Screwball Antics Continue to Mar AA Nominating Commission

The Anne Arundel School Board Nominating Commission process continues to provide us with new and wondrous screwball antics that continue to show why the process should never have been created in the first place:

Three years after the state legislature revamped the way members are placed on the county Board of Education, confusion over the details continues to muck up the process.

In another case in point this week, the commission that nominates candidates to the governor for appointment relied on a new opinion from the state Attorney General's Office to conclude that board President Ned Carey was seeking another term.

Meanwhile, Carey was reading the law differently.

"My understanding was, the way the law read, by not submitting an application, I would not be considered," he said Thursday. "It wasn't my intention to run."

Just a day earlier, Joshua Greene, chairman of the School Board Nominating Commission, had said Carey was definitely still in the running even though he had not submitted an application, because under a ruling by the attorney general, incumbents don't have to be vetted. Their names go straight to the governor for consideration.

"He'll have his name forwarded, and that's it," Greene said.

Read the whole thing.....and incidentally I find it extremely curious that nobody asked these questions when two Republicans were up for reappointment to the School Board, and thus allowed them to go through the public confirmation process.

This kind of slapstick comedy shows exactly why a Nominating Commission process continues to lack legitimacy (in addition, of course, to the other well documented reasons why such a process is a travesty foisted upon county residents). The fact of the matter is that the General Assembly in creation of Nominating Commission process punted on a lot of the nitty gritty details of the process. That might not be a bad thing, except for the minor detail that the Nominating Commission is made up of political hacks who don't seem to be bothered to actually give a damn.

This process involving Ned Carey is a joke, and continues to undermine whatever credibility the Nominating Commission might have had by providing adequate incumbency protection by allowing sitting members to circumvent the process. And once again, it is necessary to point out that legitimate elections would eliminate all of the cloak and dagger stuff, opinions from the office of the Attorney General, and the lack of credibility in the process, and replace it with a process that would adequately provide representation for the students, parents, teachers and taxpayers of Anne Arundel County...