District 15's First Blog Post By: Douglas F. Gansler Attorney General of Maryland

I am a self-proclaimed technology novice who can barely use an iPhone so the request to write the first-ever District 15 Democratic Caucus blog caught me by surprise.

Must be that I live closer to District 15 headquarters (a.k.a., Daphne Bloomberg’s living room) than anyone else.

No matter. I appreciate the opportunity, applaud the effort to keep people engaged in political conversation, and I look forward to reading each new posting.

I may not be an expert blogger, but I do know that the first-ever anything sets the bar for what will follow so I am going to avoid the temptation to take a jab at the woeful crop of Republican Presidential candidates and say only that it was a great honor to Co-Chair Obama’s first presidential campaign in Maryland and I look forward to working with all Maryland Democrats to ensure his re-election.

Here in Maryland, from Governor O’Malley to Senators Mikulski and Cardin to Congressmen Cummings and Hoyer to our new Party Chair, Yvette Lewis, President Obama is in good hands – not to mention the support of our numerous everyday volunteers who will out canvass and out call states four times our size.  

Just to give you an idea of the strength of Democratic volunteers in Maryland, they helped deliver 1.3 million votes my way in an election in which I ran unopposed. Imagine what they can do when the going gets tough.

And the commitment to Maryland’s future demonstrated by those volunteers, well, in the Attorney General’s Office, we take that commitment seriously, which is why I want to take a minute to tell you a little about what we have been up to when it comes to protecting Maryland’s future.  

When it comes to our State’s most treasured natural resource, the Chesapeake Bay, we have been educating Marylanders in the Marcellus Shale region of our State on what it means to them, their property, and the health of the Bay when they lease the mineral rights to their land to natural gas prospectors.

We also continue to be committed to prosecuting polluters of the Bay.  In one of our more recent efforts, we successfully prosecuted a country club in Cambridge, Maryland that opted to run a pipe feeding raw sewage directly into one of the Bay’s tributaries rather than fix its failing septic system. The $500,000 fine and court order to fix the system will send a message to other potential polluters.

And because there is no one panacea when it comes to the Bay’s health, we also have successfully worked to get legislation passed taking phosphorus out of dishwasher detergent and now lawn fertilizer, getting it out of our waste water treatment plants and ultimately out of the Bay.  

And, of course, we continue to work toward getting a chicken poop power plant on the Eastern Shore, which will provide our farmers with an additional source of income and remove up to 500 million pounds of chicken litter, the primary source of nitrogen and phosphorous to our Bay, from their land, keeping it out of the Bay in the first place.

In the future, watch for our pilot Prescription Drug Take Back Program so instead of flushing your unused prescription drugs down the toilet, which has made it so the fish in our Bay don’t know whether they are boys or girls, you will be able to return unused prescription drugs directly to your pharmacy for disposal free of charge.

Fighting for Maryland’s future doesn’t stop with the Bay, however. It also means assisting families through the mortgage crisis by requiring the Banks that contributed to the crisis to take responsibility for their actions. We are working with Attorneys General throughout the nation to ensure they do, and to help the families who unfairly lost their homes as a result of “robo signing.”

We also have led the effort among my colleagues nationally to get caffeine-enhanced, alcoholic energy drinks, such as Four Loko, which are marketed to under age drinkers, off the shelves and out of the hands of our youth.

And, finally, though I began by calling myself a technological novice, I know enough to know that the internet is an incredible technological advancement but like all things it can be abused, whether it be for cyber-bullying, identity theft, or the misuse of our private data.  So when I become President of the National Association of Attorneys General next year, I will introduce an initiative to examine privacy and the internet. We will look at all the issues I just mentioned as well as many others and consider how we make the best use of all the internet has to offer, promoting technological advancement and the jobs that come with it, while also protecting ourselves and our communities.

Thank you so much for giving me the honor of writing the inaugural blog post for the District 15 Democratic Caucus. I look forward to your future successes and hope I’ll be able to share in celebrating some of the victories we achieve together again soon.

Douglas F. Gansler
Attorney General of Maryland