WASHINGTON -- The budget President Clinton sent to Congress yesterday offers Maryland a mixture of gains and losses, including a huge increase in housing aid for Baltimore and the prospect of losses in mass transit subsidies. And, it proposes only a slim pay raise to the 300,000 Marylanders on the government payroll.
In general, officials trying to figure out what the $1.61 trillion budget means for Maryland seemed relieved that the state had not been hit harder at a time when budget-cutting is in vogue.
"On the Maryland-specific items that we have been able to check, we seem to be moving ahead," said Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes, a Democrat.
Submission of the budget is the opening action in a months-long process that will end with a spending plan shaped by the Republican-controlled Congress.
Maryland officials were still scrambling late yesterday to pin down the meaning of the budget.
It consolidated a number of transportation programs into one program and appeared to cut transportation spending by more than 14 percent nationally. But the change in the structure of the program made it impossible to calculate the impact on Maryland immediately, said Bob Frantz, an analyst with the state Department of Transportation. The overall cut suggested, though, that Maryland would suffer.
Mr. Sarbanes noted that the Clinton administration tried to cut mass transit subsidies last year but that much of the money was restored by Congress -- at a time when Democrats were in charge.
The budget contains $22 million for extension of Baltimore's light rail line to Penn Station and Baltimore-Washington International Airport, along with $200 million for further expansion of Washington's subway system into the Maryland and Virginia suburbs.
Again this year, the president failed to include funds for the MARC system, Maryland's rail commuter network, to expand service and upgrade equipment. Last year, Congress earmarked million for MARC and Capitol Hill aides were hopeful that Congress would weigh in again with additional subsidies.
The budget contains $60.1 million in housing funds for Baltimore -- a 44 percent increase -- and $11.3 million for Baltimore County ++ -- an increase of 54 percent.
Over the next three years, the Department of Housing and Urban Development also plans to reduce federal control of public housing and to turn public housing funds into vouchers that tenants could use to live anywhere.
Moving to Opportunity, a federal voucher program intended to help 285 Baltimore families move from public housing into better neighborhoods in the city and suburbs, drew furious opposition in eastern Baltimore County last fall. Officials seemed wary yesterday of drawing parallels to that controversy.
Democratic Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland, who had blocked further financing of that program, welcomed yesterday's housing initiative.
"HUD's proposals are a good start," she said in a prepared statement. "I want to use housing assistance as an incentive to self-sufficiency, and remove current disincentives that discourage work and create zip codes of pathology."
Last week, at a meeting with tenant leaders at Lexington Terrace, a badly dilapidated development in West Baltimore that the city plans to demolish, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke said: "I think that overall our experience is that it's better to have vouchers and counseling programs than these types of old high-rise buildings."
Despite the huge increase in funds for the city, housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III was wary.
"I think the final outcome will be pretty far from the . . . proposal," he said. "At this point, I'm not taking any increases seriously. I'm planning for cuts."
And Rep. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., the Baltimore County Republican, saw rough sledding ahead for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Mr. Ehrlich, a member of the housing subcommittee, said: "A proposal to eliminate HUD is on the [subcommittee's] table."
Where local officials a few years ago were asking Congress to restore funds cut by Republican presidents, they are now worrying about holding on to what President Clinton has proposed.
For federal employees, the news wasn't what they had hoped. The budget proposed a 2.4 percent raise, less than half the 5.9 percent they anticipated under a federal statute designed to bring federal workers into line with people holding comparable private-sector jobs and to give them a cost-of-living increase as well.
"By jeopardizing the middle-class status of government employees," said John Sturdivant, president of the AFL-CIO American Federation of Government Employees, "the president may have endangered the high-quality government that taxpayers are insisting upon."
The budget also proposes dropping 35,900 employees from the federal civilian work force of 2 million.
The Social Security Administration, headquartered in Woodlawn, would lose 900 workers, even as its operating budget increases by nearly 12 percent to $6.2 billion. The personnel cut is the first step in a plan to cut 4,500 workers by 1999 as part of the Clinton administration's plan to reduce the federal work force by 272,000.
The cuts will come from the supervisory ranks, said Phil Gambino, Social Security's spokesman, and will be achieved through attrition. By 1999, he said, "front-line service personnel" would increase by 2,000 as supervisors are cut.
Social Security is also getting $357 million as part of a $1.1 billion computer modernization project and $534 million to help cut the backlog of 1.2 million disability cases.