Peter Franchot is not "Like a good neighbor"

 UPDATE, July 21:  Peter Franchot came out a distant third in the July 19 primary.  Good for Maryland Democratic Voters.  And good for us all.

It is certainly not uncommon for elected officials, running for election for higher office, to use their power of incumbency to burnish their candidacies.  Sometimes these efforts spill into a gray area of using public funds to advance a candidacy in ways that are arguably improper and violative of the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. 

But yesterday, Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot, who is now running for Governor, took this power to what may be a new low.   Every year as long as I can remember – and I have been a Maryland resident for most of the last 70 years – the State Comptroller’s Office publishes a list of Unclaimed Property, typically in a special large magazine-size publication in major newspapers. This is a ministerial act, not the product of policy initiatives by the incumbent.  This year, in what I think is unprecedented, Mr. Franchot’s photograph took up most of the cover page of the list found in the Washington Post.  

 

And not an official photo.  Rather it was an informal campaign-like picture of a knit-shirt-clad Franchot holding a landline phone to his ear, but smiling straight into the camera.  And the title at the top was NOT “Maryland’s Unclaimed Property List.”  

Instead, it read “Like a good neighbor, Franchot is there.”  Nice, albeit misleading, campaign advertisement.  But certainly inappropriate for an expenditure of our tax funds.  

In any event, "a good neighbor" would not conspire with the Governor to press a plan, in many ways held secret from the public, to create private toll lanes on major highways which would not ease traffic congestion, but would lead to bailouts of millions of tax dollars to a private Australian company.