By EARL KELLY, Staff Writer | Posted: Sunday, May 20, 2012 6:00 am

The Maryland General Assembly’s special session cost taxpayers $75,000.

That was the special session of March 4 through April 2, 1936, and the price tag translates into about $1 million today.

That also was the special session when lawmakers approved a memorial for former Gov. Albert C. Ritchie, who had died in late February, and authorized building a bridge in Charles County to make it easier for Marylanders to cross the Potomac River and get to Virginia.

In July or August of this year, there likely will be another special session. This time, the question will be whether to build a casino near the foot of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. The goal will be to get Virginians to bring their money to Maryland, and Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., D-Calvert, says the new casino will help keep taxes down.

The last round of income tax hikes, just completed this week, cut the $1 billion structural deficit in half, but that still leaves a $500 million hole to be filled. Miller said expanding gambling will produce more state revenue and more jobs, and help keep taxes from climbing.

“The urgency is we are losing money daily to Pennsylvania, Virginia and Delaware,” he said. “I get nauseous seeing the billboards telling Marylanders to spend their money in (casinos in) those other states,” Miller said Friday.

“If we don’t have it on the ballot now, if we don’t get it done now, we have to wait until 2014 to complete it,” he said.

The session also likely will include efforts to make owning pit bulls less of a legal liability.

Special sessions allow lawmakers to focus on a small number of bills, and to get their work done quickly, Miller said.

“Special sessions are very useful because you decide what you want to do beforehand, you come back into session, you focus … and nobody wants to be there, so they act expeditiously to get their work done,” Miller said.
Earlier sessions

According to Maryland State Archives records, there have been 61 special sessions since the General Assembly became an independent body on Feb. 5, 1777.

At first, the General Assembly met only every second year, and special sessions were a way to fill in the gap. Then, the General Assembly started meeting each year, but special sessions became a way of dealing with unfinished business.

“We have citizen legislators, we do not have a full-time legislature, and it is not always possible to finish or complete or deal with the business of government in 90 days,” State Archivist Edward Papenfuse said.

Over the centuries, special sessions have addressed pressing issues, but they sometimes have made democratic government look a bit silly.

In 1836, the General Assembly convened in late May after the regular session ended on April 4 without anyone uttering the magic words “sine die,” according to Carl N. Everstine’s “The General Assembly of Maryland.”

Lawmakers had to saddle up and come back to Annapolis during the planting season to do things as the state constitution required. (While they were in town they addressed transportation issues and tried to require the state’s armorer to issue each member a new Hall’s patented rifle, a modern breech-loading affair.)
‘Spirit of anarchy’

During the three-day special session that concluded this past Wednesday, there were dire predictions of doom and gloom. Supporters of raising income taxes – Democrats — said the sky would fall and education would collapse if tax rates weren’t hiked and teachers’ pensions weren’t shifted onto the counties. Republicans kept spotting greener grass elsewhere, and huffed and puffed about moving to Delaware and Pennsylvania. They made Virginia sound like the Promised Land.

Somehow, these lamentations didn’t sound as authentic as those of November 1836, when Gov. Thomas Veazey, a Cecil County native who belonged to the Whigs (the precursor to the Republican Party), called the second special session of that year, to “curb the spirit of anarchy, disorder and revolution” that threatened the state.

The Eastern Shore counties were trying to break off and join Delaware, Southern Maryland wanted to join Virginia, people were leaving the state in droves because land had been farmed to death and, above all, the state and the nation were facing economic collapse because banks had made so many risky loans.

“Does any of this sound familiar?” Papenfuse said.

Veazey isn’t one of Maryland’s better known governors. His claim to fame is that he nearly bankrupted the state by spending money on capital improvements, including investing in the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

But Veazey’s bad investments were two pieces of infrastructure that long continued to make the state one of the most prosperous in the nation.

“Practically every development venture in the state of Maryland is funded in part with government monies,” Papenfuse said.
Taxes, taxes, taxes

It’s easy to imagine the public outcry in the spring of 1936, when Gov. Harry Nice, a Baltimore Republican, called a special session that placed a 2 7/16 cents-per-gallon tax on beer and a 10 cents tax on cosmetics. The General Assembly also passed laws regulating the butterfat content in milk and outlawing trafficking in stolen goods, according to General Assembly records.

Back then, in an era when there was supposedly less government intrusion, the General Assembly had to approve every benevolent bequest made in citizens’ wills. Lawmakers handled hundreds of these items during the March-April 1936 session – as an example, Willard A. Baldwin, late of Millersville, left $10,000 to a Protestant Episcopal church in Baltimore, and another $5,000 to erect a memorial window in the church.

Some gifts were as small as $25, and the list included many bequests to orphanages and asylums, and some to the “Home for Incurables of Baltimore City,” now the Keswick Home rehabilitation center.

In the winter of 1936, Nice convened the General Assembly for another special session, the second in the same year.

That session established the state’s unemployment compensation fund as a way of dealing with the Great Depression.

Economic problems frequently have been the impetus for calling special sessions. In 1933, Ritchie called two special sessions to deal with budget shortfalls, to license and tax liquor stores following Prohibition, and to create public welfare. Some years later, in 1947, Gov. William Preston Lane Jr., a Democrat from Hagerstown, called a special session to impose a 2 percent sales tax.
Urgent matters

Increasing taxes is easy compared to effecting real social change.

During his time in office, Ritche called a special session to outlaw lynching, to end Jim Crow segregation on steamboats and trains, and to legalize interracial marriages.

All of the bills failed.

A few decades later, Gov. Harry Hughes, a Democrat, was drowning in the savings and loan crisis. Old Court Savings and Loan had gone under, and Hughes issued a special order to limit withdrawals to $1,000.

Instead of having the desired effect of stabilizing banking, the safeguard triggered a run on S&Ls, and Hughes called two special sessions to deal with the crisis. During the second one, the General Assembly authorized Chase Manhattan Corp. to buy three troubled savings and loans in the state.

Taxpayers underwrote some of the risk and paid Chase Manhattan $25 million to assume the responsibility.

Accounts of special sessions are a window on the history of the state, Papenfuse said, because the serious issues facing Maryland show up there.

In 1965, for example, in response to the Supreme Court’s one-man, one-vote ruling the previous year, the General Assembly met to apportion representation by population and not by county. Two centuries of state domination by the rural counties ended, but the resentment continues to surface at nearly every meeting of the General Assembly.

People will yell a long time about the tax increase the legislature passed this week, but probably no louder than they yelled following a number of special sessions, such as the one in 1948 in which lawmakers authorized $525,000 to give themselves nicer offices, and to connect the then-Court of Appeals building to the State House by a tunnel, so the gentlemen of the legislature could avoid bad weather.

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