At the request of the Department of legislative Services, Speaker Busch has introduced HB 777, a bill seeking to clarify various provisions of law that grant powers and duties to county governments.

This bill seeks to clarify a number of long-standing and potentially confusing provisions of current law that spell out the domain for Commissioner Counties, Code Home Rule Counties, and Charter Counties, that are currently spread across multiple sections of the Maryland Annotated Code. In many cases, conflicting or ambiguous references in the current code are replaces with more “plain language” statements of application. The goal of this bill is, essentially, to clarify many of these provisions in advance of a non-substantive Code Revision bill, expected in coming years, to create a new Local Government Article of the Annotated Code of Maryland.

MACo and numerous County Attorneys have been involved in the iterative development of this bill, and have guided a number of the provisions that now appear in HB 777. County officials with questions or concerns about the bill are invited to contact Michael Sanderson at MACo for more information.