employment officer...
...Even in 1974, in the wake of the oil crisis and the recession, when Mandel presented a budget that he claimed was “prepared under the bleakest of economic conditions and fiscal uncertainties,” he was able to increase the general fund budget by 14 per cent and add another 1,680 jobs to state agencies...
...says Henry BOSZ, the state’s veteran personnel secretary...
...And as the growing middle class has organized and lobbied for its concerns-mostly in the social services area-the government has taken on new tasks in response...
...State sales and income taxes, put in place earlier, have been handsome income-producers for Maryland...
...As each new building and program means more salaries and fringe benefit costs, particularly pensions, the state is moving to a position where the declining private economy-and a halt in the expansion of the federal bureaucracywill mean a steady erosion of the surpluses of the past decade...
...He won approval of the state sales tax, which produced his defeat in 1950-“pennies for Lane’’ was his opponent’s slogan...
...Solomon’s response was to implement another reorganization plan that added a new layer of bureaucratic offices, including an Office of Special Services, an Office of Professional Resource Services, an Office of Government Relations, and an Office of Management Staff...
...After two years of wrangling, Agnew got the legislature to graduate the state income tax...
...That has proved a prescient decision, since it has allowed the state to reap full benefit from its growing number of affluent citizens (federal employees, with their ever-expanding salaries, account for a lot of the affluence...
...In addition, it has taken far more planners and architects and engineers to meet new federal standards...
...These two major taxes-along with a host of minor ones-have given Maryland an almost unshakeable revenue base...
...Since then, however, these trends have either stopped or reversed...
...This state-controlled munificence began in large part nearly 30 years ago under the administration of William Preston Lane Jr., the man who effectively established a healthy base of revenues and became the only politician to pay the elective price for it...
...Despite a muchheralded reorganization program that was supposed to save money and make the government more efficient, the size of the “streamlined” bureaucracy has more than doubled in ten years, from 33,552 in 1968 to 70,147 today...
...In its economic character, Maryland is shifting from sunbelt to frostbelt...
...It took just a handful of people to run the Medicaid program in Maryland in 1968...
...Now, 39 state workers distribute the almost $10 million a year in LEAA funds...
...A Report from Maryland by Barry C. Rascovar and Thomas B. Edsall For the past decade, the state of Maryland has grown impressively in population and wealth, but its government has grown even faster...
Vol. 10 • April 1978 • No. 2
