the hacks in Annapolis

Not Illegal -- Just Arbitrary In Maryland, a probe exposes the governor's cavalier approach. Friday, August 11, 2006; A18 THE UNSAVORY tale of Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s "Prince of Darkness" seems finally and mercifully to be on its final chapter. The dark "prince," you may recall, is Joseph Steffen, a Republican party hack who was for years the governor's factotum and self-proclaimed dirty trickster. It was Mr. Steffen who boasted online of having spread malicious rumors about the governor's chief Democratic rival, Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley. And it was Mr. Steffen who strutted through the halls of state government, a statuette of the grim reaper on his desk, bragging that he was authorized to pick career civil servants who should be fired to make room for Ehrlich loyalists. That last role has been the focus of an inquiry into whether Mr. Steffen -- and by extension Mr. Ehrlich -- was intent on dismissing state workers specifically because they were Democrats; to do so would be illegal. After dodging state lawmakers, and a subpoena, since May, Mr. Steffen finally appeared before a special legislative committee this week. He denied having axed public employees based on their party affiliation -- though he said he wasn't heedless of it either. Yet at the same time he exposed the Ehrlich administration's approach to firing state workers as cavalier, arbitrary and witless. Mr. Ehrlich, the first Republican governor of Maryland in a generation, was elected on a platform of reforming the political culture in Annapolis; he was entitled to hire and fire when he took office. In the event, he removed 340 workers from their jobs; not all that many but among those ousted were dozens of competent, experienced mid-level managers. Some of them were culled by Mr. Steffen, a high school graduate with no relevant managerial or personnel experience, based on who-knows-what criteria. Lacking access to performance evaluations, he targeted some employees for dismissal based on "what some in the department told me," he told lawmakers. Well, that's fair! After initially saying it welcomed the inquiry into its personnel policies, Mr. Ehrlich's administration turned mildly obstructionist, denouncing lawmakers as embarked on a witch hunt. Some documents sought by the committee seemed impossible to find. The governor's aides insisted Mr. Steffen was a mid-level nobody, despite evidence that he was well known and in contact with the governor's inner circle. Then Mr. Steffen went AWOL for three months. Now that he has finally testified, there is no evidence of illegality -- just of a slapdash approach to state government. Lawmakers, too, have dropped the ball. Legislation enacted in the past decade empowered the governor, at a whim, to fire any of some 6,000 state workers, more than the president can fire at will from the federal government. That is wildly excessive and an invitation to abuse, as the Steffen episode illustrates. Inexplicably, the General Assembly did nothing this year to rectify that situation. It should do so in the next session, by identifying a sensible list of positions -- senior managers, executive secretaries and the like -- who may be removed when a new administration takes office, and offering some protection against arbitrariness to the rest of the state's workforce.