Following is the press release from the Sierra Club.
For Immediate Release
Contacts: David Hauck (301) 270-5826/ David Sears (301) 233-6690
Sierra Club Endorses Nancy Navarro
(ROCKVILLE, MD)- April 15, 2009 – The Sierra Club of Montgomery County is pleased to endorse Nancy Navarro in the District 4 County Council special election. She is smart, articulate, and will be a strong advocate for expanding public transit, directing future growth to areas well-served by transit, and promoting energy efficiency and other actions that will help Montgomery County address climate change.
Nancy Navarro, although not an environmental expert, demonstrates a good intuitive understanding of the key environmental issues facing the county. With many Master Plans coming before the County Council in the coming months, it is important to have someone like Ms. Navarro as a strong advocate for walkable communities, sensible growth, and environmental protection.
Ms. Navarro “gets it” that “going green” needs to serve all groups in the County. That means training workers for jobs in the green economy. It also means locating more employment opportunities in eastern Montgomery County to reduce the need for long commutes from the eastern portions of the county, where there is more housing than jobs, to the west where jobs outnumber homes. She understands that a renewed emphasis upon affordable and convenient public transit is vital for all, especially in places like District 4, which is population dense but transit poor, and particularly for low income commuters and others with few transportation options.
Ms. Navarro’s statements supporting transit-oriented, walkable communities are very strong, reflecting a good understanding of what is needed to move Montgomery County toward a more viable future: “As a councilmember, I will be a strong advocate for environmentally sound land-use decisions that promote transit over road construction and transit-oriented development over sprawl. This will be the first step toward pulling people out of cars and into mass transit, while channeling residents into walkable, transit-accessible communities and away from our auto-dependent lifestyles.”
District 4 is relatively poorly served by public transit. Nancy Navarro is outspoken in her support of expanded and improved transit. “If we are going to relieve some of the congestion on our roads and reduce our carbon footprint, we need to have a forward-thinking approach toward transportation policies that gets people out of cars and into mass transit as much as possible. That’s why, as a member of the County Council, I will prioritize transit projects over new road construction.” Her actions indicate that these are not just words. In December 2008, Ms. Navarro testified before the Maryland Transit Administration in support of the light rail option for the Purple Line. She also has publicly supported the Corridor Cities Transitway between Shady Grove and Clarksburg.
Ms. Navarro’s record on local action to address climate change is strong. While President of the Board of Education, she promoted energy efficient new schools that far exceed building code requirements. County schools are now installing solar panels on any properly-sited school at the time it is re-roofed and the school system is entering into long-term contracts to sell unused renewable energy into the grid.
We believe that Ms. Navarro will draw upon her expertise in the education arena to help others understand the importance of facing our environmental challenges. For instance, she told the Sierra Club that investing in energy efficiency is very much like investing in early childhood education: what you spend today pays for itself in future benefits and savings.
Her record as leader on the Board of Education shows she will be a coalition builder on difficult issues.
The Sierra Club encourages all District 4 voters who support smart growth, expanded public transit and strong local action to reduce the effects of climate change to vote for Ms. Navarro on April 21 in the Democratic primary election.
Sierra Club of Montgomery County •
103 North Adams Street • Rockville, MD 20850
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Sierra Club Endorses Navarro
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comments:
Wow. No disrespect to Ms Navarro, but Sierra Club still does not understand that the commuting problem in Montgomery County isn't driven by District 4 commuters going to jobs elsewhere in the County.
The County's commuting problem is driven by the fact that there are many more jobs in Montgomery than there is housing.
More than half of the police force and about the same percentage of the teachers live outside of Montgomery because of two factors:
1. There is almost no affordable housing available in Montgomery that is suitable for a public servant to raise their families.
2. Although we pay premium salaries to our civil servants -- under the theory that if they can afford to live here, they will -- the premium salary differential increases the profitability of commuting very long distances because that costs far less in time and money than can be banked in the differential between housing costs in Montgomery and housing costs out-of-county.
While speaking to the Sierra Club in their individual interviews, some of their ranking staff were flatly flabbergasted when I pointed this out to them. Some expressed disbelief so openly that one nearly called me a liar to my face.
Yet I think that Sierra Club has been relying on data that doesn't distinguish between those who intentionally choose to exploit the pay/housing-costs differentials through long-haul commuting, whether the intentional aspect of it is intending to exploit the differential, or merely an intentional choice made with few alternatives.
We might pay a police captain enough to buy a $750,000 dollar home in Montgomery, but if they can buy the same home in Frederick County for $250,000 merely by adding 1.5 hours daily commute and bank the $500,000 difference, That's 7500 hours of commuting over 20 years of commuting 1.5 hours 5 days a week. Divide the $500K differential in housing costs over 20 years of commuting to pay off the mortgage, and that 1.5 hour commute pays $66.66/hour of driving... well worth it. Indeed, it would be foolish to not do so.
This sort of financial driving force appears to be outside the ability of Sierra Club to understand. Indeed, to most people it seems insane, as it proceeds inevitably from the well-touted motto that "job creation in Montgomery brings wealth to us all".
That the Sierra Club simply doesn't get this is underscored by their suggestion that one way to reduce commuting in Montgomery -- and thus reduce environmental impacts -- is their suggestion that locating more jobs in District 4 ("East Montgomery") will somehow reduce automobile commuting. It will in fact increase it.
Nancy Navarro didn't show up at last year's "meet and greet" at Verizon's immense Fairland campus, so she did not have the experience that the rest of the candidates had.
Altogether, we buttonholed about 200 people asking them if they were voters here, and the vast majority -- all about about 15 -- told us that they commuted in from outside of the County. While about a third of those commuted fairly short distances from just across the border with Prince George's County, still just over half of the people we buttonholed commuted from at least as far away as Columbia or Waldorf, and about a quarter commuted from as far away as western Baltimore or even Annapolis.
Thus, doubling the number of jobs at this facility would do no more than double the number of long-haul commuters. What Sierra Club -- and Nancy Navarro, one presumes -- can't understand is that the solution to decreasing the number of commuters isn't job creation in Montgomery, but job-creation in the regions from which people commute to Montgomery.
That being said, if you can't create more jobs in the origin communities, more and better mass-transit is essential. A cross-counties east-west light rail axis is essential, and a transit-hub in Burtonsville connecting light-rail running from Laurel to Rockville would enable a lot more commuting via long-haul and medium-haul rail connections such as MARC and even AMTRAK.
Another option will be to somehow drive down housing costs in Montgomery to the point where it is no longer extremely profitable to commute from outlying areas. Yet there is no place to build such housing other than in the Agricultural Reserve... and in District 4.
Sierra Club, presumably, would not like that. Yet -- because of their failure to understand the actual details of a phenomenon they examine only through statistics with an insufficient level of granularity -- Sierra Club has endorsed a candidate that will be able to see no option other than to concentrate even more low-rent housing in District 4, and is unlikely to comprehend the fundamental madness of adding more jobs to a community when all that will happen is that if the jobs are well-paid they will attract more long-haul commuters, and if they are not well-paid, they will employ local workers who won't be able to pay the cost of housing in the area... unless the market is saturated with low-cost housing and the market can't support low-cost housing in Montgomery unless there is a lot of it. That means Paving District 4.
Way to go, Sierra Club!
And congratulations to Ms Navarro on the endorsement, she's pretty smart and maybe she can think of a way out of the predicament that doesn't rely on principles I started articulating online as soon as I came to understand the fundamental driver of long-haul commuting in Montgomery and especially in District 4.
Post a Comment