The problem with you average state employee in Maryland, is that they forget who their "customer" is.  They lose sight of who they are there to serve, and why their job exists in the first place.  This happens if your job is in HR, and your function is to support colleagues, or if your job is in the state police, and your function is to literally "protect and serve".  Our focus in our jobs should always be on "who is our customer" and "how do we give them the best service or the best product".

Too many forget that.

Full disclosure:  I am a contractual employee with the University of Maryland School Of Medicine.

This year’s Maryland state budget is a farce.  It was balanced largely on fund transfers (like stealing money from the oil spill disaster recovery fund), federal “stimulus” money,  and planning on the US Congress transferring millions of dollars to the states to boost Medicare/Medicaid payments.  Today, the fifth day of the new fiscal year, we are already in technical deficit on the budget.

O’Guvnah and his Dark Servants like to say “we’ve cut to the bone” and “we’ve made the hard choices”, but that just isn’t true.  We have yet to see a philosophical shift at the state level about spending, about hiring, about management.   Until that happens, we will be in perennial deficit.

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The past three years since the election of O’Guvnah Martin O’Malley have been quite illustrative in some of the major weaknesses of budgeting in Maryland.  It’s time that Maryland’s elected classes in Annapolis begin to come to terms with the facts on the ground, and not be lured by the siren song of power-hungry wet dreams when it comes to state finances and state budgeting.