Tobacco Settlement

The House of Delegates gave preliminary approval yesterday to a $19.5 billion state budget that leaves Gov. Parris N. Glendening's spending priorities largely intact. Like the Senate a week ago, the House cut more than $100 million from the governor's budget proposal, but most of the trims simply slow the growth of state spending. The operating budget for the University of Maryland, College Park was cut by $750,000, but the state's flagship university would receive more than $30 million in new spending -- an increase of roughly 10 percent.

PORK-BARREL politics is driving powerful House legislators to turn the governor's anti-cancer and smoking-cessation crusade into a grab-bag for local special interests eager for a piece of the state's $4.2 billion tobacco settlement. That would be a big mistake. It would weaken a well-conceived plan to dedicate most tobacco money to fighting cancer and reducing teen smoking. Instead of a focused drive to curb Maryland's high cancer rate, the legislature would be playing politics with the tobacco money.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center have developed a new way of detecting cancers that requires patients to provide only a urine, saliva or sputum sample. Dr. David Sidransky said the test would allow doctors to find early cancers that are hard to detect with conventional methods such as biopsies. Labs would screen body fluids for genetic changes that are associated with cancer. The tests would be commercially available within the next five years, he said. "We now have an entirely new method of cancer detection that can be used when cancers are still amenable to early detection and cure," said Sidransky, a specialist in head and neck cancers.

THE YEAR is 2025. At the Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Cancer Center in the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Building, oncologists meet with patients, review medical histories, analyze lab results and recommend treatment. The center is full, yet one vital factor is fundamentally different from when the building opened at the turn of the century: the patients. They are, for the most part, much less sick -- and enjoy a far better prognosis -- than the patients of 25 years before. Many of them look perfectly healthy.

Making the state of Maryland a model for use of tobacco money Very soon, major decisions affecting the fate of thousands of Marylanders will be made in Annapolis. Over the next two weeks Governor Paris Glendening's tobacco settlement spending plan will come up for review by the Maryland General Assembly. Governor Glendening's proposal to spend $80 million annually on two ground-breaking programs has afforded Maryland the opportunity to become a national leader in tobacco control as well as cancer prevention and treatment.

Maryland's leading corporate lobbyists flocked to a House committee yesterday to urge lawmakers to kill legislation that would make it easier for individuals and governments to recover damages from manufacturers of toxic lead paint. The bill -- which could open the door to lawsuits rivaling those that led to the national tobacco settlement -- drew opposition from business groups ranging from the Chamber of Commerce to Bell Atlantic Corp. to paint makers themselves. The lobbyists were bolstered by the support of former U.S. Attorney General Benjamin R. Civiletti as they tried to head off a proposal they denounced as an effort to enrich trial lawyers.

Tobacco settlement money is 2000 income, IRS says Maryland tobacco farmers who received a national tobacco settlement check in January should not report the payments on 1999 tax returns, the Internal Revenue Service advises. Under the settlement, the tobacco companies were required to make payments to tobacco farmers and allotment owners over a 12-year period that began in 1999. Because the trustee, Chase Manhattan Bank, mailed the 1999 checks Dec. 30, the IRS said, farmers could not gain access to the money until January.

The 2000 session of the Maryland General Assembly, now at its halfway point, has been something between a pep rally and love-in, with legislators basking in the warm feelings a billion-dollar surplus can bring. Now it's down to serious business. And Sen. Robert R. Neall has a clear idea of what the most contested issues will be. "Money, money, money -- in that order," said the Anne Arundel County Republican-turned-Democrat. With six weeks and a day remaining before the closing gavel is scheduled to fall April 10, hard decisions remain on the state's spending and taxation priorities.

MONEY is proving the root of much mischief in the legislative hallways of Annapolis. It has set off a feeding frenzy that threatens to turn the governor's $100 million anti-cancer, anti-smoking program into a greedy grab bag of political pork. What lawmakers see is a huge pot of cash easily diverted to their favored interests. Members of the Black Legislative Caucus have been the most vocal in this pursuit, but they are hardly alone. It got so bad the presiding officers threatened to impound all the money flowing to the state from the national tobacco settlement for a year to stop this unseemly spectacle.

With the Maryland legislative session at its midpoint, Gov. Parris N. Glendeningtried yesterday to fend off growing efforts in the General Assembly to divvy up the state's multibillion-dollar tobacco settlement. The governor journeyed to Baltimore yesterday to make it clear that while he is willing to work with legislators in the budget process, he does not want to diverge from his plan to spend the money fighting cancer. Administration officials say these days the governor is getting two or three requests a day from legislators and community advocates offering new proposals for spending the money.