ANNAPOLIS – The Maryland General Assembly does a poor job of ensuring that legislators’ personal business stays out of State House business, according to a study released Friday.
The Center for Public Integrity study, “Our Private Legislatures,” ranked 47 states on financial disclosure requirements for lawmakers. Maryland received 68.5 out of 100 possible points — a “D” grade. That puts the state at 18th in the nation, and is a “marginal” score by the study’s grading standard.
Maryland’s grade is a two-place improvement from a similar 1999 study by the center, where Maryland ranked 20th nationally with an overall score of 71 out of 100.
Washington state scored the best, with 93.5 points, and Utah fared the worst with only 6.5. Idaho, Michigan and Vermont have no mandatory financial disclosure rules, and were given failing grades. Virginia also failed, ranking 27th with 59.5 points.
The study comes several years after the Maryland General Assembly revamped its ethics requirements in the wake of scandal.
In January 1998, Sen. Larry Young, D-Baltimore, was expelled from the Senate for “conducting private business out of his district office,” according to a Capital News Service story. Later that year Delegate Gerald Curran, D-Baltimore, resigned “after being accused of using the power of his office to secure state contracts for his private insurance business,” according to CNS.
While at the time many said the post-scandal legislation was merely “feel good,” Sean Dobson, deputy director of Progressive Maryland, said it did help stop financial conflicts in the Assembly.
“We’re glad that the ethics legislation was passed,” he said. “It required a lot more disclosure of what lobbyists could do and how much they could spend” when trying to influence legislators.
Dobson added that there was a lot more “sunshine” in the Maryland General Assembly now, a reference to the Sunshine Laws many states have to guard against potential financial conflicts for their legislators.
The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit dedicated to scrutinizing the workings of government, examined each state’s disclosure requirements, looking at 43 key questions about the information. The questions dealt with four main areas: the frequency of filing, the extent of the information requested, the ease of public access to the information, and the enforcement of the regulations.
The study concluded that while Maryland does a good job of enforcing its regulations, the regulations themselves are lacking. The state received only 57 of 83 available points on questions about the extent of information requested of its legislators.
William Somerville, ethics counsel to the Maryland Department of Legislative Services, said the score is unfair to the state system.
“I can’t imagine how they got a ‘D’,” he said. “My feeling is that the disclosure requirements (in Maryland) do ask for all the necessary information.”
Somerville added that while the financial disclosure forms get into specifics, there are legal limits to what can be asked. For instance, the form does not ask lawyers for details about clients because that would be a violation of attorney-client privilege.
James Browning, executive director of Common Cause Maryland, said he’s not surprised at the grade.
“(Maryland’s) requirements are pretty good, but compliance is bad,” he said. “Many legislators file late or fail to disclose outside sources of income.”
Maryland also scored poorly in terms of public access to information. In fact, Maryland was the only one of the 47 examined states that requires residents to physically show up at an office to request legislators’ disclosure records.
Browning said many of the potential financial conflicts are because General Assembly positions are not full time. The average annual salary of a legislator in 2004 is $37,500, and the Senate president and the House speaker each earn $50,500, according to the General Assembly Compensation Commission Web site. Therefore many legislators have other jobs to supplement their income.
Browning said Common Cause Maryland worries about this conflict.
“We think it’s too perilous,” he said. “There is potential for abuse.”
However, Somerville said it is often these outside influences that make people good legislators.
“The thing that a lot of people don’t understand is that when you have a citizen legislature — where you have legislators with outside jobs — conflicts are inevitable,” he said. “But then you have the choice between letting them bring their outside expertise to the table, or making them keep quiet on issues they know a great deal about.”
Somerville said there are rules in place to automatically disqualify legislators because of some personal conflicts, but for the most part the decision to abstain from a vote is left up to the individual representative.
He said abstaining happens hundreds of times a year, but there are usually only about 10 automatic disqualifications annually.
Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, D-Calvert, and House Speaker Mike Busch, D-Anne Arundel, could not be reached for comment.