Pay and Go, a proposal to lift some of Montgomery County’s infrastructure requirements from developers, produced one of the biggest conflicts over development policy this county has ever seen. It played a big part in the 1998 County Council elections. And two District 4 special election candidates have a history with it: Delegate Ben Kramer (D-19) and former Montgomery County Civic Federation President Cary Lamari.
Kramer, the son of former County Executive Sid Kramer and a commercial property owner, had run unsuccessfully against Republican Nancy Dacek for the District 2 seat in 1994. In 1998, Kramer ran for an At-Large County Council seat. In a July 1998 debate sponsored by the Gazette and News Channel 8, Kramer said he favored the application of Pay and Go to commercial projects. According to the Gazette: Kramer said the law is needed to help the county compete in the metropolitan area and in the region for businesses.
The Gazette labeled Kramer as belonging to the “pro-growth camp” in the At-Large race along with Steve Silverman, Mike Subin and 2006 Leggett campaign manager Fran Brenneman. Kramer finished seventh of eight At-Large candidates despite having “high-profile endorsements from County Executive Douglas M. Duncan and powerful public employee unions.” The Gazette reported:“I don't have an answer [about what happened],” said a key Kramer supporter, Gino Renne, president of the Municipal and County Government Employees Organization.
Lamari was not a candidate for office – his first run for an At-Large seat would come in 2006. But he was a member of the Mid-County Advisory Board and called for a “complete reversal” of Pay and Go in December 1997. The Gazette said that Lamari was a “harsh public critic of Pay and Go since it was enacted, writing opinion pieces against it in local newspapers and leading rallies to try and have the policy overturned.”
In January 1999, Lamari quit the advisory board. The Gazette stated:In his resignation letter to Duncan and the board, Lamari said he was departing prematurely because the board’s chairman, Henry Lee, told him that board members should not publicly express any position conflicting with Duncan's or adopted county policy.
Lamari also alleged that board chairman Lee told him that County Executive Doug Duncan had “concerns” with Lamari’s expression of his views. Bruce Romer, Duncan’s Chief Administrative Officer, appeared before a November 1998 Mid-County board meeting to offer advice to board members. Lamari recalled Romer “stated that being a member of a board limits our freedom to express concerns as individuals that may be different from county or executive policy. Mr. Romer spoke of a continuum, a sliding scale of control, from volunteerism to being an employee of the county.” Romer disagreed with Lamari’s account, saying the question of when a board member crosses the line should not be addressed.
“I truly have a moral conflict with this philosophy,” Lamari stated in the letter. “To me, silencing dissenting opinions is counter to the purpose of an Advisory Board. I fundamentally believe you are a good Executive for Montgomery County, but there are times when citizens will honestly, sincerely and legitimately have opinions that conflict with yours.”
Regardless of the circumstances of Lamari’s departure from the advisory board, he was clearly an active opponent of Pay and Go and on the opposite side of the issue from Ben Kramer. Lamari went on to become President of the Montgomery County Civic Federation and opposed the development liberalizations of the 2003 Annual Growth Policy. Kramer left electoral politics before returning to win a District 19 Delegate seat in 2006.
Growth activists are famous for their long memories and District 4 has lots of them. Are they willing to overlook Kramer’s support for Pay and Go and vote for him in the special election? Will they throw all their effort behind Lamari, who criticizes Pay and Go to this day? Or will they go their separate ways? And what will the slow-growth County Council Members and Ike Leggett do?
We’ll find out by April 21.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Pay and Go and the Special Election, Part Three
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1 comments:
Goodness gracious me, to use a C3PO-ism.
Look, back in the 1990s there was this "meme" circulating around in the business/development community and elsewhere, to the effect of "we have to compete".
Sometimes "competition" effectively turns into the dreaded "race to the bottom". We all know how that one works, I suppose; industry seeks out those jurisdictions which have the least regulation of labor and emissions, as providing decent working conditions in a minimally-polluting operation is far more expensive (and less profitable) for Capital and Management than is a dangerous and polluted pesthole. Think of all of the US industries that got offshored to places where you can whip the workers and dump toxic waste right outside of the gates. Politicians who are blinded by greed (or desperation) compete with each other to have the most lax standards.
"Pay and Go" is a roundabout way of competing to have the most lax standards and thus to attract those industries which depend on laxity of standards to be able to compete with industries "burdened" by things such as Worker Compensation insurance and environmental regulations.
Forward looking and genuinely Progressive people and politicians understand that relaxing standards in order to attract industry is nothing but a fast track to environmental destruction and a wounded workforce. Think of the industrial disaster at Bhopal in India if you want to see an extreme example. And the worst part of it is, once you have accepted and welcomed a place in the "race to the bottom", your desperation will remain such that you can't pick and choose or have any sort of standards. Once you invite the devil in, he's almost impossible to dislodge, because he's turned you into someone who thinks they enjoy being a sinner. But only destruction awaits.
The really sad part about this is the corrupting influence in even the best of souls, and that corruption often takes the form of madness as sanity falls victim to rationalization. Cary Lamari shows true fortitude in the face of unctuous hypocrisy when he points out that suppressing dissent in an Advisory Board defeats the purpose and reason for existence of such a board.
Mr Lamari wrote that "[then-County Executive Doug Duncan’s Chief Administrative Officer Bruce] Romer spoke of a continuum, a sliding scale of control, from volunteerism to being an employee of the county."
Indeed, though I was not aware that any such declaration of Party Ideology of Governance had been articulated here in Montgomery, the perception has become almost widespread among astute observers who make a study of watching the County work. For myself, back at the time of the initial formation of the "Hot Spots" task force for the "Bel Pre/ Hewitt Avenue Crime Hot Spot" in Layhill/Aspen Hill, I spoke at length with fellow activists, and suggested that if we wanted to get what we wanted, rather than what the County wanted, we would have to make particular and mindful efforts to be "cooperative, and not co-opted".
Mr Lamari evidently found himself in a position where he wasn't about to be co-opted and wasn't able to be cooperative if not co-opted. I can certainly attest that when the County doesn't like the fact that the citizens want what they want, and that isn't always the official position of the County, the County officialdom will allow rather undue pressures to be applied to oust dissenting parties from participation. It's not quite rank and vicious tyranny but when you're pushed out with a velvet glove it hurts no less than if you're pushed out with a police nightstick.
After all, the real injury is to Democracy.
Or is it Democracy that takes the final beating? Because the citizens can simply refuse to vote for people that they see as rubber-stamping yes-men for the Powers That Be, and the citizens can elect people that do what the citizens want. In particular, the citizens can -- and should -- vote for the dissenters who most reflect their own concern. If everyone was happy, or thought that they had no real choices, nobody would go to the polls. But if given a real choice -- and in District 4's Special Elections of this year, they are being given lots of choices -- the voters may flock to the polls. We can only pray that following on the heels of the amazing turnout for Obama, driven by the slogan 'Change you can believe in', comparable voter activism will flood the election booths this April and May.
I suspect that a lot of District 4's voters will turn out in high volume for anyone who has a record of "fight the power, while doing the right thing".
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