State debates expanding county

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Partisan friction and a redistricting map have held up for three years Carroll voters’ decision to expand the county commission.

They voted in a referendum in 2004 to expand the commission to five members, elected to represent separate districts instead of the entire county.

Frustrated state lawmakers are determined to solve the problem, and they will take it up again Wednesday, when they meet to discuss moving forward with a redistricting map they could not push past Democrats the past two years.

“It’s very frustrating for me, for something that’s purely local,” said Sen. Allan Kittleman, R-District 9, who is driving legislators to take up the issue again.

Kittleman blames partisan contempt from lawmakers outside Carroll for the bill’s long, drawn-out life.

He says the initiative did not take hold last year because Democrats from other districts requested that committees kill it, and so they allowed it to languish.

“If the delegation wants it, why should anyone else in Maryland care what goes on in our district?” he asked. But the delegation’s session ended in 2004 before it could pass a map of the divided districts.

When Carroll County Circuit Court last year accepted the districts laid out by a redistricting committee, it still did not end the feud. A former delegate and policy director for Gov. Robert Ehrlich, Joseph Getty, and a retired Westminster landscape contractor, James Harris, filed appeals, favoring the map the county delegation tried to pass.

The conflict remained unsettled for last year’s county election, and commissioners were elected with votes from the entire county. A new map would not take effect until the next county election in 2010, but it could take time to find a solution.

“There’s no need to rush it, but we thought we should start looking at it,” Kittleman said. “It’s just good to have for us to bring it back up again and see if there’s any consensus.”

msilvestri@baltimoreexaminer.com