Howardcounty

In this post I continue the story of the 1998 elections for Howard County Council that I began in part 20 of this series. August 1998. As Guy Guzzone faces no opposition in the District 3 Democratic primary his would-be Republican opponent, ex-Democrat Wanda Hurt, has her party credentials questioned by her primary opponent, “lifelong Republican” Kirk Halpin. (Hurt protests: “I was miserable as an active Democrat in this county. I suffered a heck of a lot.”) Though Hurt is backed by incumbent Dennis Schrader, the endorsement of the Baltimore Sun goes to Halpin for his “vigor” and “fresh perspective.”1 ...

In part 19 of this series we saw that in 1996 the voters by referendum adopted a change to the Howard County charter to have a redistricting commission create proposals for council district lines, as opposed to having this be the function solely of the council. However the council still had the power to influence the commission through its appointment of a seventh “tie-breaker” member. In this post and the next we review the council elections of 1998, which would determine the balance of power in drawing district lines after the 2000 census. ...

For those following this blog, note that I’ve changed the canonical site name from blog.hecker.org to frankhecker.com. Any links and feed URLs referencing the previous domain name will still work for the foreseeable future, but if and when you have time you may want to update your bookmark list, RSS newsreaders, and related information to reflect the new name. A little history by way of background: I was around when the Internet was first being commercialized, and I had the opportunity to register hecker.com for myself if I really wanted to. However I passed because I didn’t have a server to associate with it and I thought I needed to be running an actual server in order to register the name (though I’m not sure that was the case even then). When I finally got around to having a personal server in the late 1990s I found that hecker.com had already been taken by a company that registered thousands of surname domains so that they could offer a shared domain service in which multiple people could have their own personal subdomains under a top-level domain: jane.smith.com, john.smith.com, and so on. So I settled on the next best thing and registered hecker.org instead for use as my primary domain, at the same time registering frankhecker.com (as well as the .org and .net variants) to prevent anyone else from getting it. ...

How can Maryland promote job growth and the well-being of its citizens as the economy languishes and Federal spending shows every sign of declining, never to rise again? Should Maryland seek to model itself on its next-door rival, Virginia, or even on Texas and other states in the south touting themselves as “business-friendly” destinations? Or is there another way to grow Maryland and make it a better place to live and work, one that takes into account Maryland’s own characteristics and doesn’t try to make it into something it’s not and never could be? ...

In part 18 of this series Republicans overcame the disadvantage imposed on them by the recently-adopted redistricting plan and gained a majority on the county council in the general election of 1994. We now review how the council tried to avoid a replay of the redistricting battle of 1991–1993: July 1996. The Howard County Council considers a proposal to establish a separate commission to devise council redistricting plans, as opposed to having the council create plans itself. The proposal envisions a seven-member commission with three members appointed by the Democratic and Republican Central Committees and a “tie-breaker” member appointed by the council. The commission’s plan would be presented to the council, which could adopt it as-is, modify it, or create a new plan; however the commission plan would automatically go into effect in the event of a council stalemate. ...