Gov. Martin O'Malley's move to close the Maryland House of Correction just two weeks after a guard was stabbed there surprised many who had been pushing for the prison's closure for years. But corrections isn't the only troubled state agency on which the administration is moving quickly.
A month after a Baltimore youth died at Bowling Brook Preparatory School in what authorities later ruled a homicide, pressure from the O'Malley administration helped force the 50-year-old reformatory to close. Less than a week after that, O'Malley proposed $21 million in funding to build the state's first new residential program for youth offenders in more than a decade.
Two weeks into office, the O'Malley administration pressured Public Service Commission Chairman Kenneth D. Schisler, who was widely criticized for the state's response to last year's BGE electricity rate increase, into resigning. Now, with O'Malley appointee Steven B. Larsen in charge, the legislature has ceded virtually all initiative on energy policy to the administration.
O'Malley has taken a slow, deliberative approach to working with the General Assembly on contentious issues such as taxes and slot machine gambling. But when it has come to things he can control administratively, he has wasted no time.
"Even while the legislative session is going on, there are a lot of things in motion now that are the nuts and bolts of the administration of government," said O'Malley, a Democrat. "It's not as if we've been waiting on the difficult things we need to do in order to make government work."
Matthew Crenson, a political science professor at the Johns Hopkins University, said O'Malley's early actions aren't surprising, given that the state constitution provides tremendous power for Maryland's governor.
"I don't think this reflects a daring gesture on the part of the governor," Crenson said. "I think it just reflects the extent of his powers and his sense of what he can do without arousing the legislature."
O'Malley's predecessor, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., also had a penchant for bold gestures when it came to the state's biggest problems.
In the summer of 2005, Ehrlich announced at a surprise news conference at the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School in Baltimore County that he would close the long-troubled facility for youth offenders. And at the beginning of public outcry over BGE rates last year, he publicly declared the 72 percent increase "will not stand."
But when he announced the Hickey closure, he did so without a plan for what to do with all the children who were there. The facility is still open. And after promising to fight the BGE increase, Ehrlich later declared himself a "neutral arbiter" on the issue and amended his promise to "72 percent overnight will not stand."
Ehrlich pushed for the biggest initiative of his term, legalizing slot machine gambling, in his first legislative session only to see the measure die in the Democratic-controlled legislature. Though O'Malley's party affiliation gives him an advantage, he appears intent not to repeat Ehrlich's early failures.
Rather than pushing his own ideas, he has mostly signed on to others' initiatives, such as clean car legislation, ground rent reforms and a death penalty repeal.
For now, he's operating much the same way he did as mayor of Baltimore, where a strong system of executive government enabled him to enact much of his agenda without having to win over the City Council. Although he now has a much larger and more autonomous legislative body to contend with, O'Malley aides say, much work is being done at the administrative level, even during the General Assembly session.
O'Malley said he wants his administration to aggressively tackle the state's biggest problems. For too long, Americans have been told that the government doesn't and can't work, O'Malley said. But he said he believes government can succeed at difficult tasks and intends to make it try.
"Big things done well make even bigger things possible," O'Malley said.
Sue Esty, the interim executive director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 92, said that one of those big things, closing the 19th-century House of Correction, came as "a real shot in the arm" to correctional officers. Before the recent nonfatal stabbing of a corrections officer there, another officer and three inmates were killed there last year.
"If this is what's to come, these real strong moves ... it's a good thing," she said. "I just hope it doesn't go the other way, real strong moves in the wrong direction."
In the two weeks before the closure, the state quietly transferred more than 800 inmates to other Maryland prisons as well as to federal and state facilities as far away as Kentucky.
In the wake of the death at Bowling Brook, Juvenile Services Secretary Donald W. DeVore promised to develop new guidelines for the use of restraint on youths in custody within 30 days and to conduct a sweep within 90 days of all the privately run facilities where the state sends children. He said he met the first deadline and is on track for the second.
Many of the policy ideas DeVore is trying to implement - such as developing small, regional detention centers so youth can be rehabilitated near the communities they come from - are not new, he said. But the will to implement them is, he said.
"The governor, throughout the entire process since I've been secretary, has been very supportive of our new program and philosophy for Juvenile Services," DeVore said.
When legislators arrived in Annapolis in January, they were promising new laws on energy regulation in reaction to last year's BGE rate increase. But since Larsen took office, they have dropped most of their efforts.
Sen. E.J. Pipkin, an Eastern Shore Republican who was one of the General Assembly's leading voices on utility issues last year, said he thinks O'Malley's PSC nominees will be willing to challenge the status quo to help consumers in a way their predecessors weren't.
"They're going to take a more balanced approach between the industry and the consumers ... versus the last commission, which was very set on implementing the 1999 [electric deregulation] bill, regardless of any external changes since the bill was enacted," Pipkin said.
The efforts of the legislature and the administration are also intersecting in the debate over Prince George's Hospital Center. Legislators are working on ways to generate more cash for the hospital, a debt-ridden institution that serves large numbers of uninsured patients. The nonprofit organization running the hospital says it will run out of money within months.
O'Malley's secretary of health and mental hygiene, John M. Colmers, has been working behind the scenes to resolve the situation. He said this week he will recommend a plan to set up an independent hospital authority with local taxing powers.
"The administration is working hard with the county and with other parties to find a solution to a problem that has been in place for many years," Colmers said. "Our goal is to find a long-term solution."
Other efforts are in the early stages.
Richard E. Hall, O'Malley's planning secretary, said at his swearing-in last week that one of his first orders of business is reviving the Office of Smart Growth, which was created by former Democratic Gov. Parris N. Glendening but was effectively eliminated under Ehrlich.
O'Malley has held initial meetings of StateStat, a performance-management system he hopes to use to improve government efficiency, and BayStat, a similar program aimed at coordinating Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts.
And O'Malley ordered all of his Cabinet secretaries to come up with action plans to implement the recommendations of his transition team. Those reports are due April 9, the day the legislature is scheduled to adjourn.
But not everyone agrees with how O'Malley has directed his administration in the early days of his term. Though he has made significant moves in corrections, juvenile services and other areas, he has shied away from taking major action on the $1.3 billion budget deficit that analysts expect Maryland to face next year, much to the chagrin of leaders in the General Assembly, including Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller.
"The governor has this tremendous feeling of good will following the election," Miller said. "I wouldn't say he's squandered it, but he let an opportunity go by in that he could have used it to move forward more quickly. He's looking at the long term, but this is a problem that's not going away and only gets worse every day we delay."
But O'Malley said that's not necessarily true. He said that although the solution will likely involve legislation to change the state's tax code, a big part of the problem can be solved with good administration.
"I'm a realist. I don't believe we can do things that will save us $1.3 billion between now and the next session," O'Malley said Monday on the Marc Steiner Show on WYPR-FM. "Once [the new Cabinet secretaries] are firmly in place and get a handle on their positions, they will each start doing about 100 things differently and, we hope, better than were being done before, and each of those little things will add up to real savings."
andy.green@baltsun.com