The fire is crackling in Gov. Wes Moore’s office as he shuffles in his chair by the fireplace, breaking out into the grin many Marylanders have come to know in the last year, pondering, as he often does, about dreams becoming reality.
“This was a dream, right?” he says, recalling the day in October when he celebrated the launch of his signature service year program for recent high school graduates.
The program — where the goal of connecting young adults to public service opportunities was inspired by the way Moore’s military service changed his own path as a troubled teenager — was, he says, maybe the most memorable and impactful moment since his inauguration one year ago Thursday. It’s been a year packed with those moments for the ever-optimistic first-time elected official, even as his championed successes haven’t always met his own expectations.
The service year program, for one, will need to expand significantly to reach the level he pitched during his campaign. And the accomplishment he cites as his second most memorable, securing a long-term lease for the Orioles to stay in Baltimore, was an at-times harrowing, 11-month ordeal that ended without a definite 30-year commitment.
While not new to negotiating given his business experience, Moore wasn’t quite used to the public-facing aspects of the lease talks , saying that he’d been through “a lot of complex deals” in his career but never one where that complexity was compounded by having to “read about it in The Baltimore Sun.”
As he’s preparing for year two, meanwhile, there are mounting concerns that a growing $761 million budget deficit could put his and the legislature’s progressive goals — from reforming the education system to expanding mass transit — on the chopping block in the coming years without tough decisions on new taxes.
The 45-year-old former businessman, author and military veteran who became Maryland’s first, and the country’s only, Black governor has said he’s not deterred.
With a stump speech about making this “Maryland’s decade” and a charm offensive that’s earned him national attention and countless allies at home, his message about getting “big things done” is unrelenting. Part of that strategy has been bringing together sometimes unlikely partners.
“He’s not afraid to ask our opinions and have us provide some insights to what our thoughts are,” said Senate Minority Leader Steve Hershey, an Eastern Shore Republican whose party finds itself frequently frustrated by the Democratic supermajorities that control both chambers in Annapolis. “At the end of the day, that’s all we’ve ever really asked for.”
Del. Carl Anderton, another Republican from the conservative-heavy Eastern Shore, has brought several funding requests for his district in Wicomico County before Moore and the rest of the Board of Public Works and said coordinating with the governor has been easy.
“When he ran, when he got elected, he said, ‘I’m going to be there for the Eastern Shore.’ And he has been, 100%, no question,” Anderton said. “Any time I go to his office for any type of need, it’s always met.”
Moore has referenced his bipartisan work repeatedly, especially as he’s rattled off what he considers win after win on everything from raising the minimum wage faster than scheduled to increasing benefits for low-income families.
Maryland’s happy warrior governor hasn’t pitched a perfect game, though, even if he has repeatedly claimed he went “10 for 10” with his first slate of bills last year.
Legislative priorities like the minimum wage, tax cuts for veterans and raising dental coverage for members of the Maryland National Guard all fell short of his goals as lawmakers in his party scaled back his proposals, all of which eventually passed in some form.
The initial service year program also wasn’t exactly what he pitched on the campaign trail. The program Moore said would be open to any Marylander who wants to participate and that more than 500 people applied for in the first year was capped at 280 participants for 2023-24. It’s scheduled to grow each year, up to 2,000 in the fourth year, but will need to expand significantly to reach the potential demand.
“The idea that we could really be the state that serves and have a platform to give all of our young people a chance to be part of something bigger than themselves … is going to have ripple effects that are going to impact this state, and frankly beyond, for generations,” he said in an interview Wednesday in Annapolis.
Negotiations on the Orioles’ lease to remain at Camden Yards also concluded not with a definite 30-year term but instead an initial 15-year agreement and an expansion under certain conditions. Both Moore and team officials have said they believe the deal will last the full three decades.
“Them being here was not inevitable. This thing was tenuous, and it was rocky,” Moore said Wednesday.
“It was a hell of a lot of work,” Moore said. “I’m really proud that 20 years from now, hopefully, I’ll be able to hang out with my kids and grandkids at Camden Yards watching the Orioles play.”
Moore said securing his hometown team’s future was his second-most memorable moment, behind the service year launch, that he thinks will have a generational impact.
It’s also one of the elements of his 2023 agenda that in some ways is left unfinished.
The deal gives both sides until the end of 2027 to agree on a plan to lease public land around the stadium for the Orioles to develop. Securing that agreement would trigger the full 30-year term. It would also require the General Assembly to approve additional funds to cover stadium maintenance costs after it already approved $600 million for improvements to Oriole Park in order to incentivize the team to stay. Moore has said there are no plans for Orioles-related legislation this year.
More pressing now on Moore’s agenda is the state’s financial situation. Lawmakers are facing an immediate $761 million deficit and are on the hook for billions of additional spending for planned education, transportation and climate laws.
That reality is putting new pressure on Moore’s administration for his second year — and possibly the rest of his four-year term — and leading to speculation that money might not be available for new laws with hefty price tags.
Despite the larger budget picture, the governor has enthusiastically celebrated progress on other top priorities — like increasing funding for law enforcement or his ambitious goal of ending child poverty — while leaving some wanting for more.
“We’re waiting for the policy to meet the rhetoric,” said Nate Golden, a Baltimore teacher who leads a group that’s fighting for a more aggressive approach to child poverty issues.
The Maryland Child Alliance’s focuses are on restructuring the state’s child tax credit to include more families and on establishing a “baby bonus” fund that would provide one-time payments of at least $1,000 to individuals upon the birth or adoption of a child. Moore proposed a “baby bonds” program during his campaign but has not focused on the idea in office.
The Family Prosperity Act, a law Moore sponsored last year, expanded Maryland’s existing $500 child tax credit to each child under age 6 in families that earn $15,000 or less. The previous law applied to only those who made $6,000 or less, and Moore said the expansion would impact 40,000 families.
Golden said the credit still only reaches less than 2% of children, and a smarter approach would be a fully refundable child tax credit of $1,000 per child for joint tax filers making up to $50,000 and single tax filers making up to $25,000. The plan is modeled after policies in other states like Oregon and New Jersey.
“There are tons of states doing more about child poverty than Maryland,” Golden said, adding that he sees the needs of students “at work every day.”
The other half of Moore’s Family Prosperity Act affected the earned income tax credit (EITC) — a separate credit for low-wage workers that legislators temporarily expanded during the pandemic and that the new law made permanent. The maximum value of the credit was previously $530 but is now based on a percentage of the federal version of the same tax credit.
But a critical piece of EITC expansion has been routinely “left behind,” said Robin McKinney, the CEO of the CASH Campaign of Maryland, a nonprofit that works to improve financial security for low-income Marylanders.
The measure her group has pushed for would increase the eligibility for single tax filers who can’t claim dependents, from about $16,500 to about $23,000. McKinney said it would still impact children, especially with people who are pregnant, noncustodial parents — those whose children do not primarily live with them — and parents who are working and have to pay child support. It would open the tax credit to more than 100,000 additional people, she said.
McKinney said the governor’s administration has been “incredibly” open and impressive with its engagement on the issue, but money is also a far more significant issue this year and advocates are eager to see how conversations evolve.
Moore did not commit to supporting further changes to either tax credit when asked by The Sun last week. He said there are “a whole series of options” he’s looking at to address the issue and he’ll continue working with advocates and lawmakers on it.
“One thing that people will see from both, not just this session, but also as a posture of this administration, is the full-frontal and bipartisan assault that this state is going to make on child poverty. It’s not going to stop,” Moore said.
Public safety will be another pressing challenge for Moore.
A package of bills he’s introducing this year aims to aid crime victims, recruit more law enforcement and reduce gun violence at a time of heightened public concerns about crime.
Keith Wallington, the director of advocacy at the Justice Policy Institute in Washington, D.C, said the governor has “a unique opportunity and an aligning of the stars” to work with Maryland Public Defender Natasha Dartigue and Attorney General Anthony Brown to tackle the roots of crime and incarceration.
Maryland has one of the highest rates of long-term incarceration for Black men in the country, according to the Justice Policy Institute. Baltimore City has a disproportionate representation among incarcerated Marylanders by jurisdiction.
While Wallington disagrees with some of Moore’s criminal justice policies — including investing more money into law enforcement to patrol certain areas of the state — he’s encouraged by the governor’s commitment to invest in services for communities that are most impacted by violence.
“By at least having the conversation about the investment needs in those communities, it’s showing a real changing of the guard in how we approach public safety,” he said. “We cannot arrest our way out of public safety.”
Sen. J.B. Jennings, a Harford County Republican who also represents parts of Baltimore County, said Moore’s public safety package had some encouraging elements — including a focus on holding offenders accountable — but other areas are lacking specifics and possibly substance.
“I want to see the legislation, see what he’s talking about. There’s a lot more we can do than what he talked about,” said Jennings, who added Moore is “here to play ball” as he enters his second General Assembly session.
Democratic leaders Senate President Bill Ferguson, of Baltimore, and House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones, of Baltimore County, have also maintained positive but occasionally tense relationships with Moore.
Ferguson, in particular, and Moore sometimes found themselves at odds, for example, over the governor’s plan to tie the minimum wage to inflation, his desire to end the private school scholarship program known as BOOST and on the specifics of the Orioles deal.
“The beauty of having shared values is that even when you may disagree at times on the means of getting to some place, you’re trying to aim in the same direction,” Ferguson said of his relationship with Moore. “It makes it a lot easier to have candid and frank conversations about what works and what doesn’t work, because you know that there’s a shared belief in the value and outcome at the end of the day.”
Other challenges have come up, whether disagreements with legislators or otherwise. Just this week, a federal court said a key gun control law was unconstitutional and a Republican the governor appointed to the State Board of Elections at the request of the Maryland GOP resigned after being arrested for his alleged role in the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Moore, for his part, has projected a purely optimistic vision — for public safety, child poverty and everything in between.
An admission this week that he did not set “the right bar” for filling half of the state’s roughly 10,000 state employee vacancies in his first year — after the administration ultimately netted only about 1,200, according to Moore — was a rare moment of publicly stepping back from a previous goal. And even then, it was a quick shift, a new goal, one filled both with unblinking confidence and less specificity.
“Rebuilding state government” is about aiming for a government that’s responsive to constituents, with a plan based on thought and data, he said. “I’m not trying to rebuild someone else’s government.”
Whether he creates that kind of government in the next three — possibly seven — years or comes up short, one thing is certain. It’s Moore’s government to build.
