Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Ike Leggett on MoCo's Demographic "Problem"



The above clip is from the County Executive's interview on Political Pulse. This entire exchange is newsworthy, but here is a transcript of the County Executive’s remarks starting at 2:12 of the video.

But we haven’t lost large numbers of the affluent people leaving. It just simply has not grown as fast as it has grown in the past. What has happened, though, is that we’ve had a larger influx of people at the lower economic pendulum here, people who need the services I’ve just described. And when you have that, and you don’t have that mix that you want ideally, it will cause some challenges.

The problem that we have is that Montgomery County certainly should be a place where we welcome people of all diversified realms and experiences but we should not be a community where people come and the rest of the metropolitan area is not absorbing its share[?] of the demographic segment of the population. That’s not something Montgomery County should do. We should do our share, but we should not go beyond what I think is reasonable and oftentimes we have to try to balance that.

We want to provide the services but we do not want to become an attraction for people who move here simply because of the services and that we lose that sort of mix of economic groups throughout the county because otherwise we will have an impact on our taxes, impact on services and overall quality of life, I think, would suffer.
Just a question: how will people at the "lower economic pendulum" feel knowing that we apparently don't want too many of them living here?