In their 2023 Proposed Local Legislation, the Howard County State Delegation has proposed a bill (Ho. Co. 10-23) that will disenfranchise Howard County voters by giving the Howard County Executive the right to bypass the electoral process and directly appoint two HCPSS Board of Education members every four years.…
The Howard County Executive would appoint these two “from a list of candidates provided by the Howard County State Delegation to the Maryland General Assembly.”
That sounds like an old-fashioned power grab, with the Assembly delegation seeking to muscle into control of what had been up to the county’s voters. The bill would cut short the terms of two existing elected members so as to replace them with appointees. The chairs of the delegation, incidentally, were Senator Clarence Lam and Delegate Courtney Watson.
In fact the scheme was even more cockamamie. Rather than have the remaining ordinarily elected members of the Board run in apportioned districts, as now, it would have had them be elected by state senate district — increasing the likelihood that the members of the legislative delegation could put pressure on them, perhaps by threatening to “de-slate” them if they didn’t cooperate.
Bear in mind that state senate districts routinely spill across county lines; the boundaries of one current senate district lie entirely within Howard County, while two others are shared with Anne Arundel County and Montgomery County.
This means that the three members elected from senate districts would represent electorates of three completely different population sizes. Yet they’d each get an equal voice on the board, in defiance of the Supreme Court’s longstanding “one person, one vote” guidance.
A widespread public furor ensued. Aside from the sheer audacity of the move — evidently based on the notion that board of education governance was too apt to go the ‘wrong” way under simple representative democracy unless guided from above by seasoned pols — it hardly accorded with the rhetoric of democracy that prevails in the state generally and Howard County in particular.
Proponents are talking about a “cleaned up” version of the bill that would fix some of its most glaring problems. But for reasons pointed out by HoCoWatchdogs, the sponsors have at this point earned the voters’ distrust.
P.S. Here’s an update by Frank Hecker, who points out an additional difficulty with basing school board districts on senate districts: since the latter sprawl across county boundaries, “it’s possible that four of the members of the ‘Howard County’ delegation may not even live in Howard County. What business would they have picking candidates for the Howard County Board of Education?”
And Hecker brings a bit of much brighter news: Dels. Chao Wu and Jen Terrasa (both D, as are Sen. Lam and Del. Watson) have introduced Ho. Co. 16-23, a bill authorizing the county to use ranked choice voting to elect members of its board of education. That’s more like it!