By Adam Pagnucco.
This new county council is a fascinating bunch. It took them one day – just one! – to kick off a whole lot of controversy over how the institution makes its decisions. If this is what we get from the first day, I am eagerly looking forward to what they can generate for this site over the next four years.
The drama taking place on the dais on Tuesday relates to the council’s new leadership structure. Whenever a new council is seated, which takes place after the gubernatorial elections, the council must decide how to set up its committees. Committees matter in Rockville because they are the starting points for most legislation, budget items and land use issues considered by the council, the three areas that comprise the core of its powers. Committee members – many of them, anyway – develop subject matter expertise and are supposed to take the lead on issues in their portfolio. The committee chairs are important because they make scheduling decisions, but they lack the power of the General Assembly’s mighty committee chairs who are able to unilaterally kill most bills. Good chairs try to arrange consensus among their colleagues, see that worthy bills are amended to build support for them when necessary and clean up messes before they arrive at the full council. That does not always happen but when it works out, it’s good for the institution as a whole.
The process of selecting committee members and chairs is led by the incoming council president, who this year is Council Member Evan Glass. It happens in the fall of the last year of an outgoing council just prior to the seating of a new council. While the council president is the lead, he or she consults with colleagues to try to put together the most acceptable arrangement. I have seen this process play out five times now under Council Presidents Marilyn Praisner (2006), Valerie Ervin (2010), George Leventhal (2014), Nancy Navarro (2018) and now Glass. It is never easy because it is impossible to give every council member everything they want. So the usual approach is to follow the advice of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and try to give them what they need.
It is common practice for the requests of the senior members to be considered above those of the freshmen, but sometimes freshmen are named committee chairs. The reason is math. In the old days, there were six council committees and nine council members. (Occasionally, there have been temporary ad hoc committees such as the 2003-2006 Homeland Security Committee led by freshman Council Member Mike Knapp.) The math meant if there were four or more freshmen, at least one of them was getting a chair. That happened in 2002, 2006 and 2018. (Fun fact: the 2002 council had four freshmen but one of the senior members was a Republican, so two freshmen – Leventhal and Nancy Floreen – got standing committee chairs.) Freshmen did not get chairs in 2010 and 2014 because each of those years only had two freshmen. In a way, this does not matter very much because almost all council members get a chair if they stay on the council long enough. But since politicians are wired for ambition, it matters to them.
This year had a big wrinkle: the council expanded to 11 members. That was the work of Glass’s charter amendment, so fittingly he was the incoming president and led the process. There was strenuous behind-the-scenes competition for chairs and seats. Glass added one new committee – Economic Development, which was split from Planning and Housing – resulting in one new chair. But to make everyone happy, there would need to have been 11 committees so that every single council member could lead one of them. That could not have happened for logistical reasons, but Glass’s decision to add a committee did mean that 7 of 11 members would get chairs. On top of that, there was a fierce competition between returning Council Members Will Jawando and Andrew Friedson over both the Planning and Housing chair and the position of council vice-president. Most of the time, one year’s council vice-president becomes next year’s president. Little of this matters to civilians, but it matters A LOT to council members.
An aside. I can hear the laughter of the state legislators who are reading this. The House of Delegates has 141 members and six meaningful standing committees (along with a rules committee). The Maryland Senate has 47 members and four meaningful standing committees (along with two more on rules and executive nominations). Yes, there are junior leadership slots, vice-chairs, sub-committee chairs and other assorted pooh-bahs but the bottom line is that high leadership positions in both chambers often take members of the General Assembly many years of hard work (and service to their presiding officers) to obtain. Most members never get anywhere near the loftiest perches at the top. The notion that freshmen would immediately demand such plums is alien to Annapolis.
We know the results of the council’s process this year: every senior member got a chair and two freshmen (Kate Stewart and Natali Fani-Gonzalez) also received chairs. Friedson won both of his battles with Jawando, getting the vice-presidency and the Planning and Housing chair. But Jawando got a sweet consolation prize – the chair of Education and Culture, which oversees MCPS, Montgomery College, the libraries and related functions. Four freshmen – Marilyn Balcombe, Dawn Luedtke, Kristin Mink and Laurie-Anne Sayles – did not get chairs. Again, the biggest reason for this is math. There just are not enough chairs for everyone.
The typical custom for council members who do not get everything they want from this process is to grumble privately, zip their lips in public and get to work. Well, that’s not what happened this year. We will have more in Part Two.