Laurence Levitan, long-serving Maryland state senator, dies at 90

July 06, 2024

Laurence Levitan, a former Maryland state senator who during his two decades in office became one of the most influential members of the Montgomery County delegation, died March 20 at a nursing home in Bethesda, Md. He was 90.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his daughter Jennifer Levitan.

Mr. Levitan, a Democrat, was a practicing lawyer who served for four years in the Maryland House of Delegates before he was elected in 1974 to represent a newly created state Senate district that encompassed a swath of Montgomery County that included Potomac and Gaithersburg.

At the start of his second Senate term, he was selected to lead the Budget and Taxation Committee. He held the chairmanship for 16 years, making him the powerful panel’s longest-serving leader, according to Sen. Brian J. Feldman (D-Montgomery), who announced Mr. Levitan’s death in a tribute on the chamber floor.

Mr. Levitan claimed credit for directing billions of dollars to Montgomery County, which is one of the most affluent parts of the state. According to his family, he helped secure funds for the construction of a helipad at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda and investments in Strathmore, the performing arts center that is one of Montgomery County’s premier cultural venues, among other projects.

Mr. Levitan became known in Annapolis as “Larry the Cat” for his ability to emerge unscathed from challenges and controversy. “He doesn’t have nine lives,” one legislator quipped to The Washington Post in 1982, “he’s got 10.”

During a 1982 reelection battle, a primary challenger, Anthony Puca, said he was propositioned outside a grocery store by a scantily clad woman he believed to be an agent of the Levitan campaign. Puca said that he declined the woman’s invitation but that his wife was later contacted by an anonymous caller who alleged that he was engaged in extramarital affairs.

Mr. Levitan, responding to Puca’s claim, said he knew nothing of the incident and told The Post, “He must have been a man of steel if he turned down an opportunity like that. I’d like to find out who she was.”

Mr. Levitan also described the tenor of the race as “crazy … absolutely crazy.”

“I can’t take much more of it,” he said. “How can I continue?”

In 1989, a legislative ethics committee declared him “totally vindicated” after an investigation into his involvement in the approval of a grant to help the city of Annapolis purchase an oyster packing plant of which he was a part owner. The grant approved by the Budget and Taxation Committee applied only to property adjacent to the plant and not to the plant itself, the ethics committee found.

Mr. Levitan was defeated in his 1994 reelection bid by Jean W. Roesser, a Republican then serving in the House of Delegates. Roesser criticized Mr. Levitan for representing clients through his law office in their dealings with state agencies. The practice was neither illegal nor uncommon among legislators but had come under increasing scrutiny at the time.

Mr. Levitan emphasized that he declared the names of any clients he represented before state agencies as well as any fees he received for his services.

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“I don’t threaten anybody. I don’t say, ‘I’m going to cut your budget,’” Mr. Levitan told The Post.

After he left office, he was a registered lobbyist for such clients as the Baltimore Orioles, Maryland’s Cable Television Association and the American Association of Blood Banks.

“Over the years, I’ve been pretty fair and upfront with my colleagues, and that comes back to help you,” Mr. Levitan told The Post in 1995. “The feelings are all good, and that helps when you’re lobbying.”

Laurence Levitan was born in Washington on Oct. 22, 1933. His father ran a liquor store, and his mother was a homemaker who later worked at a children’s camp and day care.

After graduating from the District’s Woodrow Wilson High School, Mr. Levitan received a bachelor’s degree in commerce from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., in 1955, and a law degree from George Washington University in 1958.

He was a partner over the years in law firms, including Levitan, Ezrin, Cramer, West and Weinstein and, later, Rifkin, Livingston, Levitan and Silver.

Mr. Levitan lived for nearly half a century in Potomac before moving to Bethany Beach, Del., in 2012. He was in the process of moving back to Maryland when he became ill.

Survivors include his wife of 66 years, the former Barbara Levin of Bethesda; three daughters, Jennifer Levitan of Silver Spring, Md., Michelle Chernoff of Ocean View, Del., and Lisa Miller of Gaithersburg; two sisters; a brother; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

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