St. Mary’s County residents and organizations have until Oct. 2 to submit ideas for the county’s 2027 state legislative agenda, ahead of a joint meeting between the Commissioners of St. Mary’s County and the county’s Maryland General Assembly delegation set for Dec. 15 at 6:30 p.m.
The Commissioners will review submitted proposals and decide which to formally adopt before presenting their agenda to Del. Todd Morgan and the rest of the county’s delegation at that meeting, held in the CSMC Meeting Room at the Chesapeake Building, 41770 Baldridge Street in Leonardtown. Proposals can be submitted through a Legislative Proposal Form posted on the county attorney’s webpage, or sent directly by mail or email to either the Commissioners’ office or Morgan’s Annapolis office; the release lists both addresses. Meetings remain open to the public and stream live on SMCG TV Channel 95 and the county’s YouTube channel.
This year’s timeline runs noticeably later than last cycle’s: the joint meeting for the 2026 agenda was held Oct. 7, 2025, with a submission deadline in late August. This year’s Dec. 15 meeting and Oct. 2 deadline push the process back roughly two months, compressing the runway before Maryland’s 90-day legislative session opens in January.
The process itself has drawn some internal debate. During last year’s cycle, at least one commissioner questioned why the county serves as a pass-through for citizen proposals rather than having residents submit directly to the delegation, and Commission President Randy Guy noted publicly that a proposal routed through the Commissioners carries no guarantee of the board’s support. Residents can still submit directly to the delegation instead of, or in addition to, the county.
Past cycles offer a sense of what typically comes through the process. For the 2026 session, the Commissioners considered county-generated proposals including raising the cap on a revolving loan fund for volunteer fire department equipment from $5 million to $7 million, exempting public projects from a local utility authority’s capital contribution charges, and banning roadside solicitations on county roads, alongside at least one resident-submitted proposal seeking a tax exemption for family recreation businesses. Not every submitted idea makes the final cut; the Commissioners ultimately vote on which proposals to formally endorse before forwarding a final agenda to the delegation, and a proposal’s inclusion on that agenda is itself a form of leverage, signaling to Annapolis lawmakers that a bill has the county government’s institutional backing rather than coming from an individual resident alone.
Maryland’s General Assembly convenes each January for a 90-day session, with most bills filed in November and December ahead of the start. The joint meeting format gives county officials and state lawmakers a chance to align on priorities before the filing deadlines, and county-endorsed proposals typically carry more institutional weight with the delegation than requests submitted with no local government backing at all. The St. Mary’s County delegation includes members representing District 29, one of several Southern Maryland-based delegations that also cover parts of Calvert, Charles and Prince George’s counties, and delegation members frequently sponsor or co-sponsor bills on behalf of the jurisdictions they represent even when those bills originate from a single county’s request.
More information on the Commissioners, including full meeting schedules, is available at www.stmaryscountymd.gov/csmc.
