Gov. Martin O’Malley speaks with public policy school Dean Don Kettl and university lobbyist Ross Stern during his visit to the campus yesterday.
With his re-election kickoff a week away, Gov. Martin O’Malley spoke to a crowd of more than 100 university faculty and students yesterday in Van Munching Hall.
Despite the beginnings of campaign season, O’Malley took off his politician hat and played schoolteacher, telling the crowd — made up mostly of public policy graduate students — of his signature StateStat program, which uses detailed data to track government’s successes and pitfalls.
While O’Malley’s presentation was more technical than political, his trip to this university — along with an appearance at Salisbury University later in the day and a similar college road trip last week by Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown — highlights how college campuses will likely be friendly ground in his effort to fight off a challenge from former Gov. Robert Ehrlich this fall.
Besides banking on the traditional liberal bent of students and faculty, O’Malley hopes to win votes by comparing his treatment of higher education to his predecessor’s. In-state undergraduate tuition was frozen for the first three years of O’Malley’s tenure, but increased 40 percent under Ehrlich, who also often clashed with university and university system officials.
“According to [Kiplinger’s Personal Finance], Maryland is one of the top 10 values in higher education in the nation,” he said during his speech, to a round of applause from the crowd. “I like to say top 10, because as Marylanders, when we hear ‘8′ we say, ‘Why aren’t we number one?”
The policy mavens gathered yesterday treated O’Malley as a rock star. The 100 chairs in the Van Munching atrium filled quickly, and late-comers were forced to squeeze into the back and sides of the room, many snapping pictures.
“The state is spending less now than it was four years ago, yet we’re continuing to make progress,” O’Malley said. “And we’re doing it with a level of openness, transparency … and information sharing which has never before been attempted in Maryland before and perhaps is occurring at a greater degree here than in any other state.”
The StateStat website, which boasts a collection of agency reports, documents and specialized maps and diagrams, is modeled after the Baltimore crime reduction strategy CitiStat, which O’Malley implemented while he was mayor from 1999 to 2007. Both programs are designed to encourage government agencies to quantify their goals and accomplishments, and locate where improvements can be made.
O’Malley said the rise of the Internet means more information can be made more available to more people than ever before, allowing regular citizens to hold government accountable.
“We’re good at telling you what the budget is, but we’re not good at telling you what the output is,” he said. “This system allows us to make those connections around tools like the map.”
The program recently expanded to track the state’s efforts with the federal stimulus bill and to look more closely at ways to continue the cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay.
The speech seemed in line with O’Malley’s push to portray himself as a responsible fiscal steward who guided the state through the wake of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Ehrlich’s campaign has argued O’Malley overspent, and Republicans have pointed out that O’Malley used one-time accounting maneuvers to eliminate about half of the $2 billion deficit the state faced last year.
While students were intrigued and encouraged by StateStat, they questioned if average people could understand the data and wondered if reports could even be trusted.
“We’re taught in the school of public policy to look at things from a lens of accessibility, so it’s really exciting to see all of these graphs and projections,” said public policy graduate student Ravi D’Souza. “But there’s a lot of average people that this website might be overwhelming to.”
Others were unsure that the statistics could be totally reliable. Walter James, another graduate student, also said he wasn’t sure taking a model for crime reduction and applying to all areas of a state government would be effective.
O’Malley is expected to officially kick off his campaign next Tuesday. Former Del. George Owings III, who served as Ehrlich’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs, is expected to challenge him for the Democratic nomination.
pino@umdbk.com
