Out of Power, Out of Ideas, But Not Out of Breath

Former Assistant Secretary Carol Arscott penned a column in the Gazette which contains the now standard Republican bleating about the unfair media bias against Republicans. Her whinge centers on media treatment of transportation issues:

Maryland Republicans insist that Maryland Democrats can do anything and get away with it. There is no better example of the Republicans’ axiom than the reaction — or lack thereof — to the Feb. 22 bombshell announcement by Gov. Martin O’Malley’s secretary of transportation, John Porcari, that none of Maryland’s three major new transit projects — the Corridor Cities Transitway, the Purple Line or the Red Line in Baltimore — will go to public hearing this year as planned.

If Gov. Bob Ehrlich’s transportation secretary, Bob Flanagan, had dropped news of a major schedule slip in just one of those all-important transit projects during a legislative hearing, he would have been lucky to escape the building alive. There would have been rallies and demonstrations and editorials, all decrying the transit-hating Ehrlich administration.

But with Ehrlich gone, and no other whipping boy handy, public reaction to the announcement has ranged from muted to nonexistent.

This column is breathtaking in its audacity. After all, regardless of what one thinks of Transportation Secretary Porcari, these delays are hardly his fault. The delays in the environmental impact statements and the errors in ridership estimates are facts that would have come to light regardless of who was elected governor. Porcari just probably allowed them to become public sooner than they would have if Ehrlich and Arscott remained in power.

The column nonetheless has one good point. Arscott is correct that O'Malley, like her former boss Ehrlich, still has yet to figure out how to pay for the new projects.