MGA Clash of Titans

Maybe with a spanking...

🔥 Maryland did something in 2024 that most people didn’t notice at first — and now a whole lot of families are paying for it. Literally.

When SB1 passed, everyone focused on the door‑to‑door electricity sales rules. Fine. Reasonable. No one was marching in the streets over that. But tucked inside that bill — slipped in like a stowaway — was a set of provisions that opened the door for power companies to charge ratepayers for things that used to come out of corporate profit. I’m talking executive bonuses, luxury offices, high‑end travel, the whole corporate‑perks buffet.

And once that door cracked open, the utilities didn’t just walk through it. They sprinted.

Since then, I’ve heard from Marylanders whose bills doubled. Some say tripled. A few swear they’ve seen five‑fold increases or more. Are all those numbers perfect? Who knows. But the pain is real, and it’s hitting families who can’t absorb another surprise bill.

Now here’s where the story gets interesting.

In 2026, along comes HB1 — a bill that looks an awful lot like a legislative apology tour. It strips out the very cost‑loading tricks SB1 enabled. It slams the door on luxury spending being passed to customers. And it does it with the unmistakable fingerprints of the new House leadership.

No one is going to step up to a microphone and say, “We’re undoing the Senate President’s mess.” That’s not how Annapolis works. But plenty of people are reading HB1 as exactly that: a quiet but unmistakable correction — maybe even a rebuke.

And then there’s the subplot.

Brian Crosby the House sponsor of SB1 back in 2024 — the bill that opened this whole can of worms — is now the primary sponsor of HB1. Some folks are whispering that he’s trying to get back in the Speaker’s good graces. Others think the Speaker told him, in effect, You helped make this mess. Now you’re going to help clean it up.

Call it a spanking, a course correction, or a political penance — but it’s the kind of inside‑Annapolis drama that tells you everything about who’s rising, who’s falling, and who’s trying to survive the shift in power.

And that’s why I wrote this article.

Because what happened with SB1 and HB1 isn’t just about utility rates. It’s about how power works in Maryland — who uses it, who loses it, and who pays the price when a bill goes sideways.

Maryland’s energy wars now have two faces: an old, clubby Senate that wrote the rules around the needs of regulated monopolies, and a newly assertive House leadership that is openly writing laws for the ratepayer at the kitchen table rather than the lobbyist in the conference room. The collision between SB 1 (2024) and HB 1 (2026) is less a technical fight over cost recovery than a generational break between “Old Maryland” and a more openly progressive project in the House.

Old Maryland: Bill Ferguson’s SB 1

For most of the last decade, Annapolis ran on muscle memory. Senate President Bill Ferguson and former Speaker Adrienne Jones shared the same basic worldview: cautious, pro‑business, and instinctively deferential to big regulated players like BGE when complex legislation hit the floor. They did not need to conspire; they simply **saw the world the same way**, which meant there was rarely a meaningful institutional check from the House when the Senate cut a deal with industry.

SB 1 of 2024, “Electricity and Gas – Retail Supply – Regulation and Consumer Protection,” was the purest expression of that consensus. Publicly sold as a crackdown on shady door‑to‑door energy marketers and a way to protect low‑income households from teaser rates, it did those things—but only as the visible part of the iceberg.[1][2][3][4][5] The bill:

- Imposed tight new licensing and conduct rules on retail energy suppliers and their salespeople, sharply limiting the long‑term, price‑locking contracts that had sometimes allowed savvy customers to hedge against rising default utility rates.[1][2][3][6][4]

- Capped residential prices from most competitive suppliers at no more than the trailing 12‑month average Standard Offer Service rate, with only narrow PSC‑approved exceptions for green power.[2][3][6]

- Expanded and funded new enforcement machinery inside state government, with increased assessments on utilities that, crucially, could be recovered “through rates” under modified Public Utilities language.[1][3][4]

In practice, this “consumer protection” bill did two things at once: it crippled the slice of the market that directly undercuts incumbent utilities, and it gave those same incumbents a cleaner legal pathway to stuff more categories of regulatory and program costs into the monthly bills of captive customers.[1][2][3][6][4] Old Maryland is adept at that kind of double game: promise the public one thing in the title, deliver another in the fine print.

Under Jones, the House did not seriously challenge that approach. There were amendments, speeches, and a record of dissent from the usual suspects, but there was no coordinated institutional pushback. The Speaker was not going to turn the lower chamber into a barricade against a Senate President she broadly agreed with on the terms of business‑government partnership.

A new House: Peña‑Melnyk breaks the pattern

Joseline Peña‑Melnyk arrives in the Speaker’s chair from a very different place—personally and ideologically. A progressive with a long record on health equity and consumer‑side protections, she does not share the reflexive comfort her predecessors had with cutting grand bargains that keep big institutions happy and voters in the dark. Her caucus reflects that shift: committee gavels and leadership titles have moved left, and some of the old guard have been quietly parked in prestige roles with minimal real power.

In that context, making HB 1 of 2026 her flagship bill is not an accident. “Investor–Owned Electric, Gas, and Gas and Electric Companies – Cost Recovery – Limitations” is written as a direct challenge to the underlying premise of SB 1’s world.[7][8][9] Instead of tinkering at the edges, HB 1 draws a thick red line around what costs a monopoly utility may pass along to the people who have no meaningful alternative provider. The bill:

- Defines “compensation” broadly for executives and supervisors—salaries, bonuses, periodic payments, perquisites, incentive pay, and non‑cash benefits—while carving out only basic benefits such as health and disability coverage.[7][8]

- Prohibits investor‑owned utilities from recovering, through rates, the costs of paying certain employees bonuses and other forms of incentive compensation, cutting off the ability to launder executive reward systems into monthly customer bills.[7][8]

- Fences off categories of corporate spending—office renovations, aviation and luxury transportation, corporate retreats and staff‑development junkets—as inherently non‑recoverable from ratepayers.[7][8]

Where SB 1 told utilities and regulators, “You can treat more of your new compliance and program costs as legitimate charges to the public,” HB 1 replies, “You cannot treat your executive lifestyle as a cost of service.”[1][7][3][8][4] It accepts the SB 1 regulatory landscape as a fact on the ground and then hunts down the soft underbelly: the quiet transfer of wealth from households to management via the bill line items most voters never notice.

Clash of agendas: pro‑business vs. pro‑people

Seen from a distance, this is not just a fight about energy policy; it is a clash of governing philosophies.

Ferguson’s Senate operates on the assumption that what is good for major regulated incumbents is, at worst, tolerable for everyone else. “Stability” and “certainty” for utilities are treated as synonymous with stability for the public. SB 1 fits that worldview perfectly: tighten the leash on small bad actors in the retail market, centralize more power in the hands of the incumbent utilities and PSC, and let cost recovery quietly expand to cover the resulting machinery.[1][2][3][6][4]

Peña‑Melnyk’s House starts from the other end of the telescope. The core question is not whether BGE feels comfortable, but whether a ratepayer in a Baltimore rowhouse or a Prince George’s apartment can afford the bill without underwriting an executive’s stock‑linked bonus or the utility’s latest office make‑over. HB 1 reads like a line‑by‑line answer to all the tricks Old Maryland has tolerated for years: if a cost cannot be defended as essential to safe, reliable service, it does not belong in the rate base.[7][8][9]

That is why this fight matters beyond the usual Annapolis inside baseball. For the first time in a long time, the House is not merely a junior partner tweaking the Senate’s work product. It is asserting a rival moral logic:

- The Senate’s SB 1 defines “consumer protection” as protection from small‑time market abuses—even if that fortifies the position of large, politically connected players and allows them to recoup new costs early and often through rates.[1][2][3][6][4]

- The House’s HB 1 defines “consumer protection” as a veto on executive self‑dealing and corporate perks being billed to families who have no practical way to say no.[7][8][9]

What this signals for Annapolis

If HB 1 passes in something close to its introduced form, it will mark the first clear, public defeat for the consensus that has governed energy politics in Maryland for years. A Speaker who is “pro‑people” in more than rhetoric will have used the most symbolic bill number of the session to redraw the boundary between the public and the monopolies that serve it.

And even if the Senate trims or dilutes the bill, the fact that the fight is happening at all is proof that Old Maryland’s quiet, bipartisan alignment around utility interests is over. SB 1 showed what Bill Ferguson could do when the House leadership was not inclined to fight him. HB 1 is Joseline Peña‑Melnyk’s way of announcing that those days are finished—and that from now on, the first question in the House will not be, “Is this good for the company?” but, “Is this defensible to the people who have to pay the bill?”[1][7][3][8][4]

Citations:

[1] MD SB1 | 2024 | Regular Session - LegiScan https://legiscan.com/MD/bill/SB1/2024

[2] MD Governor Approves Bill, Restricts Energy Choice - MDER Blog https://www.mdenergyratings.com/blog/md-governor-approves-bill-restricts-energy-choice/

[3] [PDF] 2024 Regular Session - Fiscal and Policy Note for Senate Bill 1 https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2024RS/fnotes/bil_0001/sb0001.pdf

[4] SB1 | Maryland 2024 | Electricity and Gas - Retail Supply https://trackbill.com/bill/maryland-senate-bill-1-electricity-and-gas-retail-supply-regulation-and-consumer-protection/2467011/

[5] Legislation - SB0001 - Maryland https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Legislation/Details/SB0001?ys=2024rs

[6] [PDF] Senate Bill 1 Will Permanently End - NRG Energy https://www.nrg.com/assets/documents/energy-policy/maryland_retail_op_ed_hb267-sb1.pdf

[7] [PDF] 2026 Regular Session - House Bill 1 First Reader - Maryland

[8] HB1 | Maryland 2026 | Investor-Owned Electric, Gas ... - PolicyEngage https://trackbill.com/bill/maryland-house-bill-1-investor-owned-electric-gas-and-gas-and-electric-companies-cost-recovery-limitations/2767474/

[9] [PDF] 2026 Regular Session - Synopsis - House Schedule 1 - Maryland https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/Pubs/LegisLegal/2026rs-synopsis-of-house-bills-and-joint-resolutions-1.pdf