General Assembly leaders have much left to do, including balancing Maryland’s budget: ‘It’s going to be a horse race’

With just over two weeks until they adjourn for the year, House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones and Senate President Bill Ferguson and their respective chambers are battling over the budget and a few other major policy areas while — as usual for the fully Democratic legislature — largely agreeing on most of the thousands of bills moving toward the finish line.

Haggling over the ballooning budget deficit is the most contentious issue facing lawmakers in the crunch time of this year’s 90-day session.

But it’s not the only topic on the list of unfinished business.

The House is giving a late-session push to legislation aimed at reviving Maryland’s historic horse racing industry, which is likely to face tough scrutiny among members of the Senate. And Ferguson’s goal to pass a ballot referendum that would allow voters to establish a special elections process to fill vacant seats in the legislature may fall flat in the House. The final details of legislation to resolve constituent concerns about juvenile crime, meanwhile, need to be ironed out.

“Eighteen days to go,” Ferguson, a South Baltimore Democrat, said during an interview in his State House office Thursday. “It’s going to be a horse race.”

After years of reliance on pandemic-fueled federal funding, Ferguson and Jones, a Baltimore County Democrat, have diverged on how to keep accounts for essential services like education and transportation flush with cash in future years.

Democratic Gov. Wes Moore and the Senate prefer a $63 billion budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 that fills the gaps by pulling from reserves, borrowing more and making some cuts. That plan would still lead to a roughly $3 billion structural deficit in four years, according to nonpartisan legislative fiscal analysts. It would address little in terms of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, the long-term education plan that will lack funding within three years, and a roughly $3.3 billion, six-year transportation funding deficit.

Jones and her Democratic caucus say they can fix those issues by filling what they consider corporate tax loopholes, legalizing internet gaming and increasing some transportation fees. Ferguson has said the corporate tax change — known as combined reporting — and gaming are non-starters, and the methods for transportation funds are also in doubt.

In recent days, both have said they’re standing firm — all but ensuring a tough negotiation as budget talks begin in earnest.

“We need to be more thoughtful about this,” Ferguson told reporters Tuesday, rejecting the House’s claim that its transportation funding plan covers the Maryland Department of Transportation’s needs this year, let alone the future multibillion-dollar deficits.

“When you have a revenue package that sort of mysteriously appears in the last few weeks of session, it often comes with unintended consequences. And I think that’s kind of what’s happened here,” Ferguson continued.

Jones said when announcing the revenue package that it was “carefully constructed.” Two months after she told The Sun she would consider raising taxes only unless “it was absolutely necessary,” she said that moment, at least in some ways, is now.

“It’s finally time that we just say it,” Jones said of the need to be outspoken now about raising revenues.

Jones, who typically refrains from interviews during the legislative session, declined an interview request from The Sun this week.

House Majority Leader David Moon, a Democrat representing Montgomery County, said in an interview Wednesday that he was optimistic about the upcoming negotiations despite statements from the Senate that indicate hard lines are being drawn. He said his chamber crafted the revenue package, in part, based on the governor’s and Senate leaders’ hesitations. For instance, a sales tax expansion plan he introduced as a conversation starter was not part of the final product.

“We’re going to land this plane somewhere, hopefully somewhere in the middle,” Moon said in an interview. “But some of these options need to be in the mix, I think, if we’re going to actually not end up facing school cuts.”

Beyond the tax and revenue debate, Ferguson and Jones have largely agreed — and their other 2024 priorities are mostly moving ahead as planned.

That includes their plans to address a spate of car thefts, carjackings and firearms charges among Maryland children, and connect them with diversion and rehabilitation services rather than relying solely on incarceration.

The resulting bills, which started identically, have deviated. The House and Senate have a little more than two weeks to blend them into one cohesive policy to send to Moore.

Moon said the bills have the same intent but differ in execution. The Senate legislation leans heavily on Child in Need of Supervision, or CINS, petitions to reroute children alleged of committing crimes, while the House is looking to local jurisdictions to establish diversion programs.

The differing treatment methods have led to different enactment dates. To allow counties time to stand up diversion programs where none exist, the House moved to have most of the bill’s measures begin Jan. 1, 2025. The bulk of policies under the Senate legislation would start Oct. 1.

For a number of reasons, including the historic tendency for crime rates to climax during the summer, Moon said there were “layers of concern” among the 141 delegates regarding start dates. Ferguson is “not concerned about the start dates in particular” because Maryland is beginning to see results from policies the legislature passed in recent years, he said.

“These are additional tools that I think will be helpful when put in place,” Ferguson said of the 2024 legislation.

Moon said he doesn’t believe there are “any hard lines” on the legislation. For example, he said that most lawmakers agreed to narrow the charges that children aged 10 to 12 can be arrested for — one of the bill’s most controversial measures.

“I think that you are going to see a willingness to be persuaded by good arguments, sound data and best practices on, you know, if there’s a difference in one approach versus the other,” he said.

For Jones, her 2024 priorities have also manifested in a five-point “decency agenda.”

The Freedom to Read Act — legislation aimed at combating rising challenges to public and school library books in Maryland and across the country — is on the list. The bill would prohibit libraries from excluding material based on the author’s origin, background or views, as well as for partisan, ideological or religious reasons.

Other parts of the agenda would prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation (in response to a recent Maryland Supreme Court ruling on the existing state laws), create an anti-bias training program for teachers, require leadership training for school officials and target election disinformation.

For Ferguson, one of this year’s priorities — one he said at the beginning he thought was going to happen after a decade of missing the mark — was the approval of medically assisted suicide in Maryland.

But, once again, it was not the year.

Ferguson decided not to push for a vote on the bill in the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee after realizing there was not enough support to approve it. He said residents of certain districts in opposition to the bill likely mobilized their representatives to rethink their position.

“Because — at the beginning of session — we really put it out there that this was going to be a major issue, I think it did have residents in Maryland become more active,” Ferguson said.

Moon’s eyes were also fixed on the bill’s passage, but he said he’s still hopeful it will reach the governor’s desk in the remaining two years of the current four-year term.

“We had a good fire drill, and I think we have a better sense of what needs to happen to get it out,” Moon said.

“And the session’s not over yet,” he said.