The Maryland Senate Finance Committee has a new chair-in-waiting, and he comes out of West Baltimore. State Sen. Antonio Hayes announced Thursday that he will serve as the committee’s next chair, putting the District 40 Democrat in charge of the Senate panel that writes the rules for Maryland’s banks, insurers, employers, utilities and legal cannabis industry when the 2027 legislative session opens on January 13.
Senate committee chairs are appointed by the Senate President, and Bill Ferguson — who holds that authority — was the advertised special guest at Hayes’s Baltimore fundraiser the same evening, where the appointment was confirmed publicly before Hayes posted his own statement. Hayes succeeds Sen. Pamela Beidle of Anne Arundel County, who has chaired Finance since 2023 and is retiring at term’s end after withdrawing from her re-election race at the February filing deadline. There is no learning curve: Hayes has sat on Finance since 2019 and has been its vice chair since 2025.
“I am deeply honored to serve as the next Chair of the Maryland Senate Finance Committee, and I do not take lightly the responsibility of making decisions that affect families across our state,” Hayes wrote on Facebook Thursday evening. “Thank you to everyone who has believed in me and my leadership.”
A West Baltimore Path to the Gavel
Hayes was born in Baltimore and built his career in the city’s public life before he ever held office — legislative aide to Del. Salima Siler Marriott, director of legislative affairs for the City Council President, assistant deputy mayor, and a staffer at the city Department of Social Services. Voters in the 40th District, which runs through West and Northwest Baltimore, sent him to the House of Delegates in 2015 and to the Senate in 2019. He is now in his second Senate term, has served as Majority Whip, and has already chaired the Executive Nominations Committee. The Finance gavel is the biggest of his career.
A Record Built on Household Costs
Hayes’s committee work has run through working families’ wallets. In the 2026 session he carried the Maryland Automobile Insurance Fund affordability bill — an effort to cut car insurance costs in a city where premiums are a barrier to getting to work — and it was signed into law. He has sponsored legislation to open alcoholic beverage licensing to food retailers — a food-access fight in underserved neighborhoods — and has backed reinvestment along West North Avenue through its state development authority.
Why This Gavel Matters for Black Business
Finance is not the money committee — spending and taxes run through Budget and Taxation. Finance decides something just as consequential: how private business is allowed to operate in Maryland. By the General Assembly’s own description, the committee’s jurisdiction covers financial institutions, credit regulation and consumer financing, commercial law and consumer protection, economic development, insurance, labor and employment, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, utility regulation, transportation and health care. Maryland’s cannabis laws move through Finance too, including the social equity licensing framework and the Community Reinvestment and Repair Fund, which steers cannabis tax dollars into the communities hit hardest by prohibition.
That means the issues Black business owners organize around — who gets a loan and on what terms, what insurance costs, what employers must pay, who gets a cannabis license and where the reinvestment money lands — are decided in this room, on this committee’s calendar. It is the same ground Maryland’s minority business community has worked for years, the work of advocates like Wayne Frazier. The chair decides which bills get hearings and which get votes — and that chair now belongs to a senator from the 40th District.
What to Watch
The 2027 session convenes January 13 — the first of a new four-year term — and Hayes heads into the November 3 general election as the Democratic nominee in the deep-blue 40th District, facing only a minor-party challenger. Watch for his vice chair pick, the next round of cannabis social equity and reinvestment bills, and whether insurance affordability stays atop his agenda. Maryland business owners who need a hearing in Annapolis now know whose door to knock on.
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