Notes & Personnel
Quick reads, lateral moves, and news from around the Free State.
Dr. Neal Naff holds court as Maryland’s premier political host in Barry’s new piece, opening his historic estate and gardens for the off-the-record gatherings where the state’s civic conversations actually happen — with Speaker Joseline A. Peña-Melnyk in the frame. via The Maryland Wire
The Week in Annapolis: September 20–26 — the first Sunday briefing ranks the five stories that mattered: Insurance Commissioner Marie Grant approved a 14.6% ACA marketplace hike, with Matthew F. Celentano (League of Life & Health Insurers of Maryland) and Vincent DeMarco (Maryland Health Care for All) framing the stakes, plus the governor’s AI week and MACo cheering the data-center land-use carve-out. via The Maryland Wire
Christine Condon reports environmental advocates may push in 2027 to extend the Bay Restoration Fund “flush tax” past its 2030 cut-half trigger, calling it essential to sewage plant upgrades for the Chesapeake Bay. Maryland Matters
Capital News Service finds Canada — Maryland’s largest export market at $2.2B in 2025 — is hitting state exporters hard amid the U.S.–Canada trade war, with $2.8B in imports flowing the other way. Maryland Matters
Vincent DeMarco argues the Prescription Drug Affordability Board is working and should be expanded — noting General Assembly legislation next year to let the board set drug prices — rather than rolled back. Maryland Matters
No fresh lobbying-firm hires or staff moves turned up this morning — quiet on the personnel front.
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Featured: Comptroller Brooke Lierman
Twenty-first-century Maryland doesn't measure stature by pedigree or ballroom galas, but by what you build for other people. By that measure, Comptroller Brooke Lierman stands as tall as anyone in state government.
If you filed your Maryland taxes online this month without paying a dime to do it, you've already met Brooke Lierman's handiwork. On September 1, her office opened Maryland Tax Connect to individual filers — free state filing on a brand-new cloud portal, the first systemwide modernization of Maryland's tax machinery in thirty years. The old system ran on a COBOL mainframe installed in 1993; the new one serves 3.2 million returns a year, with monthly webinars and a call center to walk taxpayers through it.
Lierman is the first woman ever elected Comptroller of Maryland, and the first woman independently elected to statewide office in the state's history — she likes to say "I may be the first, but I am going to make sure that I am not the last." She came to the job after eight years representing Baltimore in the House of Delegates, and before that she was a civil rights and disability rights attorney in Baltimore, a Dartmouth and University of Texas law graduate who clerked for two federal judges.
She's remade the Comptroller's office into something it never quite was before: a consumer-facing agency. Her Earned It campaign with Governor Wes Moore is pushing the state's Earned Income Tax Credit — Maryland's largest anti-poverty program — out to every eligible working family. Her office returned $120 million in unclaimed property to Marylanders last year. And she created an Advisory Council on Financial Education, on the theory that the state's chief financial officer should also be its chief financial educator.
Sharp, relentless, and everywhere at once — that is Brooke Lierman, and Maryland's money is in good hands.