Update: March 19, 2011 (see below)

Last December I wrote a long blog post [1] about the pay-to-play culture of Prince George's County, Maryland. The new county executive and the county's state representatives appear to have been working hard to make changes to end this pay-to-play culture, although you wouldn't know it from the new county executive's transition report [2], which came out last week. The report focuses on development, and makes no mention of the county's pay-to-play culture.

On February 11, three bills (HB 1076 [3], HB 993 [4], HB 1103 [5]) were introduced to the Maryland House that would make extensive ethics changes. The bills would deal with the moribund ethics program by providing the county ethics board with an executive director, and also providing an ethics advisor. They would require the ethics board to meet twice a year, which is insufficient if it is going to be a force in the county and if there is going to be a true ethics program.

The other changes involve simply dealing with particular problems in the past, without any attempt to create a complete ethics program or pay-to-play legislation. The solutions are good and clever, but this is not the way to go about ethics reform. Hopefully, this will be the first, crisis-oriented step that will be followed by the creation of a more complete ethics program.

Here are the other proposed changes:

Prohibit lobbyists from engaging in lobbying activities for contingent compensation

Prohibit the issuance of credit cards to elected county officials

Prohibit elected county officials from soliciting restricted sources to enter into a business relationship with, or to provide anything of value to, them or others

Establish a Board of Planning and Zoning Appeals that would take some authority away from the county council

Prohibit county council members from participating in proceedings related to land use applications if their campaign or political committee, or a slate to which the member belongs, has received any contribution from the applicant or any agent of the applicant within the prior 36 months or during the consideration of the application. The applicant is required to file a disclosure statement of its contributions and its solicitation of such contributions by others.

Prohibit the council from calling up site plans of planning board decisions on their own (this was a tactic used by council members to get pay-to-play concessions (money and jobs) from developers hoping to get a project approved)

The council and the county's state representatives have compromised on the last prohibition, which has stolen media attention away from the rest of the ethics package. According to an article in the Washington Examiner [6], the council did not want to lose the ability to call up planning board appeals. The compromise allows them to do so, but limits the time in which they can do it to 205 days, which seems a long time to hold up a development, enough to effectively blackmail developers.

According to an article in Wednesday's Washington Post [7], the amended bill passed the county's House delegation unanimously and will likely soon be approved by the General Assembly.

Update: March 19, 2011
An article in yesterday's Gazette [8] makes it clear that Prince George's County's house delegation was not happy with the compromise package and, as one of them is quoted as saying, they "won't be afraid to revisit this issue in the future." It appears that the county executive's pressure worked to get the compromise through.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research, City Ethics

203-230-2548