New government transparency committee members named

Senate President Mike Miller and Speaker of the House Michael Busch named the 12 members of the new legislative joint committee responsible for improving government transparency on Thursday.

Sen. Bill Ferguson, D-Baltimore City, and House Majority Leader Kumar Barve, D-Montgomery, will co-chair the committee. It will examine how transparent the government operations are and make recommendations to make information more readily available to the public.

“The bottom line is we want to maximize the government participatory experience for the average citizen,” Barve said.

The other members of the committee are: Sens. Joseph Getty, R-Carroll; Baltimore, J.B. Jennings; Nancy King, D-Montgomery; Katherine Klausmeier, D-Baltimore County, and Nathaniel McFadden; Dels. Talmadge Branch, D-Baltimore City; Robert Costa, R-Anne Arundel; A. Wade Kach, R-Baltimore County; Dan Morhaim, D-Baltimore County; and  Heather Mizeur, D-Montgomery.

The committee was established earlier this year by legislation proposed by Mizeur and Ferguson, which unanimously passed the Senate and nearly unanimously passed the House of Delegates.

The committee will compile a report of its findings on government transparency and recommendations to the full General Assembly each year by Dec. 1. Barve said that the committee has not planned its first meeting yet.

—Megan Poinski
Megan@MarylandReporter.com

 

About The Author

Len Lazarick

len@marylandreporter.com

Len Lazarick was the founding editor and publisher of MarylandReporter.com and is currently the president of its nonprofit corporation and chairman of its board He was formerly the State House bureau chief of the daily Baltimore Examiner from its start in April 2006 to its demise in February 2009. He was a copy editor on the national desk of the Washington Post for eight years before that, and has spent decades covering Maryland politics and government.

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