Last Monday, March 17 wasn’t just St. Patrick’s Day. It was also ‘crossover day,’ the day by which a bill had to pass out of one chamber of the General Assembly in order to have a good chance of final passage by Sine Die, the last day of the 2025 legislative session on Monday, April 7.

It wasn’t the luck of the Irish, it was the hard work of our policy team, our bill sponsors, our partners and supporters that led to 14 bills we’ve led and supported making it across this critical legislative hurdle.

A few highlights include:

• HB268/SB981: Establishes a floor for reduced-cost care at Maryland hospitals to ensure consistency across the state for patients, bans hospitals for suing patients for debts under $500, and prevents hospitals from adversely reporting medical debt to credit reporting agencies.
• HB428/SB349: Bans home liens based on outpatient medical debt.
• HB1020/SB614: Prohibits outpatient medical debt from being adversely reported to credit reporting agencies.
• HB767: Requires landlords to provide tenants with 14 days notice of a scheduled eviction date and a 10 day window to reclaim their belongings before a landlord can dispose of them.
• SB107: Improving housing justice in Maryland by allowing one-party consent recordings of Fair Housing testing interactions.
• HB332: Protects victims of domestic wire-transfer fraud, making these transactions subject to the federal Electronic Funds Transfer Act.
• HB121/SB37: Requires electricity providers to annually report their voting activity cast at Regional Transmission Organization meetings, improving transparency in the ratemaking process.

In addition to those bills, consumer protection bills limiting adverse consumer contracts, regulating automatic renewals, and increasing the statute of limitations for prosecuting local crimes against consumers are all moving forward.

• Homeowner protections that would raise the filing fee for foreclosures and establish a statute of limitations for foreclosures are moving forward as well. We are proud of our work on these bills.
• Energy legislation we supported to ensure utility companies trade association fees were not paid by consumers may be rolled into a larger, omnibus energy package.

We are still working to defeat or amend some bad legislation which crossed over, including a workgroup on predatory towing practices, a bill that creates a loophole which might allow zombie mortgages to flourish in Maryland, and a bill to allow high-cost, fintech payday loans to operate in Maryland.

Your emails and calls have pushed many of these bills across this first threshold. We truly could not be successful without you! Please support our work!