You
know there was a Governor one time in another state, and if you’ve heard this story don’t share the punch line. There was a Governor in another state, certainly not this one currently. The Governor in another state and his staff became very concerned that the governor wasn’t as engaged as he should be with the people that he’s serving – with the needs and the challenges and the opportunities in the neighborhoods, communities and the cities and towns. So they sent the Mayor, excuse me the Governor, out on the road to do a series of town hall meetings. All of you are familiar with this format of course.
Going to the high school gymnasium, they’d set it up and there would be microphones on either side and people would come up. The Governor spelled out to his citizens and his bosses that the ground rules are that every person gets to speak. You can ask as many questions as you like or make as many comments as you like, but you have to do it within a 2 minute time frame in respect to all of the other people who are lined up at the microphones. So they immediately start in after his remarks, people line up, and this woman looks like she had been there right when the doors opened.
You know you’ve seen these citizens. She jumped right up to that microphone. She had her paper in front of her very stern face and she says: “Governor, Governor.” He says: “Yes ma’am, I know you’re in line, you’ve been here all day. Go ahead.”
And she says: “I have 3 concerns.” He says; “Ma’am, you must realize you must keep them to 2 minutes.” She says: “I know, I’ll keep them to 2 minutes.”
She said, “First concern is this, the sidewalk in front of my house is broken. I call and call and call, but nobody ever comes to fix it. It’s been that way for 2 years. My second concern is that down at the playground at the end of the street, there’s so many ne’er-do-wells that take it over after dark that the kids can’t even play there because of the beer cans or the needles or God knows what’s left there.” She said: “I called and nobody comes, nobody does anything about it. Swing sets are broken. It’s in a horrible state of disrepair.” She says: “My third concern is this, there’s a tree. It’s not my tree. It’s a city tree. It’s been dead for years and nobody’s ever come to do anything about it.” She says “those are my concerns.”
The Governor says to her: “Well ma’am, I believe that your concerns would be better addressed to your mayor.” To which the woman says: “I figured as much, but I didn’t want to go that high up at first.”
I love that story, and you know I think it kind of highlights and reminds me of the importance of what all of us are trying to do together. You know that great Marylander, Frederick Douglass once said, “We are all one, our cause is one and we must help each other if we are to succeed.” And that’s the kind of government – at the state level anyway – that we are working very, very hard to create in partnership with you. A government that realizes public safety in any town or any city in Maryland is something that’s important to our entire community. That being environmentally responsible is important to every citizen and every community in our state. That when we create the sorts of skills for the jobs of today and tomorrow that we are making our whole state strong. In any town and any city, around any community college, wherever we do that, we are making our whole state strong. Clearly “we are one, our cause is one and we must help each other if we are to succeed.”
Today, I wanted to share a couple of thoughts with you under two broad categories. One is the immediate challenge that we face in terms of our budget – at least in state government – which of course directly effects what you are able to do in protecting the quality of life of the people in our state. After talking a little bit about that immediate challenge, I want to talk to you about some immediate opportunities under three broader visions that I hope might give you some sense of our vision. One that we can explain to the people that we serve why we’re doing what we’re doing and where we hope it will take all of us in the short time that we have the privilege to be able to serve the people of our state.
You know after I leave you today, I’m going back to Annapolis where a budget committee – joint committee – is meeting to look at the immediate challenge that all of us face, and that is the challenge of our deficit in our state budget. We are facing approximately a $1.5 billion hole in what is approximately a $15 billion operating budget.
Well how’d we get there? I need your help to explain to the people we work for how we got here and as we continue the dialogue and craft solutions. I need your help also in explaining and selling to people why it’s important to make these choices to make a better future for our state. The way we got here is this: we choose together to make a wise, sound, important investment in the future of our kids in public education. We invested, because of the Thorton funding, $1.3 billion additional in the education of our children. If you read some of the articles recently when the test scores came out, you see that our kids are doing a lot better across the state because of those investments.
A $1.3 billion investment in education however was accompanied at almost the same time by a $1 billion income tax cut that no one at the time was particularly clamoring for. It happened on the eve of an election and, as one person once said about democracy, it’s an awful form of government, but it’s better than all the others. And that’s how we got here, a $1.3 billion investment and a $1 billion cut. You do the math. That comes to about a $2.3 billion of additional spending over the last few years, which is why we saw every imaginable fee increase – a way of raising taxes where it falls disproportionately on the backs of working people and people on fixed incomes. We have economic growth which is a good thing, so instead of a $2.3 billion hole, it’s about a $1.5 billion hole.
Well how do we get out of this? Later on today, I’ll be meeting with legislative leaders after they’ve had hearings on the cuts-only solution to our problem. It’s an important and responsible exercise. It’s an important, responsible consideration: can we eliminate this deficit only by cuts? I suppose in a theoretical way the answer to that – in a strictly methodical way – is yes we can. And what will that involve?
It will involve cuts to things that have already been underfunded in the past, like our past investment in school construction. It will involve going back to that horrible habit of backing money out of a Transportation Trust Fund to put it in the general fund. It will involve taking dollars away from Open Space, the Rural Legacy and the other things and dumping it into the general fund. It will involve a lot of really bad choices that I think would not make us stronger as a state. It would make us weaker as a state, but we have to go through that exercise. As we do, there are no more important people in our state who can make the case about what this means in our lives than all of you. And I need your help as we go through this painful first step in this process.
Sometimes people say to me, do you think the solution to all of this might involve raising some taxes? And I kind of take a deep breath and try to explain, you know we’re already paying a lot of more in taxes everyday. We’re being taxed by circumstance. The circumstance of overcrowded schools, the circumstance of traffic and gridlock, and the choice that we really need to make as Marylanders is do we really want to allow our quality of life to be degraded. Do we want to allow ourselves to be taxed by circumstances? Or do we want to take control of our own future? Do we want to invest in the solutions that will make our state a better and stronger state for the next generation?
I believe, and I think you believe as well, that the people of our state when given the opportunity to make a choice between decline and progress will always choose to make progress. Provided we do it in a way that’s fair, that reflects the fact that we are One Maryland and that our cause is one. That we’re all in this together and that we must help each other if we are to succeed. That’s our immediate challenge.
But even as we go through this process, it’s also important that we realize that we have immediate opportunities. We have immediate opportunities to make solid progress and to advance that Maryland that all of us will be proud of, and be able to continue to be proud of. I’ve been working on some overarching themes with the new members of the cabinet, many of whom are here and have been here over the last couple of days – and I want to thank all of you who have gone out of your way to introduce yourself to the members of this administration. These are the themes that I wanted to touch on briefly here.
Workforce creation, environmental responsibility, and security integration. Well what do those things mean? Many of you are under challenges in your communities and towns and your cities because of the growth coming from BRAC, including new jobs, which is great. You know there, are some Governors in other states that wake up everyday and look at the newspaper. And instead of looking at the challenges that come from new jobs coming to their state, they’re look at the challenges of thousands and thousands of jobs leaving their state and going south of the border or off shore or to other places. This is a big challenge. Workforce creation is our way of working together to create the skills and the talents of our own people to fill those opportunities. What does that mean?
Workforce creation means combining the efforts of the Department of Human Resources with the Department of Economic and Business Development with your workforce investment boards, with your community colleges, and yes with your high schools, so that we give our kids marketable, tangible skills to graduate from high schools. Meaning they can go onto college or they can go into the workforce or they can do both the same time, which increasingly more and more of our people are doing. The reason those jobs are coming here for BRAC is because we already have the institutions – and you know they’re not going to offshore NSA or NIH or Johns Hopkins or any of the other institutions that make this security and science corridor. We have to do the best with the skills of our people and workforce creation is that umbrella that we want to advance towards, that vision, that next hill and it is an immediate opportunity.
The second overarching theme I want to throw out to you today has to do with environmental responsibility – the notion that one person can make a difference, and that each of us must try. Sustainable growth means harnessing the growth that is coming to Maryland in order to rebuild our cities, rebuild our towns, bring you the tax base you need so you don’t have to go annexing corn fields and farm lands in order keep your nose above the fiscal waters. It means bringing opportunities to those places in our state where the threads of community, those ties which bind the people together, already exist – where we have a tremendous amount of tapped potential. It also means – in this deregulated energy world of ours with all of the dire predictions of climate change and the health of our air and our water and sea level changes – that we empower consumers to take control of their own destiny.
You know no one of us is going to create that renewable clean energy source, but each of us has that ability to change our lives in such a way that we can become more conservation conscious, that we can bring down our own electric bills and our own businesses in our own homes, that we can actually be people who understand that when we turn off the light, when we conserve, when we save, we take control of our own future – environmental responsibility.
The third large overarching theme – and I want to make a couple of announcements in the context of this – is security integration. Security integration. Well what do I mean when I talk about security integration? I know that many of you here are certainly, if your not law enforcement, by being Mayors and Councilmembers, you’re concerned about law enforcement. One of the common threads that runs through so many of the initiatives that we are pulling together, and pushing forward at the present time is belief in the importance of timely, accurate data and information as the indispensable tool in keeping our community safe, especially at a time when resources are scarce.
Earlier this year, for the first time ever, our Governor’s Office of Crime Control and Prevention, pulled together all of the local police departments – their information managers – for a listening session. We heard about how difficult it is, for example, for local law enforcement to access the most basic state databases by that tiny kernel of the most violence and repeat offenders in our state. We are going to continue these meetings with IT professionals on a quarterly basis to ensure that we actually are following up, to create the connections – the security integrations necessary – that allow us to protect lives and property throughout our state because without proper information local law enforcement is fighting crime in the blind.
Under the leadership of Kristen Mahoney, we’re going to build the Governor’s of Crime Control and Prevention into a crime fighting resource center for the first time ever. Already, Maryland CCR stats are available online to counties and really that’s just the beginning. A few other things that we’re going to be doing – I’d like to announce today a series of law enforcement initiatives.
I have asked our Office of Crime Control and Prevention to offer customized, technical assistance to help local law enforcement locate data driven strategies like the ComStat process, which frankly we borrowed and expropriated from New York with great effect in the City of Baltimore. It really revolutionized New York and gave it a brighter tomorrow. This technical assistance will include mapping, record assistance, management and our office will ensure that it will have the resources available for you, for any law enforcement agency in our state that wants to move in this direction.
Secondly, GOCCP has made $750,000 available to improve the sharing of gang related information, intelligence and data between law enforcement and our local county detention centers. We have to get ahead of this gang issue. There’s not a single part of our state that this will not eventually touch if we don’t get in front of it.
And thirdly we are going to build upon the things that have worked in the past like our CSAFE program. In two of those places we are going to be adding two more components to CSAFE. With $3.3 million, we are going to be adding community prosecutors and crime analysis to two of those locations. We’d like to do it in all of them. Already we’ve made improvements at [the Department of] Parole and Probation that allows our parole and probation officers to actually access data from remote locations. Just because the honor system might work at the Naval Academy [doesn’t mean] it works with many of the people that are on parole and probation. You can’t just ask them, “Hey, have you been arrested in the last month.” You have to have the timely, accurate information. And that security integration will hopefully – as we move forward together – be something that knits all of us together.
You know, whenever a prosecution happens in our state – and I shared this with the Municipal chiefs the other day – it is not the name of the victim that appears on the charging document versus the perpetrator. It is the name of the state of Maryland versus John Doe or whoever it might be. We have to become much more integrated, we are one state, and when it comes to protecting lives and property we need to start acting as one state. A threat against one of us is a threat against all of us and that is what we’re going to do as we forward this notion of security integration. Not only integrating across the levels of government – the different assets on that public safety battle map, if you will, that are ours – but also integrating it with the challenge of homeland security throughout our state. And I’m going to need your help with this.
We do not have statewide interoperability and in a state that is as geographically small as ours, that’s really inexcusable. So I need your help, we are going to be doing a lot more drills, especially a lot more communication drills that’s going to be important, not only if there’s an awful terrorist event, but if, God forbid, there’s a category three hurricane that goes roaring up the Bay or takes out the Delmarva Peninsula. But I need your help in order to do that. We’re going to be calling upon you and asking for your help and your active participation in these drills. I know that all of you take it seriously and will help us to accomplish it.
Workforce creation, environment responsibility, security integration. These are the big themes we can work on together immediately and tomorrow and in the years ahead. If we work together, we’re going to make our state a much stronger place.
I want to leave you with this final story. I just came from touring Trimpers Rides down at the end of the Boardwalk. How many of you with little kids have ever been to Trimpers Rides? My parents took me when I was a kid. And I certainly took my kids to Trimpers Rides. Of course, that family that owns Trimpers Rides is experiencing some challenges – paying their property tax assessment when the numbers might tell them they should close it down and put up high rise condos. We’re going to work with them through that and hopefully we will be able to preserve it. But as we walked through there, it was a unique experience because, get this, they weren’t open yet and it was totally silent. I’ll bet very few of you have been to Trimpers Rides when it was totally silent.
The lights weren’t on. There was no music from the carousel. The kids weren’t screaming. There were no fathers with migraines. It was totally silent. And we just stood there in front of that carousel with three generations of this family that have worked at that Maryland institution.
As I looked at that old carousel still housed in its original building dating from I think 1903, I thought about the thousands and thousands of Marylanders – the generations of families – that have come there with the most important thing in their lives, in their hands, and put their little boy or their little girl on those old wooden carved horses, or lions or giraffes. And there was a spirit present in that place, in that circle that all of us have the privilege and honor to be a part of by being able to call Maryland home.
It really drove home to me the importance of the choices we make – beyond Trimpers, beyond the rides, beyond the vacations and the great memories we have. How many parents have looked at their child and thought about the sort of future that they’re making for them. The sort of future they’ll have. The sort of hard work necessary to get it done. The important choices, and yes the important sacrifices that working parents make every single day that we have the privilege – what Robert Kennedy called the greatest of freedom’s privileges – the privilege to be responsible for making a new tomorrow, for making a better day for our kids.
I need your help, if we’re going to be successful in our own time, in keeping faith with the past, in honoring the memory of what our parents have given to us, then we need to be willing to step up now in an important time, remembering that “we are one, that our cause is one and that we must help each other if we are to succeed.” Together, we need to move forward towards that Maryland that all of us carry in our hearts. God bless you all for the important work you do. Thank you.