Maryland lawmakers, like many of the rest of us, are motivated by deadlines, and a major one comes at midnight.

Monday is the 69th day of the General Assembly’s 90-day session. Known as Crossover Day, it’s the deadline for bills to pass one chamber — the Senate or the House of Delegates — and cross over to the other for the best chance of full passage.

This being politics, exceptions can always be made for a late-emerging, high-priority issue. But most bills that fail to make the crossover deadline will be left in the legislative dust for the year.

Senators and delegates have spent long hours in session over the past week, advancing hundreds of bills. During multiple hours’ worth of sessions Saturday, the House of Delegates churned through long lists of bills, fueled by pizza that was brought into the delegates lounge.

So which of the 2,653 bills and 16 resolutions are charging ahead, and which ones are hanging in the balance? Here’s a quick rundown.

Fighting federal immigration enforcement

Even though state lawmakers have limited ability to respond to ramped-up federal immigration enforcement, Democrats are floating seemingly every option possible.

They have already passed a law banning local jails from having formal cooperation agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Gov. Wes Moore signed that law a month ago.

Since then, lawmakers have considered a raft of actions, though none has yet fully passed.

They include measures to protect noncitizens from enforcement at sensitive locations such as hospitals, prevent personal data from being used for enforcement, and require state and local law enforcement to document federal immigration enforcement.

Lawmakers also are considering bills to require local zoning approval for private detention facilities, and to set standards and oversight for conditions in those centers.

Attacking energy issues

The House of Delagates approved a bill on energy policy that cobbles together multiple ideas — including about $150 annual savings on electric bills — last week. It’s expected to be considered in the Senate after the crossover deadline.

The bill would also require data centers to submit plans showing how they would employ local labor and use battery storage to lessen their impact on the electric grid.

Senate Democratic leaders and Moore are on board with the plan, so the bill shouldn’t face trouble reaching final passage before the end of session.

The bill is called the Utility RELIEF Act, with RELIEF standing for Reducing Energy Load Inflation for Everyday Families.

$70B budget moving forward

The Senate signed off on a roughly $70 billion state budget last week, sending it to the House of Delegates, where it will be debated this week.

There are no tax or fee increases in the budget, though it includes more than $1 billion of spending cuts and fund shifts to cover a gap between revenue coming in and anticipated spending.

Among the most difficult cuts is $127 million sliced from the Developmental Disabilities Administration, which is slightly less than the governor’s original proposal of a $150 million spending cut.

Senate President Bill Ferguson noted that this is the fastest the budget has moved — at least since the coronavirus pandemic-shortened session in 2020.

“This is something that we really wanted to make sure that we got the Senate product done early, so that we wouldn’t have this at the end of session,” said Ferguson, a Baltimore Democrat. “So we could deal with all of the other issues.”

Criminal and juvenile justice reforms

Lawmakers have advanced a bill to ban the sale of Glock handguns and facsimiles because their trigger design allows them to be easily converted into machine guns.

And, on juvenile justice, they are working to reduce the list of crimes for which minors are automatically charged as adults.

Lawmakers are also advancing a version of a bill intended to push the state to carry out plans to build a prerelease and reentry center for incarcerated women. The version in the Senate removes a requirement to put the facility in Baltimore, raising concerns among some advocates.

Lawmakers have yet to vote on a bill that would reform the process through which people can seek criminal charges through a district court commissioner with no input from police or prosecutors. A Baltimore Banner investigation documented how the process can be easily abused.

Foster care improvements

The House of Delegates approved three bills Saturday aimed at improving the troubled foster care system, including creating a foster care ombudsman and banning the state from placing foster children in hotels or keeping them in hospitals when not medically necessary.

One of the bills is called Kanaiyah’s Law for Kanaiyah Ward, a 16-year-old girl who died by suicide last fall in a Baltimore hotel where she was supposed to receive one-on-one supervision.

House Speaker Joseline Peña-Melnyk praised delegates for their unanimous votes on the bills.

“When you go home, each and every one of you has to feel proud of these three bills that just passed, because they are really important,” she said.

Governor’s priorities

Most of the Democratic governor’s priorities are moving forward in some fashion, including legislation to limit grocery stores from rapidly changing prices for different customers, facilitate housing construction around mass transit stops, promote economic development and set a process for the state health secretary to make vaccine recommendations.

Moore put forward a bill on energy policy, which is not moving, but he was involved in developing the larger energy bill.

Symbols and commemorations

The House of Delegates is moving forward with a bill to designate megadolon as the state shark.

Another bill is progressing in the House that would require the governor to proclaim January as Muslim American Heritage Month and May as Jewish American Heritage Month.

The House is also advancing legislation banning state and local governments from using Confederate names on government property such as streets, parks and buildings.

The Senate, meanwhile, passed a bill setting Jan. 13 as Korean American Day and another designating the Natural History Society of Maryland as the state’s natural sciences museum.

Redrawing congressional districts

A hot issue early in the session was whether to redraw Maryland’s congressional district boundaries to give Democrats a chance at a sweep of all eight seats in this fall’s election. The state currently has one Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Moore championed the plan, which sailed through the House of Delegates before stalling in the Senate. The proposed map has remained parked in the Senate Rules Committee, where it’s expected to stay.

Moore’s team floated the idea that it was working on a “Plan B” for redistricting — possibly pushing a new map for the 2028 election — but nothing has been put forward publicly.

Next steps

After the crossover deadline, lawmakers have three weeks to finalize the bills they intend to send to the governor. Each bill must be approved in the exact form by both the House and the Senate by midnight April 13, and the final days can be marked by wrangling over fine details.

If lawmakers fear Moore will veto any bills, they could present them to the governor early to give themselves time for veto override votes. Typically, veto overrides are taken up in the next scheduled legislative session. There is no session planned before the election.

• A bill in the Mississippi Legislature proposes a tax increase on hotels and restaurants in Jackson.
• The increased revenue would benefit the city’s tourism department, Visit Jackson.
• The hotel tax rate would increase by 1% and the restaurant tax rate by 0.5%.
• Legislators say the proposed rates would keep Jackson competitive with other cities in the region.

A bill making its way through the Mississippi Legislature would bump up tax rates on hotels, motels and restaurants in Jackson, with the revenue benefitting the city’s tourism department.

The proposal would increase the hotel tax rate by 1% and the restaurant tax rate by 0.5%, modest bumps, said bill sponsor Sen. Hillman Frazier, D-Jackson, that would go a long way for the Jackson Convention and Visitors Bureau, known as Visit Jackson.

“We’re trying to be very conservative here with this increase,” he said in a March 20 interview. “These changes are just enough to maintain operations.”

With inflation taking ever-growing bites out of profits and reduced state funds on the horizon as the income tax revenue decreases, Frazier said a minor tourism tax increase is necessary to keep Visit Jackson well-funded.

Hotels and motels currently have an 11% tax rate, most of which is attributed to the 7% sales tax. The convention center tax adds another 3%, and Visit Jackson nets 1%. Under Frazier’s bill, which has been co-authored by four other Jackson-area senators, Visit Jackson’s share would double.

For restaurants, the rate would increase from 9% to 9.5%, with Visit Jackson collecting 1.5% of that sum. The increased revenue, according to documents prepared by Visit Jackson and shared with legislators, would fund hotel-restaurant partnerships, collaborations with local farmers and culinary demonstrations at city events.

The rate changes, according to the documents, would yield the bureau around $2 million in additional revenue each year.

Taxes on the brain?: Mississippi House tax bills could save you money, help businesses

The crucial part of the bill, Frazier said, is that Jackson will remain competitive when compared to other cities in Mississippi and throughout the south.

The proposed 12% hotel tax rate falls below nearby New Orleans, which boasts a 16.2% tax and $3 nightly fee, and Birmingham, where the $3 nightly fee is accompanied by a 17.5% tax.

Neighboring Brandon, Flowood and Richland levy a 12% hotel tax and 9% restaurant tax, the documents read, nearly identical to the rates that Jackson would adopt with legislative consent.

Approval from other legislators may present a challenge, Frazier said, explaining that some lawmakers have opposed the provision in the past because it increases the amount they pay when they check into Jackson-area hotels during the session. His bill has passed two committees as of March 20 and faces a full vote in each chamber before it can become law.

“Visit Jackson does a very good job selling Jackson and bringing people here to visit,” Frazier said. “We need to give them the resources to keep doing what they’re doing.”

ASHEVILLE – The Asheville Orchid Festival will return in all its showy glory for 24th time March 27-29.

The festival, hosted by the Western North Carolina Orchid Society and the North Carolina Arboretum, will have an “Orchid Kingdom” theme this year, and will be an American Orchid Society sanctioned judging event.

Festivalgoers can expect to experience world-class orchid growers and breeders, regional orchid societies displays and hundreds of orchids presented in displays.

Orchids will be for sale from across the United States and Ecuador and will include rare species and cutting-edge hybrids.

“The Asheville Orchid Festival has been recognized as one of the best orchid shows in the country today,” Mike Mims, past president of the WNC Orchid Society said. “A huge orchid festival that is unlike any other orchid event in the region and lures the best of the best in the orchid industry to come to Asheville for a few days to engage and show off.”

WNC Orchid Society President Graham Ramsey, and his wife, artist Leslie Keller, each year create a theme for the festival.

Last year the two created the “House of Orchids” theme to transport visitors to another time, with a Victorian-inspired model greenhouse. 

“Usually we arrive at a theme, believe it or not, when we’re out hiking. We try to think of a theme that we can also come up with a neat display to match,” Ramsey previously told the Citizen Times.

In 2023, for the “Orchid Express” theme, Ramsey and Keller created a 24-foot-train that functioned as an eye-catching display for many orchids featured by the festival.