Helen L. Koss; Pioneer In Md. State Politics

Helen L. Koss, who championed reform, ethics and women's issues during 16 years in the Maryland General Assembly and who was the first female committee chairman in its House of Delegates, died of lung cancer Sept. 28 at Holy Cross Hospital. She was 86.

Mrs. Koss, who represented the Silver Spring area of Montgomery County from 1971 to 1987, was a leader in the passage of the Maryland Equal Rights Amendment.

She sponsored and led the fight to eliminate sex discrimination in credit, insurance and housing and helped ban age discrimination in loans, retail credit accounts and installment sales. She also rewrote the state's ethics law and expanded its public accommodations law.

One of her major achievements was the Displaced Homemakers Bill, which established the first multipurpose center to counsel and train homemakers for economic independence. Her idea to fund the program through fees paid by users of vanity license plates became a model nationwide.

"What made her effective was she was not only an idealist but also a realist," said Donald B. Robertson, a former House majority leader who was elected with her in 1970. "She was recognized very early on as being able and effective and of leadership caliber. . . . She was one of the most influential members of her period."

In her first term, she was appointed the House chairman of the Joint Committee on Legislative Ethics and received a seat on the powerful rules committee.

Throughout her tenure in Annapolis, she not only came up with ideas for legislation and passed bills but also "built the structures within agencies to make sure issues were permanently addressed," said Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), who appointed her committee chairman when he was speaker of the Maryland House.

"I think she was really one of the best . . . legislators in the history of Maryland," Cardin said yesterday. "Anything that came out of her committee, you didn't have to worry that it was done right. . . . She really understood what legislating is about."

In addition to bills addressing women's issues and ethics, Mrs. Koss worked on consumer protection laws, supported open meetings laws and restructured the state's Public Service Commission.

Robertson and Mrs. Koss were such close political allies that other delegates called them alter-egos and "Mom and Pop." Howard A. Denis, then a Republican state senator, often joked, "I was here for three years before I knew Koss-Robertson were two people."

The pair didn't always win in the good-old-boy atmosphere of the General Assembly. Mrs. Koss, who surprised allies by switching sides in one particularly brutal fight, donned a white hat after the fact "to establish the fact that she was still" a reformer, Robertson said.

Eight years after she left the legislature, Mrs. Koss was appointed to the state's election board by then-Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D). She became its chairman and held that job until 2003.

She was born Helen Levine in New York and grew up in Ellenville, N.Y. She graduated from Bennington College in 1942 and moved to Washington to work in the Agriculture Department's school lunch program. She and her husband moved to Montgomery in 1951.

From 1963 to 1967, she was president of the League of Women Voters of Maryland. She served as a delegate to the Maryland Constitutional Convention in 1967 and '68, chairing the committee on suffrage and elections.

She was inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame in 1997 and, two years later, received the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County's Lavinia award for her contribution in "making democracy work."

Survivors include her husband of 62 years, Howard Koss of Wheaton and Lewes, Del.; two daughters, Deborah K. Chasanow of College Park and Tamar Bernbaum of Rye Brook, N.Y.; two sisters; and three grandchildren.