The Overburdened Board: 1960-1983 103

analysis of the new law, and the regulations and procedures emanating from it, is
reserved for observation later in this chapter. Suffice to say here that at long last some
of the improvements urgently recommended thirty years earlier have been achieved.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether the changes will indeed be salutary.

The last two decades have seen the Board of Public Works become, in truth, a
microcosm of state government itself. Its expanded role has mirrored the expanded
role of the larger entity. To some extent that had been the case for many years, but
what marks this last period for special consideration is not so much the quantitative
increase in board activity as its immersion into entirely new, and not entirely calm,
waters.

The 1960s and 1970s were activist years for state government. People demanded
more and varied services from their government, and the reapportionment of state
legislatures in response to Supreme Court edicts created bodies willing to provide those
services. In part, at least in Maryland, this expansion was into entirely new areas not
formerly subject to governmental intrusion at any level; in part it involved picking
up activities that local governments for fiscal reasons found necessary to shed.

All of this, fortuitously or otherwise, happened to coincide with two other major
phenomena of the period—the growing demand for affirmative action programs as a
means of implementing the equality of treatment guaranteed both by law and public
morality, and an increasing concern, especially after the revelations collectively re-
ferred to as "Watergate," over ethics in government. At some point people began to
realize that in addition to its political authority, the state had become a significant
economic entity and that its economic power could be marshaled as effectively as its
political power to achieve desired social goals. One principal method of so utilizing
the state was, alternatively, to restrict or to mandate the types of people and firms
with whom the state would do business. As in Maryland the Board of Public Works
was the fulcrum for awarding major state contracts, and to that extent was a principal
exerciser of the state's economic power, it soon became the legislature's designee for
enforcing these various social policies, some of which were occasionally in conflict.

The intrusion of state government into new areas or those of traditionally local
concern and the task of enforcing social policy by means of state contracting created
a new range of vexing problems for the board. A wider spectrum of political consid-
erations crept into the decision-making process as the political subdivisions, minority
groups, labor unions, small business enterprises, and others all scrambled for bigger
shares of the state's largesse; these political considerations, in turn, caused public
interest (and in particular the interest of the news media) to focus more intensely on
board activities.