Charges of wiretapping, ethical lapses embroil a changing Harford County

Their agenda items dispensed with, the Harford County Council ends its regular meetings with each member raising whatever is on their mind. At Tuesday’s meeting, this included giving a shoutout to high-achieving students, noting their appearances at a bull roast and sharing a note from a Cub Scout after his pack learned what council members do (“Thank you for making the world a better place”).

But when it was Councilman Aaron Penman’s turn to speak, he launched into darker terrain. Waving legal documents as other members averted their eyes, he accused the county executive of “abuse of power and misconduct in office,” seeking “revenge” against him and engaging in “unethical and bizarre behavior.”

“I can’t listen to it anymore,” Katie Gonano muttered to another resident attending the meeting as they left council chambers in Bel Air.

Harford County government has erupted in open discord. It comes despite the county remaining, as it has for decades, run largely by a single party, the Republicans. There are dueling ethics complaints, wiretapping claims that led to a state prosecutor’s investigation and a veritable war of words fought through news releases, op-eds and public statements.

Much of the turmoil revolves around Penman, who is also a Harford County Sheriff’s Office deputy, and the county executive, Bob Cassilly, of a politically entrenched Harford family, both Republicans, drawing in other officials to one side or the other. The infighting comes at a time when many residents have become highly engaged in local government, particularly around the issue of development, growth and the future of their once largely rural county.

The feuding is a distraction for those like Gonano, 40, a Fallston resident who said county officials should be more focused on how development is stressing Harford’s infrastructure, crowding its roads, schools and hospitals.

“He’s dismissing those concerns and going off on a tangent about the county executive,” she said of Penman, her District B council representative. “That just rubs me the wrong way.

“I love Harford County,” said Gonano, whose family moved there when she was 11. “I’m not opposed to development. I just want it done responsibly and keeping children, safety and community No. 1.”

Open discord

It has been an eventful couple of years. The 2022 elections brought Cassilly and five new council members into office (one returned to the body after eight years out of office). Almost immediately, things became contentious: Cassilly refused to inaugurate Democrat Jacob Bennett, a public school teacher, as the District F representative, saying the county charter bans state and county employees from serving on the seven-member council.

The Maryland Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the school system is an independent — not a state or county — entity, allowing Bennett to take his seat on the council. Meanwhile, Penman, who had resigned from the sheriff’s office before his election, returned to duty after the court ruling favorable to Bennett.

Penman and Cassilly have been sparring over multiple issues, including money for a sheriff’s office training center, and the councilman has accused the executive of misappropriating funds, a conflict of interest over a land use plan for property owned by his family and, most consequentially, the wiretapping under investigation by the state prosecutor.

Penman said the Cassilly administration monitored his emails with five people, including communications he had with Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler and former Republican County Executive Barry Glassman, as well as his phone records.

Cassilly fired back, saying in essence he had every right to do that. He issued a news release, citing a county policy that he said makes “abundantly clear that no user of electronic devices issued by the County has any expectation of privacy … and that the County has the right at any time to inspect all electronically stored information on such technology devices.”

The matter was forwarded to the state prosecutor’s office which, among other things, investigates misconduct in public office. The office doesn’t confirm or deny investigations, but County Attorney Jefferson Blomquist wrote in a recent letter that the state prosecutor “is investigating Councilmember Penman’s allegations with the assistance of a Harford County Grand Jury.”

The letter is part of a volley of documents that have been fired off in the dispute. The barrage comes from Penman and his boss, Gahler, on one side, and from Cassilly and administration members, including Blomquist, on the other. Gahler filed a Maryland Public Information Act request that was denied by the county, and his complaint is now pending before the PIA Compliance Board of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office.

‘Above that craziness’

The squabbling has some former county officials shaking their heads.

“I’ve been trying to stay above that craziness,” Glassman said.

He declined to say much more, except to note with a laugh: “The current administration has made me much more popular in retirement than when I was in office.”

Glassman, who was known for moderation during a decades-long political career, now works as a lobbyist. He was defeated in his bid for state comptroller in 2022, a race in which he appeared on the ballot below the Donald Trump-endorsed GOP gubernatorial nominee, Dan Cox.

From Annapolis, where he is now a state delegate, former County Councilman Andre Johnson said what’s happening in Harford seems in line with the splintering in national Republican politics between hardliners and more moderate members.

“It’s vastly different now,” said Johnson, the lone Democrat on the council during his term, which ended in 2022. “We got along. As far as the collegiality aspect, it was fairly good. But these guys, I haven’t seen anything like it.

“I don’t know what they did behind closed doors,” he said of Republicans in county government during his tenure there, “but when it came to being out in public, it was in one voice.”

Sheriff vs. executive

Johnson and others say the current problems also may stem from a clash of personalities, a power struggle or some of both.

Gahler, a former state trooper who became sheriff in 2014, and Cassilly, a former county councilman and state senator, were at one point close enough allies that the sheriff is featured in photos and videos on the county executive’s personal website.

“Senator Cassilly is the statewide leader in the fight to support our deputies and police officers,” Gahler is quoted as saying.

Now, Gahler has been defending his deputy against Cassily, who has filed a complaint against Penman with Harford County Ethics Board over his dual role as a council member and sergeant in the sheriff’s office.

“He should be standing up and recusing himself on anything to do with the sheriff’s office,” Cassilly said in an interview. “He’s sitting there as a vocal advocate — that’s entirely inappropriate.”

Gahler disputed that, saying, “when Councilman Penman is in his councilman role, it has nothing at all to do with the sheriff’s office.”

The sheriff calls Cassilly’s efforts to unseat Penman “all political,” and praises his deputy for challenging the county executive, despite all three of them being Republicans.

“I don’t believe party affiliation excuses you from anything,” Gahler said. “People need to be held accountable.”

Dueling complaints

In one of the latest thrusts, Penman filed a complaint last month to the state prosecutor’s office over what he said was the county executive trying to “streamline development for his personal gain.”

Penman alleges Cassilly rushed through and approved a plat, or land use plan, for property owned by his brother, Joseph Cassilly. The latter is a retired state’s attorney in Harford who was disbarred in 2021 for withholding evidence; Joseph Cassilly maintains that he did nothing wrong. (In yet another controversy, the county executive last month nominated his brother to the Harford ethics board, but as concerns were being raised, Joseph Cassilly withdrew himself from consideration.)

County Executive Cassilly called the plat issue a “false” attack, saying that because it involved his brother, it went through the county director of administration rather than him.

The spat was only the latest in a yearlong series of conflicts between the two.

“That’s how he plays politics,” Cassilly said in an interview.

“This is just another attempt to remove law enforcement representation from the council,” Penman said.

Political fighting in Harford, of course, didn’t begin with the current group of officeholders.

During the coronavirus pandemic, for example, the county had pockets of resistance to mask and vaccine mandates — with opponents frequently railing against them during the public comment period at council meetings — and higher infection rates than the statewide average. The council voted to dismiss the county health officer, a proponent of measures to help contain the spread of the virus, in October 2021. Two months later, with COVID cases spiking, county hospitals declared a disaster, allowing them to reduce nonurgent surgeries and shift staffing and patients.

‘Unusual alliances’

Henry S. “Sandy” Gibbons has been watching the current dynamic unfold from the outside as chair of the county’s Democratic Central Committee.

“A lot of us are rolling our eyes and waiting for it to be over,” he said.

Perhaps the turbulence will help his party make further inroads in a county that has, according to the state Board of Elections, about 80,000 registered Republican voters and more than 65,000 Democratic ones.

“If people are complaining about the direction the county is going, they need to look at who has been running the government,” said Gibbons, noting the decades since Harford had Democrats in the highest county offices. “If you are tired of how things are operating, maybe it’s time to give the other party a chance.”

Still, he said, the ongoing issue of development in Harford has made some residents more focused on which officials support their cause, rather than which party the officeholders belong to.

“We see some unusual alliances,” Gibbons said. “Citizens can still come together on an issue. They’ve risen up to contest a development being dropped on their county.”

Indeed, the group 3P Protect Perryman Peninsula, which has fought a proposed giant distribution center, endorsed both the Democrat Bennett and the Republican Cassilly in the last election. Some members switched their party affiliation to vote for Cassilly in the GOP primary, given that the Republican nominee typically goes on to win the the general election.

Recognizable in their blue and yellow baseball hats, 3P members were among dozens who came to a hearing that preceded Tuesday’s council meeting on changes to the county’s agricultural land preservation program. The plan drew unanimous praise from the council members and those who spoke during the comment period, something of a “Kumbaya” moment in an otherwise fractious time in Harford.

But as Leigh Maddox, a 3P founder, said wryly as she left the hearing, “Come back next week.”