[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 1 (Wednesday, January 3, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12-S13]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

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                      TRIBUTE TO JANET L. HOFFMAN

 Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, I rise to bring to the Senate's 
attention the passing of a great and unique woman--Janet L. Hoffman. 
She was described by the Baltimore Sun as ``a lobbyist whose political 
and financial wizardry helped Baltimore shoulder the burden of urban 
poverty.''
  I first became acquainted with Janet Hoffman in 1971 as a member of 
the Baltimore City Council. I came into politics as a fiery protestor 
and had to learn how to turn my protest placards into legislation. 
Janet Hoffman really taught me, guided me and mentored me in the 
strategy of governance and the wiles of government finance. I learned 
how to operationalize my good intentions and learned how to budget. She 
was patient, persistent and a strong advocate for women's rights. She 
was so proud of seeing me come to the Congress, the Senate and a member 
of the Appropriations Committee.
  She'd be so proud in having her biography included in the 
Congressional Record on the day that four new women are sworn into the 
United States Senate. She would have cheered--and would have wanted to 
make sure they understood government finance.
  Mr. President, the Baltimore Sun described Janet Hoffman best. I ask 
that the Sun's article on her life and legacy be included in the 
Record.

                [From the Baltimore Sun, Dec. 31, 2000]

            Janet L. Hoffman Dies; Lobbyist, Adviser to City


             finance expert steered state aid to Baltimore

                          (By C. Fraser Smith)

       Janet L. Hoffman, a lobbyist whose political and financial 
     wizardry helped Baltimore shoulder the burden of urban 
     poverty, died yesterday of kidney failure at Oak Crest Health 
     Care Center in Parkville. She was 81 and had lived in Mount 
     Washington for many years.
       A strategist as well as a master of government finance, 
     Mrs. Hoffman used Baltimore's fading power with pre-eminent 
     efficiency, building coalitions and making friends in the 
     highest places.
       ``She was the best thing the city had in Annapolis,'' said 
     state comptroller and longtime Baltimore mayor William Donald 
     Schaefer. ``Everybody trusted her. She never misled anybody. 
     Her credibility was 100 percent in Annapolis. She was 
     brilliant.''
       A woman who dressed simply, she walked the corridors of the 
     State House and City Hall in one of the many berets she wore.
       ``She had a passion for the city that drove her,'' said 
     Marvin Mandel, Maryland's governor in the 1970s. ``Everybody 
     respected her. She was aggressive, too. But in the end, she 
     was one of the most knowledgeable persons in Annapolis.''
       ``She was the most effective governmental lobbyist in the 
     history of our state,'' said U.S. Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin. 
     ``I owe my sensitivity toward fiscal matters to her.''
       As Baltimore's first and longest-serving lobbyist in 
     Annapolis, she invented a position soon copied by the state's 
     largest subdivisions as they competed with her for state aid. 
     She continued in the job for 33 years, retiring in 1986 but 
     returning as a consultant periodically until 1996, when she 
     left the State House for good.
       Then 77, she had served in city or state government for 
     almost a half-century. On her last day of city service, the 
     House of Delegates passed a resolution commemorating her 
     work.
       She was known in her prime as Maryland's 48th senator, an 
     institutional honor that gave her a ``kick.'' In truth, she 
     had more real power than many of the 47 men and women who 
     earned the title at the polls, and she served far longer than 
     any of them.
       In marathon lobbying sessions of 1976, she won funding for 
     the Baltimore subway and the downtown Convention Center from 
     the General Assembly. She was so exhausted she collapsed and 
     was driven home by a state trooper.
       ``I remember going up to the gallery and speaking with 
     Donald Schaefer and Janet,'' Cardin said. ``It was a very 
     dramatic moment, an incredible night.''
       Earlier in the decade, working with city budget official 
     Charles Benton, she recommended selling what is now BWI 
     Airport to the state and using the proceeds to build the 
     National Aquarium.
       The trust of those she worked with combined with a keen 
     sense of history to bring her city an annual bonanza of 
     financial aid, including a 1960s realignment of 
     responsibility for welfare that freed the city of strains 
     that might have precluded the downtown renaissance of the 
     1980s. She also created financial formulas to pay for 
     portions of city fire, police, highway and educational 
     expenses.
       Eight governors were elected during her service: William 
     Preston Lane Jr., Theodore R. McKeldin, J. Millard Tawes, 
     Spiro T. Agnew, Marvin Mandel, Harry R. Hughes, William 
     Donald Schaefer and Parris N. Glendening.
       ``On the outside she was rough and tough,'' said former 
     Speaker of the House R. Clayton Mitchell Jr., a Kent County 
     Democrat.
       ``But when you got to know her, she was sweet and lovable. 
     You could rely on her figures. She had a talent and gift for 
     numbers.''
       Not infrequently, she helped them solve fiscal and 
     political problems. She did it with great mental dexterity, 
     bill-by-bill memory of legislative history and a keen sense 
     of what motivates people. Candid and direct to the end, she 
     said she was leaving finally to make way for new minds.
       ``A more exploring, fresher approach is needed,'' she said. 
     ``It's hard at my stage to pick up a bill and really read it 
     because I think I know what's in it.''
       Her first government job came in 1949 when she became the 
     first staff member in the state's newly created Fiscal 
     Research Bureau, which analyzed legislation for the House and 
     Senate. Thirteen years later, she left to do the same work 
     for Baltimore.
       City legislators and mayors, not governors, were her 
     bosses. A master of the complicated formulas used to 
     redistribute the state's revenue, Mrs. Hoffman made the 
     arithmetic work year after year for Baltimore with categories 
     of aid she sometimes invented--sometimes on the thinnest 
     pretext. Then she sold them to the presiding officers and 
     governors who put them in play.
       The state treasury's growing importance to a struggling 
     city losing population and power was little appreciated until 
     she took over. She learned that Baltimore department heads 
     were coming to Annapolis to lobby against money bills that 
     would have helped the city. Too much paperwork, they told 
     her. That view changed.
       She quickly became a presence in the assembly. Unique among 
     public or private lobbyists, she was given access to the 
     Senate lounge and floor by then-Senate President Steny H. 
     Hoyer, now a member of Congress. Her singular status was owed 
     to the trust built over years of service, according to Mr. 
     Schaefer.
       ``I think she's the smartest woman I ever met in the area 
     of finance,'' the former mayor and governor said in 1996. 
     ``People knew when she told them something, it was right.'' 
     Asked if he gave her authority to act in his absence, Mr. 
     Schaefer said he gave her authority to act in his presence.
       In the 1960s, with the help of a rural and conservative 
     Senate president, the late William S. James, Mrs. Hoffman 
     managed a restructuring of responsibilities between the state 
     and local governments that shifted the financing of welfare 
     from the subdivisions to the state.
       Then, like many major U.S. cities, Baltimore was paying a 
     quarter to a third of its welfare costs, a burden that was 
     growing and would have exhausted city resources if the state 
     had not stepped in. Mrs. Hoffman proposed limiting the 
     welfare payments of any state subdivision to a fixed 
     percentage of revenue from its tax rate.
       ``It meant that while the city's welfare caseload was 
     growing and its tax-paying middle class was leaving, there 
     was a limit on what the city had to spend,'' said William S. 
     Ratchford II, director of the state Department of Fiscal 
     Services. ``If she hadn't worked that out, chances are the 
     city would not have had the wherewithal to do what it did 
     later.''
       Mrs. Hoffman persuaded legislators that what helped 
     Baltimore was good for the state. The state's major 
     employment center was protected, and other, equally poor, 
     jurisdictions profited from the formulas she devised.
       Adherents and adversaries alike were at times awed by her 
     forward-looking approach.
       ``I had the best teacher in the world,'' said Blair Lee IV, 
     son of the former acting governor, Blair Lee III, and a 
     former lobbyist for Montgomery County.
       ``We'd sit around late at night studying her city bills,'' 
     he said. ``Why would she be trying to change some nondescript 
     little bit of language or numbers in a bill? We looked and 
     looked and crunched and crunched, and finally we'd see that 
     Janet was dealing with something she saw coming 10 years down 
     the road.''
       One year she pushed a bill that guaranteed a certain level 
     of aid that seemed lower than the sums Baltimore won year 
     after year. Why? Because she knew the formula on which that 
     aid was based would not work in the city's favor forever.
       ``She could write a communicated budget formula and talk to 
     the least sophisticated legislator,'' Lee said. ``She was a 
     rare creature. She walked both sides of the track.''
       One year she helped then-Senator Hoyer corral the votes he 
     needed to become senate

[[Page S13]]

     president. Once again, she had picked the right horse.
       The next summer, she sat on a committee that worked out 
     school funding formulas with then-Lieutenant Governor Lee. It 
     was her payback--and Baltimore's--from Senate President 
     Hoyer.
       She left in 1996 with concerns about the conduct of public 
     business:
       ``People are unwilling to explain a broader point of view 
     than one that is readily understood by their local press or 
     their constituents,'' she said. ``The legislature needs a way 
     to see problems resolved structurally without having to have 
     a divisive fight each time.''
       The former Janet Leland was born on the Upper West Side of 
     New York City into a family of lawyers. She was a graduate of 
     New York University. In 1941 she received a master's degree 
     in public administration from NYU.
       Her home life was quiet. She kept a garden filled with 
     spring flowers and roses. She also listened to classical 
     music.
       In 1944 she married Morton Hoffman, an urban and economic 
     consultant, who died in July.
       Funeral services will be held at 2 p.m. Tuesday at Sol 
     Levinson & Brothers, 8900 Reisterstown Road.
       She is survived by two daughters, Constance Hoffman Baker 
     of Baltimore and Ellen L. Hoffman of Berkeley, Calif., and 
     four grandchildren.

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