Maryland voters elected Larry Hogan in 2014 in large part because he offered an alternative to his “tax and spend man” predecessor, Martin O’Malley.
Under O’Malley, the state raised over 40 fees and taxes, which rankled so many Democrats that Hogan’s former competition for the governor’s seat, Democrat Anthony Brown, promised not to raise taxes repeatedly during the race. This, in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to1, and where higher taxes were for years the default remedy for chronic overspending.
In his favor, Hogan has repeatedly stopped bad legislation, including a 2017 bill that would have made it virtually impossible to fix failing schools, and has saved Maryland drivers hundreds of millions of dollars by reducing tolls and more recently, eliminating the E-ZPass transponder fee. And his reelection promises a better rewrite of the state’s ridiculously gerrymandered electoral map that would make Congress more conservative.
But he is acting exactly like O’Malley by pledging $20 million in taxpayer funds to expand the Ocean City Convention Center so that it can become a more expensive burden on taxpayers after he is gone. For starters, the Center required more than $1 million in fiscal 2017 from the Maryland Stadium Authority to plug its deficit and like its sister centers in Baltimore City and Montgomery County, can’t operate without annual subsidies. That did not stop Hogan and the Maryland Stadium Authority from predicting the expansion would “have an economic impact of as much as $67 million and continue creating jobs right here on the Eastern Shore,” however.
