NEWS ANALYSIS “And it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out, at the Old Ball Game.” The Cecil County Council stepped up to the legislative plate against the Hornberger administration this week but struck out, after some verbal swings at bat, on three major issues: the secret installation of a member of the Ethics Commission...
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A CECIL TIMES Special Report Cecil County Executive Danielle Hornberger secretly installed a former co-worker on the county Ethics Commission recently, despite the fact the County Council rejected her nomination to the panel in February. There was no notice given to the Council of the action, just a new inclusion of the woman’s name...
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The Office of the State Prosecutor (OSP) has filed five criminal charges against the former deputy director of the Cecil County Board of Elections for perjury, misconduct in office and allegedly falsifying required documents for the candidacy of Danielle Hornberger in her 2020 County Executive campaign. The prosecutor cited Hornberger’s candidacy and finance report...
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NEWS ANALYSIS Call it the once-a-month soda budget: you’ll be able to treat yourself to an occasional large Coke at the drive-through under the slightly over a penny cut in property tax rates set in the new Fiscal 2022 budget proposed by County Executive Danielle Hornberger and approved by the Cecil County Council Tuesday...
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NEWS ANALYSIS Cecil County Executive Danielle Hornberger’s proposed Fiscal 2022 budget, which will go before local residents at a public hearing on Thursday (5/20/2021), has become an ever changing list of promises and wishes—and a challenge to the County Council to figure out what is real or imagined. In addition, budget worksessions before the...
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NEWS ANALYSIS Cecil County is about to receive a $9.9 million windfall under the new American Rescue Plan signed into law in March by President Biden but some of County Executive Danielle Hornberger’s budget actions could limit how, and how much, money could be spent to help the county recover from the impacts of...
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NEWS ANALYSIS It was the first time that Lawrence Scott, an Annapolis political consultant and the new Cecil County Attorney, put in an official appearance at a public county meeting when he presided over the first session of the all-new membership of the county’s Ethics Commission on Tuesday 4/20/2021. It did not go well....
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NEWS ANALYSIS Cecil County Executive Danielle Hornberger submitted her first budget to the County Council on 4/1/2021, proposing about a 1-cent cut in the property tax rate while keeping income tax rates at the level set by her predecessor, Alan McCarthy. She also slashed operating funds for county libraries and bestowed the hefty sum...
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NEWS ANALYSIS For more than a month, the Cecil County Council has been locked in a procedural power struggle with new County Executive Danielle Hornberger’s administration over her firing of all five members of the county’s Ethics Commission, whose terms still had months or years to run, and replacement with her choices. But even...
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The Cecil County Council interviewed the five nominees from County Executive Danielle Hornberger to take over the county’s Ethics Commission at a Tuesday (2/9/2021) worksession, with members posing questions that mostly tiptoed around some of the key questions surrounding Hornberger’s decisions—and actions that could be a template for future wholesale removal of other county...
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The Cecil County Council made a strategic retreat Tuesday evening (2/2/2021), voting to rescind its previous refusal to consider five nominations by new County Executive Danielle Hornberger to the county’s Ethics Commission after she summarily fired all five sitting members. Faced with a threat that she would install her picks unilaterally if the Council...
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The Cecil County Council, in the first open revolt of its kind since the 2012 creation of Charter government, stood up for its powers Tuesday (1/19/2021) and rejected what one Councilor called an attempt by County Executive Danielle Hornberger to “strongarm” the Council to approve her unilateral choices for the Ethics Commission– after she...
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Cecil County Executive Danielle Hornberger fired the five-member county Ethics Commission on Thursday (1/14/2021) via email, despite the fact that all of them had months or years left on their terms in office under appointments previously approved by the County Council. The commission has always had staggered terms of office, so that the important...
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NEWS ANALYSIS New Cecil County Executive Danielle Hornberger may have gotten her political dream team when she installed two Annapolis Republican political consultants as members of her administration: a consultant who specializes in financial disclosures required of political campaigns to become county finance director and a prominent lobbyist and campaign consultant, who has no...
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NEWS ANALYSIS Even before Danielle Hornberger raised her hand and took the oath of office as Cecil County’s new County Executive on Monday (12/7/2020), some county department heads were already locked out of their computers and within an hour or two ousted from the county administration building in Elkton. The purge was carried out...
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