This week began with a horrific mass shooting in Annapolis. A family was celebrating at home when their neighbor shot and killed Nicholas Mireles, Mario Antonio Mireles Ruiz, and Christian Marlon Segovia, and injured three others.
Former Capital Gazette editor Rick Hutzell was at the press conference. Five years ago, after his co-workers were gunned down in his newsroom, he’d asked me and all local candidates for office what we’d do to prevent the next mass shooting. I apologized that we had not succeeded, and I pledged, alongside Governor Moore and Mayor Buckley, to never give up.
I hope you will join us for the vigil this Sunday at 6:30 pm. We will start at Maryland State House and walk to City Dock in Annapolis.
On Wednesday, the County Council passed the budget that we had proposed to them fully intact with a 6-1 vote. The process had been collaborative, non-partisan, and driven by shared values. It’s a damn good budget that allows us to finish what we started in our first term while setting ourselves up for future economic challenges.
But something else happened this week that didn’t get a lot of attention. I joined a group of good-government advocates on Tuesday afternoon in People’s Park to sign a bill that creates a voluntary system of public campaign financing for future County Council and County Executive candidates. It allows candidates to fund campaigns with public matching dollars if they limit their fundraising to contributions of $250 or less and meet minimum standards of grassroots support. You can read the bill here, or see a PowerPoint explanation of how the program will work.
This is something I’ve always felt strongly about, and the experience of raising $700 thousand for my first campaign and $1.6 million for my re-election campaign only strengthened my commitment.
It’s not that the larger contributors are bad people or bad corporate interests. I view many of them as essential partners in our efforts to create jobs and wealth. The problem is that as candidates we rely on them. We spend so much time fishing for them, meeting with them, and seeking their approval that we sometimes lose sight of the interests of the 99% who will never become large donors.
There are some who would say that the best public policy results from implementing the vision of corporations and their stockholders, but it’s not what our country’s founders envisioned, and it’s not what I believe. It’s a practice that has led to extraordinary accumulation of wealth at the top, and a steadily growing segment of American society that is unable to afford housing, childcare, transportation, and healthcare.
Creating a more fair system of funding elections, one in which candidates have time to focus on solving the social issues of our day rather than winning the financial support of the most wealthy stakeholders, ultimately benefits everyone, including the corporations. Why? Because businesses today desperately need a well-educated, well-housed, healthy workforce to create the future we all seek.
The bill that I signed doesn’t guarantee that we’ll elect better people to serve, but it does grow the candidate pool to include prospects who come with the knowledge and talent but not the connections to money. Maryland’s public finance program was the path that Larry Hogan took to beat the Democratic establishment in 2014. Montgomery County’s program was used twice by former schoolteacher Marc Elrich to beat a candidate whose personal fortune funded his County Executive campaign. Howard County’s program was used by the former Republican County Executive whose veto of the program was overridden by Democrats, to come back and challenge the incumbent County Executive in the next cycle. In each case, small dollar contributions were matched by public funds to get a message to voters that allowed them to make an informed choice.
In Anne Arundel County we’ll have a program ready for the 2026 County Council and County Executive races. Potential candidates are crunching numbers as I write this, assessing whether they can build the grass-roots support to meet the minimum threshold for a public match, and whether the cost of foregoing contributions up to $6,000 will be offset by the positive messaging that comes with the new program’s small donor commitment.
If enough jurisdictions show that this works at the local level, someday Congress will create a similar program, and America and the world will be better for it.
Until next week…
Steuart Pittman
Anne Arundel County Executive