On Monday, November 29th, Delegate Shane Pendergrass (D-13, Howard County), Chair of the Maryland House of Delegates’ Health and Government Operations Committee, announced she will not seek reelection. In an email to her supporters, she wrote the following:
Thirty-six years ago, I could not have imagined how difficult it would be to decide to leave a job I had never intended to hold. All I wanted back then was for my daughter and her classmates to be able take a test while seated in a classroom instead of on the cafetorium stage floor at their crowded school, then Whiskey Bottom Elementary. That first People for Pendergrass campaign was built with energetic friends and neighbors, bake sales, meetings around the dining room table, rallies at Carroll Baldwin Hall and a lot of door-knocking. We were political novices, but we were determined to improve our community.
The journey since has been as rewarding as it was improbable. As it turned out, I wanted to work on so much more, including establishing Howard County’s first adequate public facilities law, making health insurance affordable for more Marylanders, protecting women’s access to abortion, maintaining a not-for-profit health insurer in Maryland, codifying a patient’s bill of rights, bolstering our public health system, addressing minority health disparities in our state, safeguarding the separation of church and state, and, most recently, battling a pandemic. Although I was unable to see the passage of End of Life Option legislation, the discussion was important, and I hope that one day Marylanders will have this right.
As reported by Maryland Matters,
Pendergrass was a progressive firebrand when she first landed in the legislature in 1995, and while she never yielded her ideals, she became more of an inside player as her career progressed, becoming chair of Health and Government Operations in 2017 after years leading several subcommittees and joint legislative panels and workgroups. Pendergrass also had two stints as chair of the Howard County House delegation.
