Talk surrounding the incoming Larry Hogan administration has been that Maryland’s smaller, more Republican-leaning counties will naturally get the bulk of the governor-elect’s attention once he takes office.
County Councilmembers in Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties are teaming up to make sure the so-called “big counties” don’t get left behind in the fray.
Montgomery Council President George Leventhal said he and Council Vice President Nancy Floreen talked last week with their counterparts on the Prince George’s County Council about creating a “Large County Caucus” within MACo, an association of local government officials from across the state.
The group’s primary aim would be to protect education and mass transit funding, specifically the Purple Line light rail project that would link the counties and that Hogan has indicated he doesn’t support.
“There’s a significant interest among the large counties in working together in a much more cohesive and cooperative way,” Leventhal said during a weekly press briefing on Monday. “I think, had the election of the governor gone differently, I don’t think you’d see this spirit of cooperation in quite the same way.”
Leventhal said Prince George’s County Council Chair Mel Franklin initiated the idea in a meeting at last week’s MACo winter conference.
Leventhal also argued that protecting kindergarten-grade 12 education and infrastructure projects mesh with what he characterized as Hogan’s primary goal: boosting the state’s economy.
Leventhal’s comments came a few days after one of Hogan’s transition team members said the Republican likely won’t have much interest in satisfying the political aspirations of Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties. The two Democratic strongholds favored Anthony Brown in November’s election.
“Larry Hogan and the Democrats have fundamentally different world views, and more importantly, different constituencies,” Blair Lee IV told a group of Bethesda-Chevy Chase Chamber members on Friday.
“All of the people who are now coming to him and saying ‘You must find common ground,’ the environmental lobby, the mass transit people, the public employee unions, the teachers, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun — these people four years from now will be cutting Larry Hogan’s throat,” Lee IV said. “He knows that, they know that. How much is he going to accommodate them? Isn’t he going to play to his base? That’s Politics 101.”
Lee IV made the comments as part of the Chamber’s annual legislative outlook, making it clear the views were his alone and not that of Hogan or the Hogan transition team.
Hogan will be sworn in on Jan. 21. The 2015 General Assembly begins Wednesday.
Lee IV, CEO of a Silver Spring-based development company and a former conservative columnist for The Gazette, also said he doesn’t see Hogan spending roughly $1.5 billion in combined state funds for the Purple Line and Red Line light rail in Baltimore.
He said Democrats have been shortchanging road and infrastructure projects in smaller counties around the state for years.
“That’s why I think we’re going to have a trainwreck,” Lee IV said of his general outlook for the next four years of state politics.
On Monday, Leventhal said there’s a reason counties such as Montgomery and Prince George’s should get much of the state’s attention.
“We’ve heard a lot of dialog about how the small counties have felt left out and how the governor is going to gear his efforts toward small counties,” Leventhal said. “All counties are important, but the people live in the big counties.”
