RICHARD C. Mike Lewin was anxious in October 2000 when he joined Gov. Parris N. Glendening for a lobster lunch at Government House, the rust-brick Georgian home of the governor in Annapolis.

The Nasdaq stock market had plunged more than 30 percent, from 5,049 to less than 3,500, during the previous six months. New high-tech companies such as Corvis Corp. and Aether Systems Inc., the economic fountains of youth expected to replace the shriveled smokestack employers, were showing vulnerabilities. Lewin, Glendening's economic director, sought to persuade the governor to increase his budget to attract business.

He had hardly begun when Glendening waved him off.

"There'll never be a recession again in this country," Lewin recalled Glendening saying. "Technology has changed the economy forever."

Lewin raised a woolly eyebrow.

"You're telling me a recession will never happen? We're listening to different music, Governor," replied Lewin, who had joined Glendening after a long career in finance and banking. He returned to his office in Baltimore and contemplated their philosophical divide - and his own future.

A month later, he quit - two years after another respected Baltimore business executive, James T. Brady, had relinquished the post in frustration.

As he departs office Wednesday as Maryland's 59th governor, Parris Nelson Glendening may be credited for possessing strong instincts and a pioneer's passion in several areas, but economic development won't be among them.

He took office in 1994 with an effusively pro-business inaugural address that exceeded expectations and was being described nationally as a "new Democrat" who grasped the potency of tax cuts and regulatory reform.

He presided over a historic period of job growth, when technology ballooned and Maryland households became the second richest in the nation.

And he departs with little of that recalled, submerged beneath red ink and bad blood. Because of a $1.8 billion deficit with which he burdened his successor and the accretion of eight years of siding with labor unions and environmentalists, many business people say, he leaves Annapolis as he arrived: unconvincing, unproven, untrusted.

"You had two really good secretaries of economic development, and both resigned in frustration," said an aide who had served both Glendening and his predecessor, William Donald Schaefer, and insisted on anonymity. "That tells you everything you need to know. Schaefer was much more economic development-minded, whatever had to be done. Glendening's was certainly not a positive business legacy."

"From a Baltimore perspective, this was really the first time maybe since Millard Tawes [of Crisfield] that the business community felt really disconnected from the governor," said Donald P. Hutchinson, president and chief executive of SunTrust Banks in Maryland who formerly led the Greater Baltimore Committee, an influential business group.

During the past three months, 30 employers and economists were interviewed about Glendening's business record, and at least a dozen more declined to comment. Some of the most recognizable executives in the state said they feared repercussions despite the fact that Glendening was a lame-duck leader.

Said one county economic development director, who also declined to be identified, "I wouldn't touch that with an 11-foot pole."

Dissatisfaction might be expected during economic doldrums, but Maryland prospered immensely for most of Glendening's watch. Job creation drew comparisons to the mid-1980s boom when the state profited from the defense buildup under President Ronald Reagan.

Many states attempted a shift from manufacturing toward technology, but Maryland succeeded more than most. Its universities lead the nation in government research grants. The Interstate 270 corridor in Montgomery County, home to companies mapping the human genome, became a major biotech cluster. In technology employment, the state is just behind California and Massachusetts, the birthplaces of modern computing.

Better income growth

An underachiever in income growth - Maryland lagged behind even West Virginia in the early 1990s - the state became much more potent. Its median household income, $55,013, is second only to Alaska, says the Census Bureau. Its poverty rate is 7.3 percent, third lowest.

Maryland climbed from 43rd in job growth in 1994 to 15th in 2001. It surpassed Virginia, Pennsylvania and Delaware, the neighboring states that a decade ago stole its companies and business prospects like schoolyard bullies roughing up a classmate for lunch money.

"When he took office, Maryland was one of the slowest-growing states in the country, but things began to turn dramatically," said Anirban Basu, a director at Towson University's economic research institute. "The very late years of the 1990s essentially rivaled the Maryland miracle years of the late 1980s in terms of the number of quality jobs added on a per-year basis."

In technology circles, the governor is typically better regarded than in the business establishment, almost as if there were two Glendenings.

The policies that offended business conservatives might have comforted New Economy entrepreneurs. Politically liberal places - San Francisco, Boston, Seattle - are often hotbeds of technology enterprise, national researchers have noted.

The schism between old and new economies isn't unusual, said Ross DeVol, a research director at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, Calif.

"Baltimore is an old industrial town, so a lot of this was outside the mindset of previous leaders," said DeVol, a former economist for CSX Corp. in Maryland. "It's a threat to the status quo. Being from the D.C. area, the current governor was more aware of changes taking place. Maryland hasn't gotten much credit on the national landscape and probably deserves more than it receives."

Accident of location

Others say that Maryland simply gained by accident of location, near federal laboratories and Northern Virginia, home to America Online and other telecommunications giants. Some of Maryland's most fruitful tech initiatives were championed by others, such as former House Speaker Casper R. Taylor Jr. and Montgomery County Del. Kumar P. Barve, according to officials with those programs.

James S. Gilmore III, Virginia governor from 1999 to 2002, said that when he proposed to Glendening a bridge north of Washington to link the technology cluster in his state with Montgomery County, Glendening wouldn't entertain the notion.

"Governor Glendening said that was not going to happen," said Gilmore, now with the Kelley Drye & Warren law firm in Northern Virginia. "There was going to be no bridge, and I should not address it any further - ever. I never saw this as a rivalry. I did see it as an opportunity for a partnership which never occurred."

But many credit the governor, a university professor by trade, for strengthening the state's ability to capitalize on technology growth. The University of Maryland, Baltimore County and other schools constructed gleaming new labs, and the flagship campus at College Park lured a Nobel Prize physicist. The state's 18 percent increase in spending on higher education from 2000 to 2001 ranked third in the country.

The results were at times impressive: Eight state universities produced nearly 50 percent more information technology graduates in 2001, three years after a new program - the Maryland Applied Information Technology Initiative - funneled millions in public and private dollars to hire more computer science professors.

Glendening said a visit to a machine shop in Salisbury shortly after he won the governorship awakened him to employers' new needs. He expected to find an operation not unlike the grimy tool-and-die shop in Florida in which he worked during college. Instead, he was startled to find two machinists in a blinking control room remotely running as many lathes as used to take a dozen men.

Long-term effect

"It became clear to me as governor that it's more important to work long-term. It's great if you're personally involved and if you get a big win like Morgan Stanley," he said in an interview, referring to a 150-person data center that the New York investment firm is opening in Baltimore this spring. "But in the big picture, that's one project. Government doesn't create jobs. It creates the environment for jobs and we have one of the best-educated work forces in the entire country."

He considers his emphasis on higher education and on Smart Growth to counter sprawl development as his two most important contributions to economic vitality.

"It's not that there are two of me," Glendening said. "It could be that there are two business communities, though. One is ideological and the other looks at base results. People focus on one project like the ICC [the proposed Intercounty Connector in suburban Washington], but they forget we doubled the amount of money spent on transportation. And then think of the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on sprawl and then all that we must spend to remedy the disinvestment in places like Baltimore or Cambridge. To say that you're either for the environment or for economic development, that's a false dichotomy."

Differences

Glendening didn't recall the conversation that led Lewin to resign, but he did acknowledge his differences with his former directors, including his reluctance to cut taxes as heavily as Brady advocated.

"Their responsibility is to ask how much money is coming for their department," he said. "My responsibility is to ask, 'How do you pay for all of this?' You can only have one governor."

In 1994, Glendening campaigned as a "pro-business Democrat," a reputation he cultivated during three terms as Prince George's County executive.

Maryland was derided at the time by its own corporate executives as an inhospitable "tax hell" with confusing regulations and an unfit work force.

Glendening, well aware that the dissatisfaction nearly cost him the race against Republican Ellen R. Sauerbrey, and with President Clinton's mantra of "It's the economy, stupid" still fresh, Glendening focused nearly his entire inaugural speech on bettering the business climate.

It was the only time the topic dominated his yearly address.

Impact of speech

"It was that speech that gave me the impetus" to join the administration, said Brady, Glendening's first of four economic development directors. "I must confess, with some embarrassment, that I believed it."

Glendening also grasped the resonance of Sauerbrey's tax-cut platform. He shaved the personal income tax by 10 percent and eliminated a tax on vending items that had been dubbed "the snack tax."

In the Almanac of American Politics, Michael Barone described Glendening and Vermont Gov. Howard Dean as "politically savvy Democrats" who "co-opted the GOP tax agenda" and eschewed tax-and-spend agendas that failed previous Democratic governors such as Michael Dukakis and Mario Cuomo.

That didn't last long.

By the end of his first term, he was being lampooned as "Spendening." He had to fend off insurrection in his party and another stiff election challenge from Sauerbrey. Business people were aghast at being solicited for political donations from Glendening's staff within days of asking his office for support on a project or issue, they said.

"Every time there was a visit, there was a follow-up for money. I've been in this for 35 years and never seen anything like this," said one business leader who feared repercussions in future dealings with state government.

Glendening said he had no knowledge of any such activity.

International trade

International trade typifies the glass half-full economic assessment of Glendening.

Maryland outstripped the nation and region in export growth and jumped from 22nd in the mid-1990s to 11th in annual growth by 2000. But the total value of state exports, $5.3 billion, is meager and on a par with smaller states': Alabama, Kansas, Delaware, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. Glendening didn't come close to the goal he set in 1996 of Maryland exports reaching $9 billion by 2000.

"Schaefer's trips were packed with visits to companies. They were tough schedules, long days," a former official who accompanied Glendening and Schaefer on overseas trade missions recalled. "Glendening's didn't seem to be as packed. And when Schaefer came back, he'd have a press conference to announce deals they made. Glendening would come back, there'd be no press conference and it made it harder to judge what had been accomplished."

Early on, Glendening had criticized Schaefer's trips as scattered and lavish. He vowed to have fewer and more productive ones. But his last trip, to Africa in 2000, became mired in internal wrangling, according to Lewin and other participants, over which department would pay for the flight for Jennifer E. Crawford, the governor's then-appointments secretary, who became his wife last year.

If Glendening's economic legacy is a puzzle, Murray D. Levy, a longtime Charles County commissioner, contended that such appraisals consist more of perception than reality anyway.

"Schaefer put in the Critical Areas legislation and cleaned up the bay and the rivers, but he never got credit for that," Levy said. "I think the same is true for Glendening in doing things to help prosperity. You get pinned with a label and the label sticks. You're seen as either anti-business or anti-environment and it doesn't matter what you did. Most of us are in the middle somewhere."

Sun staff writer Bill Atkinson contributed to this article.