District 18 Delegation Recaps Assembly Session, Answers Questions

Kensington residents heard from District 18 representatives on Wednesday evening about a range of issues, both state and local, at Kensington Town Hall.

State Sen. Rich Madaleno, Del. Jeff Waldstreicher and Del. Al Carr all recapped the just closed assembly session from their point of view, speaking about the wins and losses in their committees.  Del. Ana Sol Gutierrez did not make the meeting, due to a previous commitment. All three men at the town hall are Kensington or Greater Kensington residents themselves. 

A $2 billion budget deficit, with additional structural deficits meant the budget was the overriding issue of the year.  

“Next year, if all goes well, we’ll only have a $1 billion problem,” Madaleno said, adding that as enrollments in state programs have gone up, revenues available to the state have gone, creating budget problems both in Montgomery County and in the state at-large.

Jeff Waldstreicher and Al Carr spoke to specifically to bills that had passed through their committee.

Waldstreicher said there was a “lot of consensus” about over incarceration in the judiciary committee from both established liberal delegates and newer conservative libertarian candidates that arrived as Tea party candidates.  The committee helped pass a law that clarified the process of parole fees.

Carr said he was proud of the PEPCO reliability standard bill that had come out of his committee, environmental matters, but said it was a first step.

“If we have to come back and make it tougher, we will,” Carr said.

But residents wanted to know what else was being done about PEPCO. 

“We feel like the gains were incremental,” one resident said, asking what both the elected representatives and residents could do, “We want more.”

Carr suggested following along with the PSC investigation, started last August in the wake of massive outages following summer storms and contacting the state’s Office of the People’s Counsel (OPC), a department that represents residential consumers of utilities.

Madaleno said that he’d like to see PEPCO create more user-friendly reports when they are required, so that law makers and residents could hold them accountable, and added that he’d like to see OPC be more responsive.