Lawmakers

State lawmakers pass budget The General Assembly gave its final approval Friday to a $36.9 billion state operating budget for next year that whittles down Maryland's long-term revenue shortfall without raising taxes. The House and Senate signed off on a compromise reached by a conference committee. Their approval of the budget bill, which does not require Gov. Martin O'Malley's signature, came with little drama — a stark contrast with last year's passage of a budget in the session's final hours.

State lawmakers have crafted deals that could send Towson University not only $300,000 to save its men's baseball program, but also $2 million to build a new women's softball field. The day after Gov. Martin O'Malley's proposal to give Towson money to keep the baseball program afloat drew criticism, lawmakers on Thursday reached a compromise that they said would help Maryland colleges address the financial and legal challenges that led Towson to cut its men's soccer and baseball programs.

Gov. Martin O'Malley's plan to allocate $300,000 in taxpayer money to save Towson University's baseball team came under fire Wednesday from some legislators and key fiscal policymakers for being unprecedented and unfair to other college sports programs. Comptroller Peter Franchot said the money, recently included in the governor's 2014 budget, is a "bailout" that rewards bad financial decisions by a university. Towson President Maravene Loeschke decided last month to eliminate the university's baseball and men's soccer programs because of insufficient funding and a lack of gender equity in the university's sports.

A moment of silence, please, for the death of the combined reporting bill in the General Assembly. The corporate tax reform measure passed away suddenly last week, the result of a 7-6 vote by the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee, which has developed a nasty habit of killing the bill annually. In lieu of flowers, supporters ask that angry letters be sent to lawmakers. It came as no surprise, of course, but that doesn't make the death of combined reporting any less frustrating.

I find it puzzling that the House of Delegates and the Senate have failed to come up with a compromise on the pit bull legislation currently stalled in Annapolis ("Pit bull compromise in danger as houses differ," March 13). A simple, breed-neutral approach is necessary to prevent continued discrimination against a single breed based on the irresponsibility of their owners. If the General Assembly fails to pass this legislation, each member should be required to volunteer 90 days per year at a local animal shelter so that they can see and experience the results of their inability to enact such common sense legislation.

I did a double take reading your editorial that excused Maryland lawmakers for raiding $1 billion from the state's transportation trust fund to spend on other programs ("We all benefit from transit, and we should all pay for it" Mar 25). Let's explore the logic further. Imagine your neighborhood bank loans an individual money to start a small business. That individual changes his mind and instead uses the money to remodel his home. With a straight face, he informs the bank he's not going to repay the first loan, but expects a second one because he's finally getting around to starting that business.

Strange as it may sound, only a few years ago Marylanders were heatedly debating whether to ban drivers from text-messaging on their cell phones while behind the wheel. The dangers of "distracted driving" were an illusion, opponents claimed, manufactured by a nanny-state government to justify unwarranted intrusions on personal liberty. Never mind that texting while driving was already known to cause thousands of traffic fatalities nationally every year, or that researchers had found that texting drivers' ability to concentrate on the road was about the same as if they had imbibed four or five drinks.

Lawmakers from Virginia pressed a House of Representatives panel Wednesday to forgo a requirement that a potential new FBI headquarters be located close to the Capital Beltway, a provision they said gives Maryland an unfair advantage as the two states compete for the lucrative development. Maryland officials have been working for months to lure the FBI to Prince George's County if the agency leaves its 38-year-old headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, in downtown Washington.

Maryland has little idea how much it owes a mother, a lawmaker and a football player. Christine McComas, Del. Jon Cardin and Ray Rice of the Baltimore Ravens are the driving forces behind the proposed cyber bullying bill that will save teenagers' lives. As the founder of the national crusade, The Monster March Against Bullying, I've written the tragic obituaries of more than 100 bullied American teens who in the last three years have committed suicide. Four of them, 14-year-old Kenny Wolf, 17-year-old Aiden Schaeff, 18-year-old Zoe Hauser and 15-year-old Grace McComas, are Maryland kids.

The gas tax plan unveiled this week by Gov. Martin O'Malley and the General Assembly's top leaders is a complicated proposal that wouldn't represent our first choice in how best to pay for Maryland's transportation needs. But, on balance, it's a better-than-expected solution to a problem that has been nagging the State House for two decades. Better than expected because efforts to increase the gas tax have been practically dead on arrival in Annapolis for years, thanks to high prices at the pump and public hostility toward anything that might raise them further - even as alternatives like vehicle registration and licensing fees hit Marylanders harder than a few pennies on the gallon would.