With $2 billion in electric rate relief at stake, the O'Malley administration mobilized a lobbying blitz on the Maryland Senate in an effort to reverse an amendment passed Thursday night that could kill its settlement with Constellation Energy Group.
The situation has echoes of the final night of the 2006 session, when qualms by senators scuttled a BGE rate-relief deal in the last minutes before the General Assembly adjourned for the year, eventually leading to a special session that summer.
Top lawmakers, aides in the House and Senate, and energy lobbyists shuttled between the two legislative chambers yesterday after crafting a strategy to resurrect the deal.
Together, they spent the day trying to line up enough votes to pass the House version of the settlement ratification bill without the amendment, which would require all new power plants built in Maryland to first offer their electricity for sale in the state and be regulated by the Public Service Commission. That effort succeeded in the House last night, 98-41.
If the Senate approves a clean version of the bill, it will go straight to Gov. Martin O'Malley's desk for his signature.
Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler's office also weighed in, increasing the pressure to quash the amendment with an opinion that the settlement would be "void" if the amendment made it through the General Assembly.
By the end of the day, the efforts seemed to be having an effect.
Sen. Brian E. Frosh, a Montgomery County Democrat and chairman of the Judicial Proceedings Committee, said he thought that a majority of senators would eventually support a compromise bill that didn't include the amendment. He was among the senators who voted for the provision, but he called that action "an expression of intent as opposed to a line drawn in the sand."
"If it's a choice between the settlement and no settlement, I'll take the settlement and the bill," Frosh said.
O'Malley responded to the amendment aggressively yesterday morning, calling the Senate's action unacceptable. He made energy rates a key part of his 2006 campaign for governor and has suffered politically for his inability to roll back a 72 percent rate increase by Baltimore Gas and Electric Co., a subsidiary of Constellation.
"A mistake was made on the Senate side," O'Malley said. "For the sake of making a statement ... we got ahead of ourselves and started having a debate on the pros and cons of regulation."
