Yesterday was the 7th anniversary of the day I was sworn into this job. My successor will be sworn on December 7, 2026.
On Monday, Jared Littmann was sworn in to the job of Annapolis Mayor, and a new City Council took the oath. Mayor Littmann ended his speech with a commitment to make Annapolis work. It’s a simple message - to simply make government work. I like it.
Earlier that day, I joined 65 county employees, people who know how to make government work, for a celebration of their 25th year serving our residents. Each gets a watch. It sounds corny, but I feel so proud just to shake their hands and honor them. I’d have loved to spend the whole day listening to their stories. I managed to hear a few, and there were some doozies.
Wednesday night, we lit the tree in the Glen Burnie Town Center. The place was packed. Local businesses and county agencies had booths set up, skaters filled the ice rink, and the only folks with more spirit than Delegate Mark Chang in his Santa hat were the Glen Burnie High School Cheerleaders. Even Santa Claus himself showed up. Good spirit.
As we enter the season that honors the birth of a child in a barn, most of us recognize the importance of a warm, dry place to call home. That’s why I chose to talk in my monthly Fox45 live interview Tuesday morning about the recently announced decision by Housing and Urban Development (HUD), to reverse its policy of funding primarily permanent supportive housing in its Continuum of Care Program.
The decision was announced in mid-November, and if the courts don’t rule in favor of Maryland and the nineteen other states that have challenged the legality of the shift, our county will lose the funding that houses over one hundred of our otherwise chronically homeless and mostly disabled residents. Our Housing Subcabinet met yesterday to explore strategies to address a likely spike in homelessness, including the possibility of opening a new county-run shelter.
We also met this week with our Anne Arundel County Department of Health, the team that worked heroically to save so many lives during the COVID pandemic. Now they are putting together a plan to manage the bureaucratic and humanitarian nightmare presented by the forthcoming changes to Medicaid eligibility.
The federal assault on both homeless and health care programs are not presented as budget cuts. Instead they are designed to create inefficiency and paperwork burden both for clients and local government. They are deliberate attempts to cripple government programs with inefficiency.
As I closed out yesterday’s Cabinet Meeting, I shared a part of the State of the County Address that I will deliver by video next Tuesday at aacounty.org/state-of-the-county. It opens with the statement that people in America are losing faith in government, and goes on to reflect on the source of my own distrust of government and cynicism about how things work. It concludes, however, that the public servants and the people of our county have shown me a way forward. It’s about making government work effectively, and engaging the people in the process. I thanked them for being so committed to those things.
I can’t end this letter without noting that we made the front page of the Capital Gazette yesterday. I say we, because it was me and this weekly letter. The headline was, “Pittman violated ethics code in official newsletter, commission finds.”
It’s not the first time that the Ethics Commission has warned me that some people are complaining to them about what I write. After President Biden named his COVID recovery legislation Build Back Better, they told me that if I were to continue my earlier use of that term for our county recovery, it would be seen as supporting the President’s reelection campaign.
After I noted in a letter that I’d been on television endorsing my friend Sarah Elfreth for Congress, they said that I came close but had not crossed the line.
Now that I serve in the volunteer capacity as Chair of the Maryland Democratic Party, the contents of the letters are under even more scrutiny. So every week, I make an effort to maintain the separation between governing and campaigning, and to avoid the latter.
But when I decided to play the role of reporter in what I called “Election Reflection”, and commented on the mood of the country based on election results, it seems I crossed the line. I chose not to contest the determination, and the Commission chose not to issue a formal complaint. I agreed to be more careful.
The system worked as it should. If I felt that the Commission was preventing me from fulfilling my obligation to communicate in an honest, direct way with the people I serve, I would say so. In fact, I would request a hearing and make a case for my position. But that’s not where we are, and I don’t think it’s where we’ll be in the future. And I’ll keep these letters spicy, opinionated, and separate from campaign activity.
Until next week…