Licensing And Regulation

Gov. Martin O'Malley announced an initiative yesterday aimed at preventing home foreclosures through credit counseling, enforcement of lending practice standards and refinancing assistance to stop what he said is a rising threat to the state's middle class. The state has received commitments for $100 million in private capital to allow about 500 households to refinance from adjustable rate loans into fixed mortgages. It will use $10 million in surplus funds from the state's mortgage insurance program to leverage another $200 million in private sector capital and will spend $1 million for foreclosure prevention activities, such as counseling for homebuyers.

Maryland builders launched a full-scale legislative assault yesterday against a bill intended to protect buyers of new homes from unscrupulous builders.Builders, led by Dennis McCoy, a lobbyist and former delegate, lined up in solid opposition to the bill sponsored by Baltimore County Republican A. Wade Kach and eight other delegates."This is bad for the industry and bad for consumers," McCoy testified before the House Economic Matters Committee.Kach's bill would create a statewide, self-supporting registration system to cover builders, who currently are licensed only in Montgomery and Prince George's counties.

John P. O'Connor, Maryland's labor commissioner, was named yesterday as the state's acting secretary of labor, licensing and regulation to replace Eugene A. Conti Jr., whose resignation is effective today.Conti, 51, announced last month he was quitting his $100,500-a-year post to accept an unspecified senior-level position with the U.S. Department of Transportation, becoming the second Cabinet-level member of Gov. Parris N. Glendening's administration to leave this spring.O'Connor, 50, a former union official from Huntingtown in Calvert County, was one of Glendening's first appointments after taking office in January 1995.

Gov. Parris N. Glendening's secretary of labor, licensing and regulation, Eugene A. Conti Jr., resigned yesterday, becoming the second Cabinet-level member of the administration to quit in less than six weeks.Conti, 51, who has been Maryland's labor secretary for nearly three years, told Glendening in his letter of resignation that he was leaving the $100,500-a-year post to take an unspecified position with the Clinton White House.Neither Glendening's office nor Conti's office would say where he will serve in Clinton's administration.

State and local prosecutors have opened criminal investigations in the wake of a lawsuit that accuses a Delaware man of fraudulently selling houses in Baltimore to poor homebuyers at inflated prices -- using inaccurate appraisals, "secret" second mortgages and falsified documents.Representatives of the U.S. attorney and the city state's attorney met yesterday with officials of the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, which has launched its investigation, said a spokesman for the state agency.

Maryland's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate stayed steady at 4.5 percent in January, according to new data from the state Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation (DLLR). The state continued to stay well below the national unemployment rate, which was 5.4 percent for January.Without adjusting for seasonal variations, Maryland's unemployment rate increased to 4.8 percent in January from 4.2 percent in December. But that's typical, as retailers lay off seasonal help after the holiday shopping season.

The Teamsters union, which has filed a petition to represent Anne Arundel police officers and deputy sheriffs, is stuck in a bureaucratic turnstile that may ruin its chance of becoming the county's largest law enforcement bargaining unit.Since October, when more than 400 county police officers filed petition cards calling for a union vote, the Teamsters have been unable to arrange for elections. The vote would dissolve the Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge 70, which has represented county line officers for 24 years, and make the Teamsters their official bargaining unit.

Westinghouse Electric Corp.'s defense division in Linthicum expects to lay off an additional 400 workers this spring, according to a state application for federal money to assist more than 500 workers laid off the first of the year.The disclosure surfaced in a letter to Gov. Parris N. Glendening from the state Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation.Westinghouse previously had said that 510 workers in Maryland, the bulk of them at its Linthicum complex, were laid off at year's end. Those workers were notified in October and did not return to their jobs from the Christmas break.

A restructuring of the state Department of Economic and Employment Development turned into a small-scale purge this week, as 16 officials were dismissed and the agency's international division was set to lose its status as a separate division.The largest single move in the reorganization is a shift of the department's division of employment and training, along with 1,200 workers, to the Department of Licensing and Regulation. The new Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation will take over running unemployment insurance programs as well as research functions studying the state's economy.

He's made a career of putting out political fires -- or starting them -- and now he's turning to smoke.Or, more precisely, to smoking.William A. Fogle Jr., the state's secretary of licensing and regulation, says his responsibility for worker health and safety compels him to take action.He has become the first state official in the country to issue a smoking ban, using regulatory authority derived from occupational and health laws.Because he has headed the department for almost eight years, and because smoking is not a new threat, he concedes the last-minute nature of his action.

Maryland's Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez has been tapped to run the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, President Barack Obama announced yesterday. Perez's move, which had been widely rumored for weeks, means he will rejoin an agency where he worked as a federal prosecutor in the 1990s. As head of Maryland's Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, Perez helped to craft the state's response to the foreclosure crisis. His political career in Maryland also included a stint as the first Latino elected to the Montgomery County Council and a campaign for state attorney general that he abandoned after being disqualified for lacking the required legal experience in the state.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings and housing advocates warned Maryland homeowners yesterday to avoid shady businesses that charge high upfront fees to avoid foreclosure. Since the mortgage and housing crisis began widening last year, Maryland officials have tried to stem the tide of people losing their homes to foreclosure. Since September, officials said, they've seen a troubling trend of struggling homeowners turning to for-profit companies that offer so-called "loss mitigation consulting" or "foreclosure prevention."

The paper unemployment check will soon be a thing of the past for Maryland residents who file for the insurance benefit starting today. In its place comes plastic. The state's Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation will issue prepaid debit cards to people seeking unemployment insurance benefits and forgo the use of paper checks for new applicants. Department officials said the switch to plastic will save taxpayers about $400,000 annually in postage, paper, staff time and other processing costs.

A memorial service for Nancy Erwin, a former Maryland Department of Labor official who had worked in consumer affairs in the Jimmy Carter administration, will be held at 11 a.m. Nov. 22 at the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, 5603 N. Charles St., where she was a member. The Tuscany-Canterbury resident died Nov. 2 of complications from cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She was 62. Born Nancy Smick in Cleveland, she earned an English literature degree at Purdue University and a master's degree in consumer economics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

John R. Bashaar Sr., a hearing examiner for the state Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation who had worked for nearly three decades as a lawyer in Baltimore County, died Oct. 5 of cardiac arrhythmia at his Towson home. He was 65. Mr. Bashaar was born at Fort Benning, Ga., and was raised in Zelienople, Pa. He was a 1961 graduate of Freedom High School. He earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Columbia University in 1965 and a master's in business in 1967, also from Columbia.

Unemployment in Maryland rose and job growth slowed last month as national economic troubles touched off by the slumping housing market continue to take a toll. The state's jobless rate was 4 percent in October, up from 3.9 percent a month earlier and 3.7 percent the month before that, the federal government said yesterday. But it remains better than the U.S. unemployment rate, which was 4.7 percent last month. Employers added 28,600 jobs in the past 12 months, according to preliminary estimates - a slowdown since the summer, when year-over-year gains topped 30,000.

Maryland's secretary of labor, licensing and regulation outlined yesterday to state legislative committees in Annapolis proposals aimed at ending unscrupulous lending practices and giving troubled homeowners more time to get their finances in order before foreclosure actions are filed. Rising loan defaults on subprime mortgages, those extended to borrowers with weak credit histories, have shaken housing and credit markets nationwide. In Maryland, there were 7,000 foreclosures from July to September, compared with about 950 in the corresponding period last year, according to data analyzed by the Department of Housing and Community Development.

Gov. Martin O'Malley announced an initiative yesterday aimed at preventing home foreclosures through credit counseling, enforcement of lending practice standards and refinancing assistance to stop what he said is a rising threat to the state's middle class. The state has received commitments for $100 million in private capital to allow about 500 households to refinance from adjustable rate loans into fixed mortgages. It will use $10 million in surplus funds from the state's mortgage insurance program to leverage another $200 million in private sector capital and will spend $1 million for foreclosure prevention activities, such as counseling for homebuyers.

Gov. Martin O'Malley plans to announce today that Thomas E. Perez, the one-time attorney general candidate, will be his nominee as secretary of labor, licensing and regulation. Sources close to the selection process also confirmed that the administration will announce that James E. Lyons Sr., a California educator, will be the state secretary of higher education. Lyons is president of California State University, Dominguez Hills. Perez, a former Montgomery County Council president and attorney in the federal departments of Justice and Health and Human Services during the Clinton administration, said he was drawn to the post in the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation because of the secretary's ability to help working families.

A warning to mortgage loan officers with clever plans for avoiding Maryland's new license law: The state says it's on to you. The licensing requirement for loan originators employed by mortgage brokers doesn't go into effect until Jan. 1, but the state Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation is already gearing up to investigate companies that it hears are trying to skirt the new rules. "We have a list of places we're going to visit shortly thereafter in January," said Joseph E. Rooney, the department's deputy commissioner for financial regulation.