Laurel City Council members unanimously voted in a special session Aug. 8 to amend a law passed last year that required candidates for elective offices to submit to extensive background checks and made those who had served time in jail ineligible to run for a local office.
Prince George's County NAACP and Maryland American Civil Liberties Union officials said the law could be construed as discriminatory and in meetings with Laurel officials two weeks ago, called for a change in the legislation.
The amendments council members approved Monday night will strike down the extensive background check requirement, with the exception being screening candidates to determine if they owe back taxes to the city, which NAACP and ACLU officials said met their approval.
"I'm pleased they were so responsive to our concerns and promptly agreed to make changes," said Deborah Jeon, legal director for the Maryland ACLU.
The new rules also reflect Maryland law, which automatically reinstates a person's right to vote when they have completed a jail sentence, which qualifies them to run for an elective office. With the changes, any registered voter in Laurel, who does not owe the city back taxes, can run for a local elective office.
"Under the (previous) law, even though a person could run for governor or for Congress in Maryland, they would still have been ineligible in Laurel," Jeon said.
Mayor Craig Moe, who called for the meeting between city, ACLU and NAACP officials, said the original legislation was designed to add transparency to the election process so residents would have more information on a candidate. He said after learning of the NAACP's and ACLU's concerns, he realized it would be in the best interest of the city to change the law and called for the special session of the council to amend the rules.
"With everything going on in Prince George's County (the former County Executive and a County Council member pleading guilty to federal criminal charges), we were headed in the right direction by trying to make sure a felon wouldn't run for office," Moe told the council Monday night. "With the election coming up (in November), we needed to make sure this was clarified."
"I thought hell would freeze over before Craig Moe admitted he'd made a mistake," former City Council member Michael Sarich said after the meeting. Sarich, who said he had been following the issue, often disagreed publicly with the mayor and other council members when he served on the council.
"Amending the legislation was the right thing to do but it's sad it passed in the first place and is a sad commentary on the people who sit on the council," he said.
Privacy concerns
When the legislation was introduced last year, council members Donna Crary and Frederick Smalls raised questions about the potential of a person's privacy being violated during background checks, but both voted for the bill.
"A lot of residents, the NAACP and ACLU weighed in on this, so where something in the bill may not have jumped out at any of us, it was brought to our attention and I look at that as a good thing because we have a stronger bill," Smalls said. "I think this would've come up anyway, because we were not finished with the dialogue."
Jeon said although Laurel officials had legitimate goals in mind when they passed the original election qualification rules, they were not well thought out and could have unintentionally discouraged people from running for office if they had prior convictions or needed to submit to extensive background checks.
"And if they had gone with the background checks, Laurel would have been quite different from any municipality in Maryland, so now they will be in conformity with the rest of the state," she said.
Robert Manzi, the city's attorney, who participated in the meetings with the NAACP and the ACLU, said the legislation passed was a collaborative result of positive discussions between all parties on the issue.
"Their recommendations were good and as a result, I think we have a better law in front of us tonight," Manzi said at the special council session.
According to Robert Ross, president of the county NAACP, it was Laurel resident Valerie Cunningham, who ran unsuccessfully for a County Council seat last year and thanked the council for amending the legislation at the meeting, who alerted him to the potential discriminatory nature of the original ordinance.
After studying the bill, he said he agreed with Cunningham that the law was not well conceived and had the potential to be exclusionary. He asked the ACLU to get involved in the issue and meet with Laurel officials.
"Initially the city didn't seem like they wanted to move on amending it, but after we met and had a great dialogue of going back and forth, they got it done and came up with a good piece of legislation," he said. "This legislation could be a model for the rest of the state because it has one word (in the bill) that I want to add in the state's rules."
That one word is "immediate," and it refers to the immediate removal from office of any elected official who has pleaded guilty or been found guilty of a crime. In addition, the elected official's salary and benefits would also be terminated immediately.
"I'm happy with 'immediate' being put in so you get away from someone convicted or who has pleaded guilty remaining in office," said Crary. "I think what we have today is better and clarified."
Crary and other city officials said they wanted to avoid a situation similar to when former County Council member Leslie Johnson remained in office, collecting salary and benefits, after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice charges in a federal investigation of her husband, formerCounty Executive Jack Johnson.
The council suspended its rules so the amended legislation could go into effect immediately, something the mayor said needed to be done considering the Sept. 6 candidate's filing deadline for the Nov. 1 city elections is approaching.
To read the city's general election rules, go to laurel.md.us/content/2011-general-election.