Clerk of Court, Loretta Knight, swears in Don Praisner with County Executive Ike Leggett looking on.
Didn't beat WaPo on the news on Don Praisner's swearing-in. But we do have pictures, something they do not have.
Councilmember Don Praisner makes everything official with his signature in the official register.
Besides the normal list of Praisner supporters and his family, several other elected officials were in attendance: Council President Mike Knapp; Council Vice President Phil Andrews; Councilman George Leventhal; and former Delegate Adrienne Mandel.
Why the Delay? The reason for not immediately swearing in Don Praisner after he defeated Mark Fennel in the general election on May 13 was the Board of Elections (BOE) had to certify the elections and they could not do that until the final absentees (those from overseas) were counted on Friday).
The final official tally was Praisner 6,123 (66.2%), Fennell 3,092 (33.4%) with 32 (0.3%) Write-Ins. The 9,247 votes were less than the combined votes in the two party primaries of 9,577 (GOP 1,919 and Dems 7,658).
Only twenty-one days until our next special election, to replace Congressman Al Wynn with either Democratic nominee Donna Edwards or Republican nominee Peter James. Even for a political junkie, I look forward to have nothing to not having a campaign on the horizon. Hurry up June 18!!!
In Part One, we described how Montgomery County’s Planning Department relies on Critical Lane Volume (CLV) to estimate congestion at intersections across the county. Any statistical system that relies on just one measure, taken very infrequently, with little collaborating information is prone to fluky data. And that has happened at the Georgia Avenue-Forest Glen Road intersection, lovingly referred to by its neighbors as the Intersection of Death. According to the Planning Department, this intersection went from being the most congested in the county to falling below the county’s allowable congestion standard for its policy area. Why? Because its morning CLV declined by 26% between surveys taken on 8/28/03 and 6/6/07. They would like us to believe that one-quarter of our traffic congestion has magically disappeared even though there have been no major engineering changes at the intersection. Similarly, only four of the ten most-congested intersections reported in 2006 have returned to the current 2008 list. Have the six intersections that fell off the list been “fixed,” surpassed by others that have become worse or simply fallen victim to bad CLV measurements?
While the Gazette covered our objections to traffic measurement at Georgia and Forest Glen, they spent a bit more time discussing the intersection’s infamous nickname than exploring the underlying data issues. I presented the following case study of the intersection to the Planning Board two weeks ago. Just looking at this one intersection calls into question the statistical validity of how traffic is measured in this county.
*****
Testimony of Adam Pagnucco Montgomery County Planning Board, 5/15/08 Item 8: Highway Mobility Report 2008
Good morning. My name is Adam Pagnucco. I am Chairman of the Forest Estates Community Association's Crossing Georgia Committee as well as my civic association's incoming county government liaison. Today I offer my observations on the planning staff's new Critical Lane Volume (CLV) estimates for the Georgia Avenue-Forest Glen Road intersection.
In the 2006 Highway Mobility Report, the Georgia-Forest Glen intersection was ranked as the most congested in the county with an AM CLV of 2106 and a PM CLV of 1643. Those counts were taken on 8/28/03. No one in the surrounding area was surprised. What was surprising were the new CLV counts taken on 6/6/07: an AM CLV of 1553 and a PM CLV of 1377. If those counts are to be believed, then congestion has decreased at this intersection by 26% in the morning and 16% in the evening in just four years.
Now let's remember the location of Georgia at Forest Glen. It is adjacent to the Forest Glen Metro station, one block away from the Beltway interchange and three blocks away from Holy Cross Hospital, the second-biggest hospital in the state. Any car coming from the north to the Beltway must pass through it. Most vehicles heading to Holy Cross, and all of them coming from the Beltway, must pass through it. And hundreds of pedestrians cross the street every day to use Metro. No other intersection in the county, and possibly the state, has this combination of characteristics.
The principal change in recent traffic conditions around the intersection was the 2005 expansion of Holy Cross Hospital. That expansion, the biggest in the hospital's history, added 210,000 square feet of new space to the facility. The hospital reports that it had 128,591 visitors in 2003 and 157,573 visitors in 2007, a 23% increase after the expansion was finished. But now the hospital claims that it is bursting at the seams and it intends to expand again. Its plan calls for a new parking garage that would hold 500-700 more cars, which the hospital says it needs because cars are stacking up in its existing garage. Given the phenomenal increases in patient visits and the hospital's need for another expansion so soon after its last one, how can anyone believe that traffic congestion at Georgia and Forest Glen has really declined by double digits in just four years?
But there is more. In 1995, the planning staff estimated CLV at Georgia and Forest Glen at 1511 in the morning and 1530 in the afternoon. If the 2007 CLV is to be believed, then current traffic congestion is only 3% worse in the morning and is actually 10% less in the evening than it was in 1995. That's right, we are told that evening rush has actually improved by 10% over the last 12 years. Considering the dramatic redevelopment of Downtown Silver Spring and the residential construction upcounty in that period of time, that is extremely difficult to believe.
Last December, I showed you our video of conditions at the intersection. Remember the sight of cars stacked up towards Wheaton as far as the eye can see? Remember the constant illegal left turns? Remember how the pedestrians had to maneuver past cars stopped in the crosswalk? Of course you remember and there is no need to show you that chaos again. As I recall, that video provoked quite a reaction in this room. Many things were said at the time, but I do not remember anyone saying, "Hmmm… now that intersection has great traffic flow!"
Perhaps the issue here is how CLVs are used for purposes of analysis. Critical Lane Volume is after all a volume measure. As the number of cars proceeding through an intersection goes up, the CLV goes up. Now imagine a perfectly gridlocked intersection. No cars can move. What would its CLV be? Exactly zero. After all, no cars would be able to get through. Is it possible that the Georgia-Forest Glen intersection's declining CLV indicates more congestion and not less?
Members of the Planning Board, it is highly unlikely that you will find anyone in my neighborhood who believes that the biggest expansion in the history of the state's second-biggest hospital has led to less traffic congestion over the last four years. It is equally unlikely that you will find anyone who believes that afternoon traffic flow on Georgia Avenue has actually improved since the mid-1990's. I hope that you will ask your staff to explain how their data contradicts the facts I have cited today along with plain common sense. I for one would like to hear their answer.
*****
Tomorrow, we will show you a better way to measure traffic.
Imagine if we measured the American economy by estimating Gross Domestic Product once every four years. Forget about measuring other things like employment, unemployment and inflation. And forget about taking monthly or quarterly measurements.
“That’s ridiculous!” you would yell. “How would we understand the different trends in the components of the economy? How would we track the ups and downs? How would we get a complete picture of what’s going on?”
And you’d be right. But guess what: that is how we measure traffic in Montgomery County. Montgomery County’s Planning Department measures traffic by calculating Critical Lane Volume (CLV) at each of 422 intersections in the county. CLV is the maximum hourly sum of conflicting auto movements, both through traffic and turns, proceeding through an intersection. (You can see how the measurement is constructed on page 6-26 of the 2006 Edition of the Mass Highway Manual.) CLV is dependent on volume. An intersection without cars would have a CLV of zero. As traffic picks up, CLV rises. But in a perfectly gridlocked intersection, no cars would be able to move and CLV would go back down to zero.
The Planning Department measures CLVs at each intersection by sending out traffic surveyors to count cars in both the morning and evening rush. But since Planning has limited resources, the surveyors can only appear at each of the intersections every four years or so. What if the weather is bad? What if there’s an accident nearby? Too bad, the survey results are in. Whatever happened on that one day is assumed to be the case on every day for at least the next four years.
Some of these measurement days are a bit unusual. Of the 422 reported CLVs in the 2008 Highway Mobility Report, 22 were taken in December, 23 were taken in January, 30 were taken in February and 3 were taken in August. Are these representative months of the year for driving conditions? Also, 29 of the CLVs were taken in 2003, 14 were taken in 2002 and 6 were taken in 2001. Can these measurements really be compared to estimates made in 2006 and 2007?
Moreover, the Planning Department assumes that a high CLV means high congestion. In fact, a high CLV means an intersection is carrying a lot of traffic. Remember – it rises with volume. An extremely congested intersection is one where it takes a long time to get through. In that case, the CLV may actually be quite low. How about measuring average delay times or average speeds? The Planning Department reports average speeds in travel runs taken on MD-355, Georgia Avenue, US-29, Norbeck Road, Connecticut Avenue, Clopper Road and Great Seneca Highway in 2005 and 2007, but those runs were one-day spot-checks covering only a fraction of the county’s intersections. Nevertheless, these travel runs provided valuable data and we will cover them in more detail later this week.
So why should you care whether Planning measures traffic badly? For one thing, an intersection’s CLV plays a role in determining whether developers building nearby will have to pay for traffic mitigation measures. If your CLV was measured on a day in which traffic was abnormally low, it might fall below the allowable traffic standard in that policy area. That would make it easier for a developer to escape responsibility for mitigating the effects of any new traffic generated by additional construction.
In Part Two, we’ll look at how the county’s faulty traffic measures have played out at the intersection of Georgia Avenue and Forest Glen Road, also known as the Intersection of Death.
Dear readers, I am going to tell you something you already know: traffic congestion has reached catastrophic levels in Montgomery County. We measure it badly. We do not plan around it very well. But we can do better.
In a special five-part series, MPW offers an unprecedented look at our county's traffic measurement system. Today and tomorrow, we look at how we currently measure traffic and why we come up short. On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday we propose an alternative measurement system and preview its results. Our recommendations are radical. They are sure to be resisted by the county's Planning Department. But radical problems demand radical solutions. Our plight is truly dire. Let the timid flee, let the entrenched bureaucracy fossilize and let the naysayers be bound and gagged! None of them will be spared from Traffic Week on Maryland Politics Watch.
I found this exchange between Congressman Chris Van Hollen and an anonymous constituent on a recent online chatvery interesting.
Chevy Chase, Md.: I was wondering if you ever would consider running for Senator? I someday would like to run for your seat and was hoping you might be able to give me a timetable on when you might be giving it up (hopefully to move to the Senate but maybe governor)?
Rep. Chris Van Hollen: Well, right now I am focused 100 percent on my current responsibilities as the representative for Maryland's 8th District. I would consider other opportunities, if they were to arrive in the future.
David, do you have something to tell our readers? Come on, now - you were just elected to the town council. Isn't it a little bit early to move up?
Hmmm... what if it wasn't David? Could this be Chevy Chase Village resident Dana Beyer?
For those who doubt that the County Council mandated actual cuts in its recently passed budget, the Montgomery County Planning Department is providing a sobering rebuttal. In a recent press release that we are reproducing below, Planning detailed the activities it will have to scale back to accommodate a 3% cut in its budget.
The Planning Department's work is vital for shaping the future of the county. They have an excellent, professional staff that struggles to keep up with the work load generated by servicing a county of nearly a million residents. If this year's cuts are followed by more in the future, their ability to update master plans, recommend traffic mitigation measures and assess the impacts of new developments will be severely impaired. May 23, 2008
With Fewer Funds in 09, Montgomery County Planning Department Will Cut Traffic Relief Studies, Environmental Protection Analyses, Other Programs
SILVER SPRING, MD –The fiscal year 2009 budget approved yesterday by the Montgomery County Council includes $18.9 million for the Montgomery Planning Department, approximately a 3 percent cut from the previous year when factoring in mandatory spending increases.
Facing fewer funds, the Planning Board during budget discussions with the County Council identified services and programs that will be cut starting July 1.
On that list is the county’s oldest master plan – Westbard, on the western edge of the growing Bethesda area – that planners had targeted for an update. Master plans help guide development, set zoning, establish transportation improvements, lay out pedestrian routes and establish environmental protection measures. The Westbard community, surrounding River Road and Little Falls Parkway, will have to wait at least a year.
Another plan to be delayed is Battery Lane, a small neighborhood on Bethesda’s northern edge, where density, the expansion of the National Naval Medical Center and affordable housing are particularly important. The Council had asked the department to address those issues in a sector plan.
Last fall, the Council approved the 2007 Growth Policy, a biannual law that helps match transportation, schools and other public services to new development. At that time, the Council mandated aggressive new requirements for developers to mitigate traffic impacts in a number of innovative ways, including mass transit. That requires planners to even more carefully analyze every development plan for congestion relief strategies. With the funding cut, planners will not be able to fully carry out the Council’s intent, which they had hoped to achieve with additional transportation staff. Instead, for example, transportation planners might recommend that a developer fund construction of a new turning lane to alleviate traffic concerns posed by new growth rather than recommending more complex, long-term solutions like mass transit. In addition, planners will not be able to conduct much-needed analyses of countywide parking needs and traffic congestion.
Environmental protection initiatives also will be delayed or abandoned. A state-required plan to analyze the county’s long-term water supply and quality will be delayed by at least a year, while a proposal to study the county’s energy needs to recommend strategies to reduce demand and generate energy will be scrapped.
County residents used to visiting the department’s public information counter to learn about zoning, development plans and community master plans may find the counter closed. Planners expect to limit service hours given dwindling staff.
The fiscal shortfall mostly affects personnel, which makes up 90 percent of the Planning Department’s budget. The funding reduction forces the department to reduce staff. Unable to fund positions, the department will freeze vacancies resulting from retirements and resignations in hopes of shrinking the workforce and avoiding layoffs. In addition, for the first time in many years, the department will not offer paid summer internships to college students.
On Thursday morning, Gov. Martin O'Malley signed two bills passed in memory of Del. Jane Lawton. As Sen. Rich Madaleno explained:
The Jane E. Lawton Loan Program will provide eligible homeowners with access to low interest loans to improve the energy efficiency of their homes through the installation of new windows, insulation, and heating equipment. The Jane Lawton Farm-to-School Program will provide public schools with the ability to buy local produce for school meals.
Both are excellent programs on issues Jane cared about and was working hard on before her death towards the end of last year.
Seated in the photo are Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, Senate President Mike Miller, Gov. Martin O'Malley, and House Speaker Mike Busch. Standing in the photo are Sen. Jennie Forehand, Del. Heather Mizeur, Karen McManus, Del. Anne Kaiser, Sen. Rich Madaleno, Steve Lawton, Lisa Jackson, Kathleen Lawton-Trask, Stephanie Lawton, and myself.
Last Sunday, a Washington Post editorial slammed Montgomery County’s recently-passed budget as full of “sweetheart deals” for the county’s public employee unions. The week before, the Post ran an article by Ann Marimow titled “Union Influence Sways Budget Talks” during the middle of the County Council’s budget deliberations. And when the Post endorsed labor-backed Nancy Navarro during the District 4 County Council special election, they offered one caveat:
Ms. Navarro makes no bones about her alliance with labor, but we hope she will be sufficiently independent-minded to see that annual pay increases of 8 percent are simply not sustainable in the current budgetary environment.
These may not be disconnected events. In fact, they could be a product of the Washington Post’s long, contentious history with its own employees’ labor unions. Today we expose that history for our readers. The Post’s labor difficulties date back at least to the early 1970s. At the time, two craft unions – the printers (who set type for the paper) and the pressmen (who ran the printing machines) – dominated the newspaper’s physical production. They occasionally abused their power with job actions, including a wildcat (unsanctioned) strike in 1973. The Post decided to fight back by introducing a new set of labor-saving photographic composition equipment, secretly training non-union workers to operate it in an Oklahoma City “scab school.” In 1975, the Post installed their new equipment in their headquarters, causing the printers and pressmen to walk out. But the pressmen sabotaged the new machines, set fire to one of them and viciously beat a manager on their way out, thus igniting a 139-day strike. Keeping the paper running with non-union labor, the Post eventually settled with the printers and permanently replaced the pressmen, crushing the latter union once and for all. Management’s experience with the violent, Luddite pressmen has shaped its labor philosophy ever since. (You can read accounts of this infamous strike here, here and here.)
Among the concessions secured by the Post from the rest of its now-intimidated unions was a two-tier wage scale. Current employees were given raises but the entry-level scale was not changed. As a result, new employees were often paid less than veterans even though they occupied the same positions and did the same work. Management made things worse by bumping up some new workers to veteran scale while not doing the same for others, a practice perceived by the workforce as reeking of favoritism. And the new, lower-paid workers were more likely to be minorities, adding a racial element to the tension.
In 1987, the Post declared a bargaining impasse with their reporters in the Newspaper Guild after 16 months of negotiation over this issue and others. Guild members retaliated with a “byline strike” during which they refused to allow their bylines to be used in their articles. The Post ignored the tactic and unilaterally imposed its terms on the union. The Newspaper Guild launched twomore byline strikes in 2002 and was able to slightly improve the Post’s offer in that bargaining round.
The Post’s latest labor dispute involves its production workers, who are represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA). When CWA’s contract expired in May 2003, the Post insisted on withdrawing from the union’s defined benefit pension plan. After five years of stalled bargaining and no pay increases, CWA struck back with a publicity campaign. The Post has also not renewed a labor agreement covering 26 electricians that expired last December.
Do the Post’s recurring labor problems affect its coverage? Ann Marimow’s article describing union influence over the county’s budget may have appeared during the critical final week of the County Council’s deliberations, but a few of her sources tell me that it was being prepared for at least two weeks prior. Some political actors in Rockville suspect that the timing of the article’s release (which is not controlled by Ms. Marimow) was deliberately designed to shape the outcome of the County Council’s budget decisions. That suspicion may not be justified but the very fact that it is regarded as credible at all is a big problem for the Post.
The Post’s tempestuous union history calls into question its impartiality on labor reporting, especially with regards to local labor issues. I am not an impartial source on labor myself. As a result, I frequently disclose to MPW readers: “The author is the Assistant to the General President of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters.” Our readers should consider that fact when they read my reporting and opinion. Perhaps the Washington Post should issue a disclosure statement after every one of its articles on labor issues such as, “The Post is a unionized employer and has been party to numerous labor disputes over the years.” MPW readers have a right to disclosure. So too do readers of the Washington Post.
By Sharon Dooley. Ms Dooley is the legislative Director of Upcounty Action and is looking closely at the selection process here.
The new line up of planning board interviewees shows a diversity of ideas, sexes, races and planning orientations. The council has whittled the original list of 29 – down to a round dozen. One (Wendell Holloway) has already withdrawn his name, but the others wait their turn for public and -council - scrutiny. It appears that each applicant has been an active participant in the concerns of this county for many years; in this we are fortunate.
The county, in my opinion, has an opportunity to take a giant step into an innovative future if it takes the bold leap forward that some of these applicants might provide. Few are professional planners, many are citizen activists, and more than a few are lawyers. Five are women, only two are Republicans (the board make up must include one Republican and one non Republican to balance the vacancies for the commissioners by party). I think, although I am not absolutely positive - as I could not find photos of each applicant, that three are African Americans (the soon to be open seat is currently held by an African American – Alistair Bryant). There appear to be neither Hispanic nor, Asian contenders for these positions.
Fewer members of this group are tied tightly to developers, few are known as environmentalists, one has been with the Housing Opportunities Commission (HOC), and a others have worked for local organizations, such as the WSSC, the PG Parks and Planning Board and Montgomery County Planning Board and the Smart Growth concept. Another is known as a developer, but he is linked with the new urbanism concept, which is conserving of urban areas, encouraging of the streetscape model and green spaces.
I think that there are great opportunities to find commissioners that will step up to the plate here and be ready to start without a steep learning curve. That should be one of the criteria, I think. We have for too long only looked at re-cycling residents from one agency to another in this county, and I am reluctant to advocate this narrowing of our scope. In a county of almost one million residents, we should look for diversity of ideas as well as gender and race.
I encourage the council to ask the tough questions about the future as they proceed with these interviews: · What is their vision for the 21st Century in the county? · What will they sacrifice to save our forests and agricultural reserve? · How much density is tolerable; how much gridlock can we bear before insanity sets in? · When will we create a real plan for affordable housing that offers more than a few hundred options each year? (We are currently more than ten years in arrears from previous schemes.) · When will we seriously look at transit and create a realistic plan that funds it instead of more roads? · What are their ideas for keeping clean air, increasing the green buildings in the county and reducing our dependence on traditional fuel sources in buildings here? · When will the council ask more of the planners? Master plans are a way of life here – how can they be kept from becoming routine rote reviews that are retooled every twenty years or so? Hopefully, this new commission will deep six the mini-masters that were proposed as a way to circumvent the current schedules. · When will the planning board step up itself to direct staff to create traffic studies and capacity measures that adequately address these issues using national norms and standards?
For quite a while Montgomery county planners have rested on their laurels using the standards that they set in place a generation ago. Quite properly, the county received many honors for these innovative practices; but in my opinion we have stagnated, while other parts of the country have taken our initial ideas and brought them to new levels and tried pilots with citizen input, development, housing and transit that we are not even considering. The cities of Portland and Minneapolis are among the new leaders in urban development. We have an opportunity to send a strong signal by starting down new paths and opening new doors – let’s take them and move toward real innovation and increased integrity in our planning process by selecting new commissioners who have a vision for tomorrow and for the tomorrows future generations can enjoy.
One month ago, I criticized Governor O’Malley for allocating $46.3 million for school construction in Montgomery County instead of the $55 million he promised our state delegation in the special session. After that, I was willing to let it lie. I know how tight the state budget is. But the Governor will just not let this go. According to Maryland Moment’s John Wagner, the Governor went after Montgomery County school construction director Joe Lavorgna at a recent Board of Public Works meeting. The Governor claimed, correctly, that his administration had allocated $98 million for school construction in its first two years – much more than Governor Ehrlich’s $19.6 million. Wagner reports this exchange:
“Was there another county that got as much as $98 million?” O’Malley asked Joe Lavorgna, who oversees school construction in Montgomery County and attended the board’s meeting.
Lavorgna had been invited to the lectern by Franchot, a former Montgomery delegate, to explain the ramifications of receiving less funding than Montgomery officials had anticipated based on closed-door conversations during the special session. During that session, lawmakers took tough votes on tax increases and slot machines.
Lavorgna said that some local money would be used to close the shortfall in construction funding and that some projects could be pushed back.
O’Malley asked Lavorgna to give a copy of a chart showing a comparison to the Ehrlich years to his boss, Montgomery Schools Superintendent Jerry D. Weast. O’Malley said spoke recently with Weast by phone.
Lavorgna appeared taken aback by the exchange.
“I’m not here to complain about the state aid,” he said.
The Governor should have let this drop. Instead, he is putting this issue back in our faces. And he is badly misreading the political mood in this county.
1. Montgomery County residents have just suffered twin hits from state and county tax hikes. No one, not the richest nor the poorest, has escaped them. And on top of that, we are being reminded that our state aid is less than our legislators were promised.
2. The school construction fight exacerbates a long-held perception that the county does not get its fair due from the state. In last week’s apocalyptic budget sessions, County Council President Mike Knapp said from the dais that the state regarded Montgomery County as its “piggy bank.” None of his colleagues disagreed with him. More people are beginning to remark on the statistic that Montgomery gets only 15 cents of every dollar it pays in state taxes back in the form of direct state grants. The state average is 35 cents.
3. School construction is a big issue in this county. Frustration about over-crowded schools was a factor in electing several slow-growth County Council Members in 2006. Last year’s growth policy doubled development impact taxes in an effort to pay for more school capacity. And delays on school improvements have been a hot topic for many county parents over the last several months.
4. Opposition to disparate impacts on Montgomery County drove many of our state legislators to vote against the Governor’s proposed millionaire tax. Now that the Governor is resurrecting the school construction dispute, he is encouraging our delegation to act more parochially. This is unhealthy for his remaining agenda.
Politicians, of all people, are hardly surprised when other politicians break their promises. (It is always entertaining to hear one of them complain about how politicians in general can't be trusted!) The wise thing for the Governor to do would have been to let this lie and move on to other matters likely to attract our state legislators’ support. But instead he is throwing the school issue back at us and inviting discontent. Governor, for your own sake, leave it alone.
Update: The Baltimore Sun has more here. It seems the event was instigated by Comptroller Peter Franchot and that makes the Governor's reaction slightly more understandable. However, the Governor should have known better than to fall into the Comptroller's trap.
Sam Schwartz, a nationally recognized traffic engineer and planner who has been retained by the Town of Chevy Chase, will be on the 'Political Pulse' TV Show on:
-Thursday, May 22nd at 9:00 p.m.; and
-Tuesday, May 27th at 9:30 p.m.
Mr. Schwartz has analyzed the ridership and other information compiled thus far by the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) regarding the different alternatives and routes that are being studied for the Purple Line.
Other guests that have appeared in the past on 'Political Pulse' regarding the Purple Line include Mike Madden, the MTA's Project Manager for the Purple Line, Ben Ross from the Action Community for Transit (ACT) and community activist Pat Baptiste.
Political Pulse is on Channel 16 TV in Montgomery County.
You can also include the zip code, Barack Obama's parents, the Minimum Wage, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel. If you don't know and are dying to find out their connection then just click here.
This has nothing to do with our normal focus of MoCo Politics. But it is still fun to think about.
In Part One of our two-part series on income inequality, we reported that growing labor market inequality was fueling rising income disparities in Maryland. Today, we look at what is happening in Montgomery County. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment Survey produces data at the metropolitan area level, including a series combining Montgomery and Frederick Counties. But small sample sizes at this geographic level handicap some of the individual occupational observations with unacceptably large standard errors. So we turned to a rich source of locality data that is less burdened with sample size issues: the decennial census.
The Census Bureau reports detailed demographic, economic and real estate data down to the census tract level (and even further) every ten years. We identified the five wealthiest neighborhoods and the five poorest neighborhoods, defined as census tracts and using per capita income, in Montgomery County in 2000. We then compared real per capita income, measured in 2007 dollars, in each of these census tracts between 1989 and 1999. We also looked up black and Hispanic population percentages for each census tract. In Potomac, we had to merge two census tracts to obtain comparable data for 1989 and 1999 because of changes in the area’s census tract definitions in the 1990s. We report our results below.
Measured by per capita income, the five wealthiest neighborhoods in Montgomery County are Chevy Chase Village, Potomac, the section of Bethesda west of its Central Business District, the Bethesda neighborhoods on either side of Democracy Boulevard and the Martin’s Addition and Rollingwood sections of Chevy Chase. The five poorest neighborhoods are Langley Park (separated into two census tracts), the section of Rockville east of the CSX tracks, the section of Wheaton west of Veirs Mill Road reaching up to Rockville, and the Oakview neighborhood in Silver Spring (southwest of the intersection of the Beltway and New Hampshire Avenue). On average, the percentage of black and Hispanic people living in the poorest neighborhoods is ten times their percentage in the richest neighborhoods.
Between 1989 and 1999, four of the five richest neighborhoods saw double-digit gains in real per capita income. Over the same period, every one of the poorest neighborhoods saw real losses. Together, the richest neighborhoods enjoyed a 15% real per capita income gain while the poorest neighborhoods suffered a 12% drop. The county as a whole saw a 4% real per capita income increase over this decade.
The 1990s was a relatively decent decade for America’s middle and working classes. Real wages ceased their two-decade drop and rose a little bit in many occupations. If Montgomery County’s poorest neighborhoods saw a double-digit real income drop in the 1990s, what is happening to them now?
Rising income inequality is a national, indeed a global, trend. Can Maryland’s state or county policymakers truly reverse it? Measures that might help thwart inequality include:
1. Encouraging unionization. 2. Funding public employee contracts, especially for the lowest-paid workers. 3. Investing in public education, the state university system, vocational training, apprenticeship programs and ESOL instruction. 4. Supporting minimum wage, living wage and prevailing wage laws as well as other worker protections (like Montgomery County’s domestic worker bill). 5. Cracking down on unscrupulous employers who cheat workers.
Will all of the above, if implemented with gusto, really make a difference? Possibly. But one thing is certain:
Last month, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released a study on income inequality in all 50 states. We reproduce their results for Maryland below and add some new research of our own in Part One of a two-part series. The above analysis shows that income inequality has been growing steadily in Maryland since at least the 1980s, as it has been in the rest of the country. Why is that? There are many potential explanations, but as a union researcher, my natural inclination is to look at the labor market. What is happening to pay for Marylanders?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment Survey program releases occupational employment and wage data from surveys of employers at the national, state and metropolitan area levels. The program has produced methodologically consistent longitudinal data going back to 1999. While some of the data is handicapped by small sample sizes and resulting large standard errors, many occupations report wage levels within 95% confidence intervals even at the state level.
We picked a list of 15 of the highest-paying occupations and 15 of the lowest-paying occupations in Maryland. The high-paying occupations all paid at least $35 per hour in 2007 dollars and the low-paying occupations paid $14 per hour or less. All of these occupations reported standard errors associated with their wage estimates of 6% or less. Together, these occupations accounted for 28% of all employment in the state in 2006 and they accounted for most of the employment at the upper and lower ends of the wage distribution.
For each occupation, we report employment and mean hourly earnings in 1999 and 2006, deflated with the CPI-W into 2007 dollars. We then compute weighted averages (by employment) for each occupational group and compare it to the state average. Below are our results.
As you can see, the 15 high-paying occupations saw a weighted average hourly earnings gain of 19.2% in real dollars. The 15 low-paying occupations saw a gain of just 0.4%, a statistically insignificant difference from zero. Six of these occupations saw real earnings losses. On average, Maryland workers saw a gain of 7.2% in real dollars, or about 1% per year over the period.
But the employment data is also instructive. The fifteen high-paying occupations saw a combined employment drop of 11%. The fifteen low-paying occupations saw employment grow by 18%. This change in employment patterns may be just as meaningful in driving labor market inequality as the change in the wage structure.
The above data applies to only 30 occupations over just one seven-year period. It cannot be considered as comprehensive as EPI’s work or a true peer-reviewed academic study. But the behavior of the upper and lower ends of Maryland’s occupational earnings distribution strongly suggests one source of the state’s growing income inequality.
Maryland’s labor market is rewarding a smaller and smaller number of people at the top with above-average real earnings gains. At the same time, it is punishing a larger and larger number of people at the bottom with no real earnings gains at all. And there is no reason to believe that this trend will end anytime soon.
In Part Two, we will use a very different methodology to examine income inequality in Montgomery County.
