Thornton showed unity can work when it counts

School funding plan showed potential for teamwork, direction

Parsons said the county delegation ‘‘has never had that combination of leadership and unity and strategic direction and the numbers that it needed.”

But he noted one exception: the 2002 negotiation of the $1.3 billion Thornton school funding plan.

The plan would have benefited the rest of the state at Montgomery’s expense before Montgomery joined with other delegations and ‘‘blew up the formula,” Parsons said.

The county executive, the County Council and the county school board worked in tandem with the delegation to craft the final version of the school-funding law, said Sen. Richard S. Madaleno Jr. (D-Dist. 18) of Kensington.

‘‘The county executive [Douglas M. Duncan] put forward a plan that the delegation bought into and supported across the board,” said Madaleno, one of Montgomery’s chief strategists on Thornton in 2002 when he worked as a legislative analyst for the county’s Office of Intergovernmental Relations.

Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. remembers things differently.

‘‘It wasn’t such Doug Duncan as it was Rich Madaleno stealing $100 million from the state of Maryland,” said Miller (D-Dist. 27) of Chesapeake Beach.

Madaleno and lobbyist Melanie Wenger presented numbers to Ida G. Ruben, then a Democratic senator from Silver Spring, and Sen. Patrick J. Hogan (D-Dist. 39) of Montgomery Village. Ruben and Hogan sat on the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee, which considered the bill jointly with the Senate Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee.

Montgomery was able to get the amendments it wanted — an increase in the funding formulas that when phased in meant more than $100 million for Montgomery, Baltimore, Howard, Talbot and Worcester counties — ‘‘because it had votes and because they could do it,” Miller said. ‘‘... Montgomery County said, ‘Look, first and foremost we’re going to make sure Montgomery County gets our share.’ And they did.”

‘‘Montgomery County did very well with Thornton because we couldn’t get it passed without them,” said Barbara A. Hoffman of Baltimore, who headed the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee at the time.

Christopher Van Hollen Jr. of Kensington, now a congressman, was the committee’s vice chairman. ‘‘And I needed his vote,” Hoffman said. ‘‘And he said, ‘We have to improve the basic formula for Montgomery County.’”

Montgomery took the position that ‘‘we’re not going to comment on the piece to the city or to Prince George’s County,” Madaleno said. ‘‘Instead we’re going to put our piece on the table and say, ‘We feel this is what’s fair to us.’”

With Baltimore and Prince George’s County representatives on board, Montgomery got what it wanted.

‘‘That showed what can be done with our numbers,” Parsons said.