Maryland's Republican lawmakers unexpectedly dropped their opposition yesterday to a constitutional amendment that would let voters curtail the governor's power to sell off state-owned parkland -- clearing the path for the measure to appear on the November 2006 ballot.
The Republican turnabout appeared to be part of a new strategy to blunt the potency of a ballot initiative that Democrats believe will hurt Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) as he campaigns for reelection next year.
Republicans consistently had opposed the proposal, voting in a bloc to try to defeat it in committee. They argued that the measure was a political ploy aimed at galvanizing the Election Day turnout of voters disenchanted with the Ehrlich administration's attempt to sell 836 acres of St. Mary's County woodlands to a Baltimore construction executive.
But Ehrlich's press secretary, Greg Massoni, said yesterday that the governor urged the senators not to oppose the measure. "The governor encouraged the senators to switch their votes, and [he] looks forward to leading the debate on the constitutional amendment," Massoni said.
Thirteen Republican senators signed on as cosponsors of the amendment and pledged to support it when it comes up for a vote this week. The House is expected to follow suit quickly.
"It's a deathbed conversion," said an astonished Sen. Brian E. Frosh (D-Montgomery), who proposed the amendment in November after hearing about the aborted St. Mary's land sale. "We're delighted to have them on board. The environment needs all the help it can get."
GOP leaders said they got behind the bill because they did not want to be mischaracterized as opposing the state's land preservation efforts.
"We are very interested in not being perceived as anti-environment," Senate Minority Leader J. Lowell Stoltzfus (R-Somerset) said. "We are all strongly environmental, and we believe in doing the right thing."
Some Democrats suggested that the change of heart came after a statewide poll showed that Maryland voters overwhelmingly would support the constitutional amendment. Stoltzfus denied any connection between the shift and the poll.
In the January survey of 501 registered voters -- which was commissioned by a coalition of state environmental groups known as Partners for Open Space -- 72 percent of those questioned said they would vote for the amendment. The coalition ran radio advertisements in Baltimore markets for nine days last month. In the ads, the announcer speaks against a backdrop of birds chirping and children laughing.
"I'm standing in one of Maryland's most beautiful parks, a great place for us to play, swim, camp and fish," the ad says. "But it may not be this way long. The governor has tried to sell public land to developers behind your back."
The governor's office strongly objected to the ad, and Ehrlich's communications director urged several environmental groups to take it off the air. They complied, cutting short the two-week run. Republicans said the assertion that the governor tried to sell off land to developers was false and misleading. "The governor's been unfairly characterized," Stoltzfus said. "We're trying to make clear that the nefarious attack on the governor was wrong."
Kim Coble, Maryland executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and a member of Partners for Open Space, said the state's environmental community was alarmed by the proposal to sell the 836 acres in St. Mary's to Willard Hackerman, the construction executive. The state recently purchased the land to preserve it, but Hackerman had expressed an interest in building several luxury estates there.
Dru Schmidt-Perkins, executive director of the environmental group 1000 Friends of Maryland, said her members have been baffled by what she called a succession of decisions to harm the state's land preservation efforts. "I don't know what light went off between Monday and Wednesday, but we're pleased," she said.
Democrats have said the constitutional amendment is needed because the St. Mary's deal was part of a pattern. They noted an earlier effort by the University of Maryland to shed land it owns along the Choptank River. Richard E. Hug, a university system Board of Regents member who is Ehrlich's chief fundraiser, vocally supported the proposal to sell the environmentally sensitive acreage to a developer who wanted to build a conference center, a retirement community and a golf course on the site. In a divided vote, the Board of Regents rejected the proposal.
House Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Anne Arundel) said the Republican support means that the amendment "will roll through" his chamber. As a proposed constitutional amendment, it would go directly to the ballot and would not be subject to the governor's veto.
Maryland's Democratic Party chairman, Terry Lierman, demonstrated yesterday how his party's candidates will try to use the constitutional amendment to their advantage in 2006, should it appear on the ballot.
"We'll support it as good government," he said. "And we'll tell people: If it takes a constitutional amendment to stop the governor from trying to pave the state, so be it."
