The Howard County Council held its monthly meeting on September 14, 2026, with a hybrid format. The primary agenda item was the annual meeting with the Inspector General, followed by reports. Key discussions centered on the Inspector General's progress, access to records, and challenges with obtaining information from county systems. A notable procedural dispute arose over adding an item regarding Columbia Community Concepts to the agenda.
Inspector General (IG) Kelly Madigan provided an update on the office's status, including securing permanent space at 9755 Patuxent Woods Woods, hiring Deputy Inspector General Frank Lopez, and onboarding two additional investigators. The office has implemented a case management system and created an ethics training course for county employees.
The IG reported that as of September 11, 2026, the office had received 97 complaints, converted 19 into active cases, and had 13 active cases and 15 open complaints. She explained that complaints must involve Howard County government, employees, or funds and touch on fraud, waste, abuse, efficiency, accountability, or integrity to become cases.
Councilmember Young questioned the impact of an upcoming court decision in Baltimore City (Judge Pamela White) on IG access to documents. The IG outlined three potential remedies: judicial, legislative (drafted with County Solicitor Gary Cook and sponsored by Delegate Chao Wu for local and statewide bills), and a third option making the IG a co-custodian of records (disagreed upon by Mr. Cook).
Councilmember Rigby asked about staffing, noting the IG's current team (herself, deputy, two incoming investigators). The IG plans to request an administrative assistant in the next budget cycle.
Councilmember Yungmann expressed concern that legislation to improve access might not pass the General Assembly. The IG confirmed she will contact former council members when hearings are scheduled.
Councilmember Walsh emphasized the need for the IG to set a marker of 30 priority systems for access and urged the IG Advisory Board to advocate for the office's needs proactively.
The IG Advisory Board member expressed frustration over the slow pace of granting direct records access, noting it has hindered investigations and impeded the board's oversight.
Councilmember Young asked whether the IG has been denied information outright under the Maryland Public Information Act (MPIA). The IG clarified that all denials are based on mandatory denials under MPIA, not bad faith, but confirmed these denials have prevented pursuit of some cases, e.g., personnel records to verify employee qualifications.
Good morning, everyone. This is the Council September monthly meeting. The proceeding this morning is a hybrid meeting which is held in person and via WebEx teleconference. It is also available to the public via video stream online on the county council website. At this time, I'm going to do a roll call for the council members. Ms. Wigby. Here. Mr. Youngman. Here. As I understand Ms. Young is joining us shortly. And Ms. Walsh, maybe virtual. Okay. We have a quorum. We will now proceed with our agenda, and we will begin with the annual meeting with the Inspector General. Good morning. Good morning. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you for this opportunity to appear before you. As you may know, this is an annual requirement pursuant to 221203. And I'm going to take this opportunity to kind of give a status of the office and its growth, but I'm happy to answer any questions. The first thing I think is probably the most important is that the office now has permanent space at 9755 Patuxent Woods. Woohoo. Space is lovely. I'm very grateful to the administration for working to kind of make some tweaks to the design. The space has its own conference room and can accommodate up to eight personnel when fully staffed. The office has policies and procedures which have been reviewed by the Inspector General Advisory Board and have been implemented. We have a complace complaint and case management system that I personally designed and the Department of Technology and Community Services created and implemented. It's a huge help for the office in terms of documentation of number of cases and tasks that are occurring within the system. It'll certainly be very helpful as a dashboard to kind of help pull statistics for the upcoming annual report requirement. But if I was interested in how many interviews the office had conducted, I would be able to simply just kind of run our report. It's been a great um, it's a great aid, and I'm very glad we have it. As of right now, the office has hired three employees and onboarded one of those. We have a deputy inspector general, Frank Lopez, who started in June. Two investigators have signed conditional offers and have start dates later this fall. Additionally, the office is um proud to say that we have our first uh college intern from the University of Maryland. She started last week. This was something I started in Baltimore County, and I continue. Um I think it's really important to have interns. Typically, we have law students, but this year we will have um someone from the University of Maryland. Um the office also created an uming course that I'm looking forward to rolling out to all Howard County employees. I worked closely with the administration and with the Office of Human Resources to create this course and the content. Um I think the plan as of right now in speaking with Ms. Gance is for it to be rolled out preliminarily to two agencies. Um they're gonna send an email out, but hopefully by the end of October, that course will be rolled out to all Howard County employees. It talks about the office, what someone can expect, what the responsibilities are, what the office does, what the office doesn't do, and I think it's a really important education requirement for all of the staff to kind of be introduced to the concept of what an inspector general's office does. Um, in terms of systems access, which I know is an important issue.