Yes, yes, we know some of you are asking us whether we plan on re-naming this blog “Saqib Politics Watch.” But this is not just another Facebook-related post. Read on.
On July 21, the Montgomery County Young Democrats sent out the following mass email which included a voter registration message from Delegate Saqib Ali (D-39):
HELP DELEGATE SAQIB ALI REGISTER DEMOCRATS
Dear Young Dems,
I’m looking for some volunteers who are willing to do voter registration of specifically targetted people who live in Gaithersburg/Germantown/Montgomery Village/North Potomac area.
The Prerequistes for the tasks are:
Volunteers have access to the internet.
Volunteers have cellphone/text message access.
Volunteers can make personal trips to Gaithersburg/Germantown area homes if neccessary.
Volunteers be willing to talk on the phone to strangers to persuade them to register to vote for Dems. Whatever it takes! :)
I have identified about 500-800 people in my district who are likely sympathetic, but are not registered as Dems. Unless they are registered Democrats, they cannot of course vote in the Democratic Primary Election in September 2010. Many of them are my personal friends/acquaintance. Many of these people are new Americans or racial/ethnic/religious minorities.
So we sometimes have to “hunt down” these people and get them to fill the form. It might require multiple phone calls/emails and even personal home visits!! I’m very happy to pay the registrar a whopping $5 for every person on this list that can be flipped to Democrat. We can make it a competitive thing :)
All the personal info of these “targets” is stored in an online Google spreadsheet that is routinely updated by numerous other volunteers concurrently from their own homes in their own free time. So we don’t actually meet together at any one place or time. I’m happy to share this spreadsheet out to interested volunteers. I also have set up a Google Group (ie: Email list where all the volunteers share their info/activity).
- Saqib
CONTACT SAQIB AT: DELEGATE@SAQIBALI.ORG TO VOLUNTEER
Here’s the problem: § 3-205 of Maryland election law states that voter registration volunteers cannot “receive any form of compensation, including bonuses, that is based on the number of voter registration applications collected.”
Delegate Ali must have learned of this prohibition. He sent out a second message in a Montgomery County Young Democrats email on July 28 stating:
HELP DELEGATE SAQIB ALI REGISTER DEMOCRATS
Dear Young Dems,
I’m looking for some volunteers who are willing to do voter registration of specifically targetted people who live in Gaithersburg/Germantown/Montgomery Village/North Potomac area.
The Prerequistes for the tasks are:
Volunteers have access to the internet.
Volunteers have cellphone/text message access
Volunteers can make personal trips to Gaithersburg/Germantown area homes if neccessary.
Volunteers be willing to talk on the phone to strangers to persuade them to register to vote for Dems. Whatever it takes! :)
I have identified about 500-800 people in my district who are likely sympathetic, but are not registered as Dems. Unless they are registered Democrats, they cannot of course vote in the Democratic Primary Election in September 2010. Many of them are my personal friends/acquaintance. Many of these people are new Americans or racial/ethnic/religious minorities.
So we sometimes have to “hunt down” these people and get them to fill the form. It might require multiple phone calls/emails and even personal home visits!!
All the personal info of these “targets” is stored in an online Google spreadsheet that is routinely updated by numerous other volunteers concurrently from their own homes in their own free time. So we don’t actually meet together at any one place or time. I’m happy to share this spreadsheet out to interested volunteers. I also have set up a Google Group (ie: Email list where all the volunteers share their info/activity).
- Saqib
CONTACT SAQIB AT: DELEGATE@SAQIBALI.ORG TO VOLUNTEER
PLEASE NOTE: NO COMPENSATION IS BEING OFFERED FOR PARTICIPATING IN THIS PROJECT... JUST THE SATISFACTION OF BRINGING MORE AMERICAN CITIZENS INTO THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS
None of the above establishes that Delegate Ali actually paid anyone for voter registrations, but the State Board of Elections may want to find out. As for Delegate Ali himself, well... his enemies are watching.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Is Saqib Ali Buying New Democrats?
Thursday, July 30, 2009
MoCo and Frederick State Legislators Support Light Rail CCT, I-270 Toll Lanes
Eleven state legislators from Montgomery County and two state legislators from Frederick County signed a joint letter yesterday calling for light rail on the CCT and toll lanes on I-270. All of the legislators are Democrats except Frederick Senator Alex Mooney (R-3), who is a Republican, and Frederick Delegate Richard Weldon (I-3B), who is a former Republican and current Independent.
July 29, 2009
Mr. Russell Anderson, Project Manager
Maryland State Highway Administration
Project Management Division
707 North Calvert Street, Mail Stop C-301
Baltimore, MD 21202
Dear Mr. Anderson:
We are writing to express our fervent support for the Corridor Cities Transitway (CCT), which is our number one transportation priority, to stay on track for construction in 2012.
This project is shovel-ready with the right-of-way largely set aside. There is little or no opposition in the community with strong local business and government support. Compared to other mass transit projects, the overall costs are very modest. We urge creativity in financing, including a public/private partnership and a combination of federal, state, and local aid.
By providing a link between many communities - Clarksburg, Germantown, Gaithersburg, and Rockville - to the Shady Grove Metro Station, this project will benefit commuters in some of the fastest growing communities in both Montgomery and Frederick Counties and alleviate traffic congestion in the I-270 corridor. In addition, the CCT will play a vital role in the continued economic development of Montgomery and Frederick Counties and the state.
We believe that light rail should be the mode choice for the portion of the route from Shady Grove to Clarksburg. Economic development is more likely near light rail transit, and light rail promotes a more high quality transit-oriented development in burgeoning town centers. Studies have shown that more people choose to get out of their cars for light rail, as opposed to bus-rapid-transit (BRT). Light rail would have lower operational costs than BRT because, as demand increases, more rail cars can be added at no additional personnel cost. However, if BRT is the necessary choice due to Federal Transit Administration cost effectiveness requirements, then we urge that such BRT truly be a “rail on wheels” system, without compromising the advertised service level, speed, and quality.
Additionally, we support two Express Toll Lanes (ETLs), as a component of this project, to help reduce congestion on I-270. We also think that the Montgomery County Planning Board's recommendation of reversible lanes is worth further exploration, as it could alleviate traffic congestion while mitigating negative environmental impacts. These ETLs should be combined with general-purpose lanes without tolls, so that these new transportation facilities will be financed in large part by private investments.
We thank you in advance for your attention to these important matters.
Sincerely,
Rob Garagiola
State Senator – District 15
Saqib Ali
Delegate – District 39
Charles E. Barkley
Delegate – District 39
Kumar P. Barve
Delegate – District 17
Kathleen Dumais
Delegate – District 15
Brian J. Feldman
Delegate – District 15
Jennie M. Forehand
Senator – District 17
James W. Gilchrist
Delegate – District 17
Nancy J. King
Senator – District 39
Alexander X. Mooney
Senator – District 3
Kirill Reznik
Delegate – District 39
Craig L. Rice
Delegate – District 15
Richard B. Weldon Jr.
Delegate – District 3B
cc: The Honorable Martin J. O’Malley, Governor
The Honorable Beverly Swaim-Staley, Maryland Department of Transportation, Acting Secretary
Cary Lamari on the Passing of Stuart Rochester
By Cary Lamari.
My condolences go out to the family and friends of Stuart Rochester.
Stuart Rochester died Wednesday, July 29. The funeral service will be tomorrow, Friday, July 31 at 11 am at Tikvat Israel Congregation, 2200 Baltimore Road, in Rockville. Interment at Judean Memorial Gardens in Olney.
Stuart Rochester was a colleague and a fierce and extremely intelligent advocate for the people of Montgomery County but even more so for the residents of Burtonsville and the East County.
I have known Stuart for many years. My first interaction with Stuart was dealing with the ICC. It’s no big secret Stuart vehemently opposed the Northern Alignment for the ICC. Stuart felt the huge trucks that traverse 198 each day destroyed the community of Burtonsville and Spencerville and Stuart wasn’t going to let that simply pass. Stuart also argued that there was inequity between the eastern part of Montgomery County and the Western side (Potomac). He felt we were shortchanged with respect to money for education and infrastructure. He felt we received the challenges but did not get the resources to address those challenges. As only one example the schools on the Western Side were always in top shape while we had to wait for any improvements with numerous portables. Paint Branch High school was a prime example.
We have lost so many valuable community leaders recently that Montgomery County will most certainly suffer. These people are the core to the making of good government. Stuart was the most articulate civic activist I know. During my term as President of the Civic Federation, Stuart was kind enough to be our representative for the Print Media. I remember Stuart enjoyed writing op-editorials for the Gazette and really loved taking on the Gazette Editor Chuck Lyons. I remember feeling they were two sides to the same coin but Stuart was always the one more capable and equipped with his sharp wit.
I worked with Stuart on many issues facing Montgomery County and he supported my campaign this past special election. I will miss Stuart’s support and passive guidance. Stuart never was one to be in front of the camera, he always felt easier behind the scenes making sure the “i” was dotted and the “t’s” were crossed. On the last Montgomery County Civic Federation meeting he reported on the Zoning rewriting committee and most especially the new commercial mixed-use zone. He cautioned us that this zone could, if not monitored, be deleterious to Montgomery County. He was on the exemption committee and reminded all of us that the devil is in the detail. Stuart’s guidance was never misplaced with me.
Stuart will be missed and my prayers are with his wife Shelly, his kids and his grandkids. I hope they know how much we in Montgomery County respected and appreciated Stuart.
Cary Lamari
Sectarian Conflict, Maryland Style
We like arguing with Baltimore Sun transportation reporter Michael Dresser. He’s an honest, vigorous advocate for his city and his region. Posing as his alter-ego, “Baltimore Guy,” Dresser wrote a column blasting the I-270 widening project. After we pointed out all the things Baltimore received from the state, Dresser offered this response: Adam:
We love honesty and Dresser gave us a big dose of it. This is far better than listening to another awful “we’re all in it together” speech!
I showed Baltimore Guy your article, and he wasn't at all pleased. I think you hurt his feelings. -- Mike Dresser
“What is this Montgomery tofu-head trying to put over on me, anyway? Has all that brie rotted his brain? Does he think Baltimore wants to keep feeding on crumbs from Montgomery’s table? Shove that! We want more of the feast. We can take all the growth that comes our way without whining about traffic.
“And if we don’t get high-tech jobs in Baltimore, we want them a lot closer than freaking Montgomery County. My kid, who just graduated from UM with a computer sciences degree, doesn't want to commute to Gaithersburg even with the ICC because the tolls will cost an arm and a leg. He’d rather get a job somewhere on Interstate 95 where people won’t look down on him because he drinks Natty Boh instead of Cos-mo-pol-i-tans.
“And why does this guy keep going on about Baltimore city? Doesn’t he realize he’s up against Baltimore County and Howard County and Harford and Anne Arundel too? None of us get squat from new jobs along I-270. We want them on the eastern end of their precious ICC. And it just so happens we have pals in Prince George’s and Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore who feel the same way.
“So why don’t we all have a meeting in Annapolis and let those Montgomery County liberals explain to us all again how much we owe them and how only Montgomery is worthy to be a job creator and how they’re generously offering to absorb more traffic for the good of the state? We’ll show them gratitude.”
OK, Baltimore Guy, back in your box. We want to keep it civil here.
Sorry, Adam, Baltimore Guy’s been a little touchy since his industrial base went away.
For all the sound and fury surrounding the I-270 project, it will not be the near-term battlefield for Free State sectarianism. The real conflict will take place over the FY 2011 and FY 2012 state budgets. We have blogged several times about Senate President Mike “Big Daddy” Miller’s intention to send teacher pensions down to the counties, a move that would disproportionately devastate MoCo. The state’s never-ending budget disaster makes that much more likely next year or the year after. But for all the talk about ending the one state program that may actually benefit MoCo in net terms, no one is discussing ending the state’s 100% subsidy for Baltimore’s Community College, Detention Center and Central Booking Facility. Let’s view once again the state’s $185 million handout from the Governor’s FY 2010 budget – a special deal that no one else in Maryland can ever hope to get.
What would happen if that aid ever wound up on the chopping block? The Baltimore delegation would fight like hell and the Sun would have their backs. Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s clueless Boy King has already asked the Governor to send teacher pensions down to the counties.
We hope our state delegation understands what they’re up against.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
MoCo From Above
The following pictures were taken by District 17 Senate candidate Cheryl Kagan when she was recently on board a traffic plane. They are some of the most remarkable images of Montgomery County that you will ever see.
Downtown Bethesda
Downtown Silver Spring
Downtown Silver Spring
Germantown Town Center
Clarksburg Jail
Travilah Quarry
Rockville Center City
Rockville Town Square
Shady Grove Transfer Station and MARC
Gaithersburg's Bohrer Park
Glen Echo
ICC Route
David Taylor Naval Research Lab
National Naval Medical Center
Hanging Frank Kratovil
Politico reports on an anti-Kratovil protest in Salisbury which included this display:
Is this how the GOP plans to revive its moribund party?
Politics and Policy With Anthony Brown, Part Three
By Marc Korman.
After discussing a few policy issues with Lieutenant Governor Brown, we shifted to the political landscape.
Brown’s answer to my question of how often he came to Montgomery County, which gave O’Malley/Brown more votes than any other county in the state, was the nice and political “not enough.” He discussed the effort both he and the Governor make to get outside of Annapolis to see state programs, meet with business leaders, and engage with the community. The “Maryland Capital for a Day Program,” where O’Malley goes to different locations around the state with his cabinet to perform state business, demonstrates that effort. He also said Montgomery County would be a more frequent destination in the future, which is not a surprise given its importance in Maryland elections both for votes and fundraising.
Brown also compared his boss to the previous two governors, who he experienced as a member of the General Assembly. Not surprisingly, he had a lot of nice things to say about his boss’ policy aptitude and political sense, admitting he was learning a lot from working for him.
But I also asked about their specific interactions with the legislature. Governor Ehrlich was notorious for not engaging in the legislative process, though to be fair he was a Republican dealing with overwhelming Democratic majorities. But to paraphrase Brown, Ehrlich had no interest in governing at all and when he left there was no evidence of his presence in state government. Brown said that when he first came to the legislature in 1999, Governor Glendening was engaged with legislators and his policy people were always willing to help with bills. Brown has tried to emulate that approach. He also refuses to sit in his office and have legislators come to him, but likes to make the most of his legislative experience to engage directly with his former colleagues on whatever issue needs whipping.
At my request, we mostly skipped discussion of 2010 in favor of longer term politics. When I asked Brown about his future, he said his goal has always been to put his skills to the best use possible to serve others. When the O’Malley/Brown Administration comes to an end, that could mean running for governor in 2014, returning to his private legal practice, or taking advantage of other opportunities. But his focus was on his current job as Lieutenant Governor and reelection, though he did return to the thought of a gubernatorial run and signaled he was more likely than not to head in that direction.
After our meeting, Brown went to do a little politicking with the Montgomery County Young Democrats, where a large turnout welcomed the only statewide elected official to not claim some Montgomery County tie.
Shady Grove Science Center: A Smart Growth Community
By Elaine Amir, Johns Hopkins University.
The Montgomery County Planning Board has adopted a visionary new Gaithersburg West Master Plan that will allow true smart-growth development to take hold in an expanded Shady Grove Science Center, right in the heart of Montgomery County’s I-270 science and technology corridor. The new plan provides for long-term growth of the Shady Grove Science Center, with a continued focus on research jobs and healthcare. For the first time, it also allows a mix of housing and retail in an area that was limited to commercial use only in the old plan.
This is exactly what smart growth advocates have wanted to see more of in the I-270 corridor: A vibrant, walkable community, with improved pedestrian, bike and transit access. Right now, workers in the Shady Grove Road area have to get into their cars and drive if they want to meet someone over a cup of coffee. The new plan would allow people to walk from their offices to a meeting, or to a sidewalk café, or home for lunch. New parks and community recreation facilities would also be integrated into the community, and all of this will be located within convenient walking distance of three new transit stations. The Corridor Cities Transitway (CCT) connects this area directly to the Shady Grove Metro station, King Farm, Washingtonian Center, Germantown and other key points all the way to Clarksburg at the northern end of the CCT alignment. 
Nearly the entire plan area falls within a 5-minute walking radius of the CCT. The entire Life Science Center and many surrounding neighborhoods lie within a 10-minute walk.
By changing the design of the life sciences center, introducing a more walkable, transit-oriented design, and a mix of jobs, housing, shopping and entertainment, we hope to provide the kind of environment that can attract the best and the brightest scientists and entrepreneurs to live and work here. This is the kind of community that will foster innovation and help transform great scientific discoveries from our research labs into the latest medical advances to improve people’s lives. Isn’t this the kind of future we want to see for the next generation here in Montgomery County? Great jobs with great futures, in key growth industries such as healthcare, bio-science and related fields are not a bad thing in this economy. The millions of dollars in new annual tax revenue will also go a long way towards ensuring our future prosperity. Great opportunities exist to build partnerships among leading scientists, teachers and students to reach out to our children and get them more excited about careers in science.
I think this plan will be looked back upon as the defining moment when Montgomery County chose to complete the vision that was first laid out more than two decades ago for a thriving 270 technology corridor, and updated that vision with a new, more sustainable community design.
I know there are some who may not support all aspects of this plan, but that is not unusual. Most people don’t yet have enough information to even form an opinion, so let’s put some facts on the table:
1. This New Plan is a Huge Improvement over the Current Master Plan.
The existing plan for the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center allows up to 13 million square feet of mainly commercial construction, 38,000 jobs, and virtually no housing. It also includes very limited pedestrian, bike or transit access, and no requirement that any significant transit service be provided before additional development can happen. The new Gaithersburg West Master Plan would transform this single-use, commercial area, filled with low-rise office parks and acres of surface parking lots, into a vibrant town center that feels more like a community. The new plan will have some taller buildings right around the new CCT stations, to provide more compact, transit-oriented design so we can move from parking lots to parking garages that take up less space. The new plan also adds a local street grid with smaller blocks and more connection points to disburse traffic, plus intersection and pedestrian improvements, new sidewalks, common areas and parks. And finally, one of the great advantages of the new plan, from a countywide standpoint, is that it would allow an additional 22,000 science and healthcare-related jobs – and an estimated $176 million in new annual tax revenues for the County – but these new jobs are allowed only if new infrastructure is provided first.
2.The New Plan Contains Strict Staging Requirements. The Current Plan Does Not.
In the new Gaithersburg West Master Plan, development can move forward only if needed infrastructure is funded and built beforehand. There is no such requirement in place under the current plan. In fact, the “staging requirements” in the new Gaithersburg West Master Plan actually would allow LESS development in this area (no more than 8.6 million square feet) as compared to the current 13 million square feet in the existing master plan, until construction funding is provided for the CCT. Full build-out cannot happen until the entire CCT is up and running. In some ways, the new Gaithersburg West Master Plan imposes TIGHTER restrictions on future development than the existing master plan. Between the CCT, planned improvements to I-270, a new pedestrian-oriented street grid, and mixed-uses to allow more people to live near work, we can significantly increase the percentage of non-auto trips generated in this area. The Planning Board has established a detailed and effective program for managing transportation needs in a smart growth, transit-oriented manner.
3. The New Plan for Johns Hopkins Belward Research Campus: Great Science, Great Jobs, Great Place to Work and Play.
Continued growth of the Life Sciences Center and the Belward Research Campus is critical to Montgomery County’s efforts to remain competitive as a global center for scientific research. Belward will provide a campus-like setting for good bio-science, healthcare and related jobs over the next 30 to 40 years. This will allow us to fulfill our mission for groundbreaking scientific research to help improve people’s lives. The new plan also will make this whole area a much more exciting and healthy place to work, with new recreational facilities, more public and open space, and other work-life amenities. While the Planning Board did scale back the scope of the research facilities Johns Hopkins had requested for the Belward campus, the Board still recognized the need for a sound guiding vision that will help transform the area into a vibrant, transit-oriented, science-based community that will attract the next generation of knowledge workers on which the bio-science industry depends. And since 45% of the Belward site will be preserved as parks and community/recreation space, there will be new sports fields, natural areas, and lots of other new amenities for our scientists, students and neighbors to enjoy. The old plan had just 25% open space.
The new plan preserves 45% of the Belward Research Campus as parks and recreational space. No permanent housing will be allowed at Belward.
4. The Community’s Voice has been Heard in Crafting this Plan.
Johns Hopkins University has been meeting with community representatives throughout the planning process, for over three years. We have found broad support for creating the kind of place where we can bring together great scientists and researchers, create thousands of good jobs, and help transform the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center into a much more vibrant and attractive place to live and work, for our children and for generations to come.
The new Gaithersburg West Master Plan is one of the best opportunities we will ever have in Montgomery County to retain our edge in biotech, health and informatics, and create a truly transit-oriented, smart growth community, in the heart of what has long been planned as a major development corridor for our region. The Planning Board has produced a plan that is both workable and visionary, and preserves the residential character of the surrounding neighborhoods. We hope the community can see the value it will provide for years to come.
We look forward to working with the County Council to put this visionary plan into action and create the kind of community where great science, great jobs, and real transit-oriented-design all come together to make Montgomery County an even better place to live, work and play.
Elaine Amir is Executive Director of Johns Hopkins Montgomery County.
This is what the Life Sciences Center Looks Like Today:
This is what the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center could look like with this new plan:
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
SEIU Local 500 Political Director Jackie Lichter on Political Pulse on Channel 16 TV
Jackie Lichter, the Political Director for SEIU Local 500, will be on the Political Pulse TV Show in Montgomery County, Maryland on:
Tues, July 28th at 9:30 p.m.
Wed., July 29th at 6:30 p.m.
Thurs, July 30th at 9:00 p.m.
Fri-Sun., July 31st-August 2nd at 6 p.m.
Topics that will be discussed include the Washington Post's assertions that Unions wield too much power in Montgomery County, whether school pension liabilities (of approximately $700 million) will be shifted from the State to the Counties during the next budget season and whether a rift is developing between members of the Montgomery County Council and members of Montgomery County's State Delegation.
Political Pulse is on Channel 16 TV in Montgomery County.
Politics and Policy With Anthony Brown, Part Two
By Marc Korman.
After discussing the budget and education, Lieutenant Governor Brown turned to the topic of transportation. Cavan Wilk from Greater Greater Washington took the lead in questioning Brown on the issues, since it is his area of expertise.
Cavan Wilk, Anthony Brown and Press Secretary Mike Raia.
As discussed last time, Brown has a few areas the Governor has given him the lead on. Outside of the BRAC Subcabinet, those issues are not really transportation related. But the Lieutenant Governor was previously a land use and zoning attorney and dove right into some difficult transportation questions.
Brown said a gas tax increase was off the table in 2010, with Marylanders already pinched by salary cuts, unemployment, and other effects of the recession. But Brown did discuss how existing transportation revenues could be used better, with a particular emphasis on mass transit. He acknowledged that finding the right mix of transit versus roads was difficult, and even within each area there were many questions: rail or bus; maintenance of old roads or bridges or construction of new ones; and so on. Brown identified three Administration priorities for transportation: The Purple Line, the Red Line, and the BRAC Intersection program. Every other project is about finishing, fixing, or maintaining, not starting anything new. Brown was not yet up to speed on proposals to expand 270 and/or construct the Corridor Cities Transitway.
Brown also highlighted the Administration’s MARC train plans. The plan goals are ambitious, but Brown took umbrage at the idea that instead of improving MARC, the system was actually moving in the other direction due to the cuts enacted in 2008 that reduced service and effectively increased fares by eliminating certain multi-ride passes. The Lieutenant Governor talked about short term advances that had occurred, including new trains (which was happening prior to the Administration’s plans), improving parking, and renovating stations and platforms. He also said discussions were ongoing with CSX to help address freight traffic issues. As readers of the blog know, two of the MARC train lines are owned by CSX, who control dispatching on the lines. The state is continuing its efforts to coordinate scheduling better with freight trains. But Brown was more passionate talking about long term MARC train plans, including serving new locations. Those plans are more grandiose and nice ideas, but seem fantastical when track switches and signals are malfunctioning on an almost daily basis.
Wilk also kept after Brown about his role in the BRAC Subcabinet and how to address the increased traffic that will be caused by the newly consolidated Walter Reed at Bethesda Naval Medical Center. Brown differentiated Bethesda from other military installations benefiting from BRAC, due to its more urban location. But he also emphasized that the intersections around Bethesda Naval were failing independent of any increased BRAC traffic, so addressing Wisconsin, Jones Bridge, Connecticut, and adjacent roads would be necessary whether Walter Reed moved to Bethesda or not. BRAC just brought more attention to an existing need.
Brown conceptually agreed that expanding roads would, in the long term, just lead to more cars filling those lanes. But he was not prepared to embrace a specific and aggressive transit alternative. He said he has been working with Congressman Van Hollen on some type of transit improvement, but whether that would be a pedestrian bridge, an underground tunnel, a new entrance to the Medical Center Metro Station on the east side of Wisconsin, or other innovative approaches such as higher subsidies for employees to ride instead of drive was not yet known. With the expanded facility set for full operation in 2011, Brown and Van Hollen will need to act much quicker if they hope to affect transportation around the project.
Apocalyptic Budget Memo: MoCo Edition
Following is the text of a memo on the budget written by County Executive Ike Leggett to the County Council. He estimates a $370 million budget deficit for FY 2011 and argues that furloughs are needed in the current budget year. He also predicts that if the county is found to have not satisfied the state's Maintenance of Effort requirement for school funding - a real possibility - the county could be penalized $33-57 million by the state.
MEMORANDUM
July 24, 2009
TO: Phil Andrews, President, County Council
FROM: Isiah Leggett, County Executive
SUBJECT: FY10-11 Fiscal Update
Attached please find the materials requested for the Fiscal Update for the Management and Fiscal Policy and the County Council for this coming week. As the attached materials indicate, significant challenges and difficult choices remain for Montgomery County in managing the current year budget, as well as in developing the FY11 budget. The attached fiscal plan projection is not based on a "rate of growth" for FY11 expenditures, but rather is based on estimated FY11 expenditures at "Major Known Commitments" for all County tax-supported agencies. At this time, the fiscal analysis shows a gap of $370 million. This gap is before considering other factors including:
• additional State Aid reductions in FY10 and FY11 (these reductions are, unfortunately, a certainty, though the specific amount is not known yet);
• further deterioration in local revenues (e.g. property, income, and transfer and recordation taxes); and
• other unanticipated events (e.g. fuel price spikes, extraordinary stock market losses, etc).
Preliminary indications are that FY09 tax-supported revenue collections for the operating budget are, generally, on target with the March projections. This means that we can not reasonably expect any budgetary relief from future increases in local revenues, and will monitor indicators carefully for the possibility of a slower than anticipated recovery. The fact that we are on tract with our revenue estimates does not alter the projected $370 million gap for FY11. The expenditure projections contain approximately $57 million of expenditures for Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) and Montgomery College (MC) above Maintenance of Effort (MOE) requirements.
While additional time is needed to evaluate economic and fiscal data due to the already clear magnitude of the problem, we will need to implement an FY10 Savings Plan and/or employee furloughs in FY10. I do not approach either issue lightly though. Given, the position and service reductions made in preparing the FY10 Operating Budget, we will be very constrained in our options for an FY10 savings plan. Increases in lapse, elimination of nearly 400 positions, and other budgetary reductions have removed much of the flexibility that previously existed for instituting mid-year savings plan. For an FY10 savings plan, service reductions and mid-year employee layoffs may be required to achieve any meaningful and reasonably achievable savings.
As indicated in my FY10 Recommended Budget, employee furloughs may be an option, or supplement to a savings plan, since it would result in only temporary service reductions and would provide a source of feasible savings to carry forward into FY11. However, any furlough should be implemented across all tax supported agencies to ensure equitable treatment of employees and to produce substantive savings.
In closing I want to stress that, jointly, we have reduced cumulative gaps of nearly $1.2 billion in the last three years. I believe by continuing to work together we will produce a balanced budget in FY10 and FY11 that preserves essential services in education, public safety, and our social services safety net and aligns our ongoing expenditures with our resources.
c: Timothy L. Firestine, Chief Administrative Officer
Kathleen Boucher, Assistant Chief Administrative Officer
All County Government Department Heads and Merit Directors
Dr. Jerry D. Weast, Superintendent, Montgomery County Public Schools
Royce Hanson, Planning Board Chairman, Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission
Brian K. Johnson, Ed.D., President, Montgomery College
FY10-11 Fiscal Issues
Risk and Uncertainty (Not included in fiscal plan projections):
• State Aid Reductions
o Not included in projections, but could be significant
o Timing of announced cuts: August 2009 through April 2010
• Local Revenue declines: Income, Transfer/Recordation, and Property tax (estimated $40 million reduction at Charter limit due to reduced inflation)
• MOE Penalty: If the SBOE finds the County did not satisfy MOE requirements the penalty could range from $33 M. to $57 M.
• Fuel or other Price Spikes
Lack of Options/Flexibility
• Savings Plan limits: lapse reductions, vacant position reductions, MC311 cuts
• Large transfers from Liquor Control and other funds already taken in FY10
• Reserves are already dangerously low in light of risks
• Cash flow limitations
• Very little discretion in terms of tax increases - "tax room"
• Impact Taxes: Actual FY09 Receipts were significantly under budget ($26.5 million) and will be for FY10-14 as well and will need to be replaced with tax supporting funding or addressed through project delays.
• Further service reductions and additional layoffs may be required given the foregoing and the pending imposition of further state aid reductions.
Exit Strategy
• Need to present rating agencies with a plan for restoring reserves, OPEB, and PAYGO and aligning expenditures with revenues over the long term.
• Need to leave the recession with a stronger fiscal position as we did in early 90's with Revenue Stabilization Fund, Retirement Savings Plan, Changes in Health Insurance premium share, and "tax room"
Savings Plan
• Previous savings plans have relied heavily on lapse which is severely restricted due to additional lapse reduction of $2.7 million across departments and MC311 reductions of $1.875 million.
• Relies on inter-agency cooperation in attaining savings plan targets
• Service reductions and mid-year layoffs may be required to produce meaningful and reliable savings or...
Furloughs
• Furloughs, across all agencies, should be seriously considered as an alternative to further service reductions and layoffs.
Why Baltimore Should Support I-270 Widening
Baltimore Guy (and Sun reporter) Mike Dresser feels cranky about the I-270 widening proposal. Well, we have news for you, Baltimore – the I-270 project may be a better deal for you than for us!
First of all, we can see where Baltimore Guy is coming from. The view around the state is that MoCo bullied its way into getting one giant road project – the ICC – and now we want to bully our way to getting another giant project to widen I-270. The problem with that view is that it gives us too much credit. The history of the ICC does not showcase MoCo’s ambition, but rather its schizophrenia when it comes to big road projects. Longtime County Executive Doug Duncan supported the ICC, but our County Council voted to oppose it by 6-2 in April 1999, 5-3 in March 2002 and 5-3 in July 2002. In 1999, the Council tried to rezone ICC-intended property as parkland, provoking a confrontation with the General Assembly. After the 2002 election, the Council voted 6-3 in favor of the ICC in December 2002 and 6-3 in favor in March 2005. The road finally began construction under Governor Bob Ehrlich, a Republican whom MoCo voted against twice. The County Council’s newest member, Nancy Navarro, won a tight special election in part because she opposed the ICC and ran against a pro-ICC state legislator. Does all of the above really lead you to believe that MoCo waged a relentless campaign to get the ICC?
The proponents of the I-270 project say it’s about creating jobs, jobs, jobs. Let’s look at that argument. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, MoCo had more jobs than any other jurisdiction in Maryland in 2008. But that’s not all – MoCo’s jobs pay 23% better than the state average. And since MoCo’s income tax is a flat 3.2% and the state has had a progressive income tax since 2007, the state is the real beneficiary of those high-paying jobs.
Now let’s find out who is paying the state’s bills. In FY 2007, MoCo paid $1.6 billion in income taxes and $453 million in sales taxes to the state government for a combined total of $2.1 billion. Baltimore City paid $342 million in income taxes and $287 million in sales taxes for a combined total of $629 million – less than one-third of MoCo’s payout.
What happens when the money gets to Annapolis? Much of it comes back out in the form of state aid, but it doesn’t come out evenly. The aid formulas are largely driven by property values. Let’s set aside the fact that high property values mostly mean unaffordable mortgages for residents like your author – MoCo is supposed to be rich, right? So “rich” counties get less and “poor” counties get more. Here’s how that works out in the Governor’s most recent budget proposal: 
Baltimore City residents would have received $1,879 per capita in aid next year under the Governor’s proposal. MoCo residents would receive $768. If William Donald Schaefer and an army of Pratt Street accountants dreamed up a state aid system, it could hardly be more generous to Baltimore than the one we have now!
But wait, it gets better. The state gives three times as much school aid per pupil to Baltimore as it does to MoCo.
And the state has completely assumed funding responsibility for Baltimore’s Community College, Detention Center and Central Booking Facility.
And Baltimore Guy is complaining about anything we get?
All of the above points to a cardinal truth: every job created in MoCo because of the I-270 project means more state aid for the City of Baltimore. And Baltimore can roll up that cash without having to deal with all the extra traffic that will impact us if the project is built. Traffic is a huge issue here – 58% of our residents picked it is as our top long-term challenge in a recent Council of Governments poll. It is the primary reason that we sometimes vote politicians out of office for letting in too many jobs. Yeah, we’re funny that way. And we still think we’re smarter than everyone else!
So do you really want to help us, Baltimore? Forget about I-270. Just loosen your development regulations, build a giant superhighway and double your population and employment. Then send a big chunk of those extra tax revenues to the state so they can pay for the majority of our school budget and take over funding responsibility for huge swaths of our local government.
What did you say? You don’t like the sound of that?
Hey, it worked for MoCo, right?
Monday, July 27, 2009
Saqib Ali Uses Help Save Maryland to Raise Money (Updated)
Delegate Saqib Ali (D-39) is nothing if not creative. After Help Save Maryland targeted him for defeat next year, Ali used their declaration to help him raise money. Following is his solicitation.
Dear Friend,
As I conduct my work in our legislature, I try to be fair and judicious to all members of our society. Recently I voted against a bill state bill known as "Federal Real-ID". This was a complex bill with many nuances pertaining to illegal immigrants and drivers licenses.
Because of my vote on this bill, and because they know I am compassionate towards immigrants, I drew the opposition of a local anti-immigrant organization known as "Help Save Maryland" (HSM). HSM has been declared a Nativist/Extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center -- a major national civil rights organization. They track and expose racists such as the KKK.
HSM declared in a recent Gazette article that they are targeting me for electoral defeat. You can read that article by clicking here. (I have included the full text of the letter below for your convenience).
Quite frankly, I think if the extremists are upset by my work, I must be doing something right! However, I still need your help to defeat mean-spirited efforts like this one to remove me from office.
You can counter-act HSM by donating now to my campaign. Please make a contribution now by clicking here. No amount is too small or too large. And I certainly need all the help I can get. So please donate now.
Delegate Saqib Ali
(301) 685-3409
www.SaqibAli.org
Update: Saqib Ali is really serious about this. Check out how he is spreading the message to his Facebook friends in the middle of the night:
Last year, Ali recorded a greater net fundraising gain than any other Montgomery Delegate. His cash balance in January ($87,423.54) was higher than the rest of the District 39 delegation combined. So why is he looking so hard for more money?
Andrews: No Helicopters
County Council President Phil Andrews sent the following memo to County Executive Ike Leggett today indicating that the Council will not support the Executive's helicopter proposal.
Politics and Policy With Anthony Brown, Part One
By Marc Korman.
Last week, Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown sat down with Cavan Wilk from Greater Greater Washington and me at the Silver Spring Library for a blogger roundtable where we discussed policy and politics.
Lieutenant Governor Brown is a New York native. He served in Iraq, but has been in the Army or Army Reserve since 1984. In 1998 he was elected to the General Assembly from Prince George’s and reelected in 2002. In 2005, he joined the O’Malley ticket. He is Maryland’s eighth LG, a position created in 1970.
Brown opened by discussing what a Lieutenant Governor does. In his case, the Governor has given him a few specific assignment areas to pursue. These include: chairing the BRAC Subcabinet, veterans issues, chairing the Maryland Healthcare Quality and Cost Council, addressing higher education with a focus on community colleges, foster care, and domestic violence. According to Brown, the Governor does not send him on specific errands so much as give him room to run with these broad issues to make progress for the state.
Brown acknowledged that the O’Malley/Brown Administration has been about the budget more than anything else, including cutting spending, cutting programs, and containing costs. Brown emphasized that when elected officials talk about cuts, they are usually talking about curbing the rate of growth and not actual cuts. But Brown said the budget was smaller this year than the previous year, and for the first time since the 1970s the budget is actually smaller than it was three years previous. Presumably, Brown was referring specifically to the General Fund which has dipped below $14.5 billion in spending this year, a few hundred million less than the last few years.
Our conversation took place just after the Board of Public Works (BPW) cut $280 million from the current budget. But preserved from the cuts, and according to Brown what will continued to be preserved, is K-12 Education. Brown trumpeted O’Malley/Brown’s funding of Thornton, including the Geographic Cost of Education Index and disparity grants which have at least seen partial funding under O’Malley/Brown. It was not clear if preserving education funding going forward meant not passing the approximately $125 million in Montgomery County teachers’ pensions down to the county.
Brown also highlighted the Administration’s three consecutive years of higher education tuition freezes. But BPW just cut approximately $40 million from higher education, undercutting the argument that tuition freezes can be sustained because the state is providing enough in direct appropriations. Because Brown was a member of the Commission to Develop the Maryland Model for Funding Higher Education, I asked him about the sustainability of tuition freezes. The Commission report set ambitious goals for how much Maryland colleges and universities should charge compared to institutions in other states and how much they should provide in financial assistance. But to reach the goal, the report estimated a $750 million increase in costs and failed to recommend a funding mechanism.
Brown said the funding mechanism was the set aside from slots proceeds for higher education. But funding for capital projects at community colleges and other higher education institutions is just one use of the education trust fund slots are supposed to benefit. And of course, slots do not appear able to deliver on their fiscal promises. The Lieutenant Governor recognized the limitations of the slots account even as he was explaining the funding.
I asked Brown about the possibility that freezing tuition, as opposed to moderate increases tied to inflation or some other measure, would lead to large increases once the freeze ends, not unlike what has happened with energy rates. Brown said Maryland would not follow Florida, which has hiked public tuition by 15% this year. But he also said he preferred a year by year approach, rather than establishing formula funding tuition increases.
Brown next turned to a long conversation on transportation, which we will discuss in Part Two.
Eli Eli’s Domestic Abuse Record
District 20 Delegate candidate Eli El’s former wife accused him of domestic abuse in 2006. A Montgomery County judge found “clear and convincing evidence” of abuse and issued a protective order prohibiting El from contacting his wife. The judge later summoned El to appear in court and explain why he should not be held in contempt for failing to attend an Abused Persons Program.
Elihu Eli El married Vonda B. Rhodes in Minden, Louisiana on 9/3/05. The couple later moved to Montgomery Village. On 10/26/06, Rhodes filed for divorce from El in Montgomery County Circuit Court (Case File No. 58250-FL). Rhodes alleged:That soon after the parties’ marriage, and in particular since August, 2006, the Defendant [El] commenced a pattern of violent and outrageous behavior toward the Plaintiff [Rhodes], such that the Plaintiff began to fear for her health and safety.
Rhodes and El had no marital property to be divided. On 4/20/07, the family law judge issued a Consent Order for Injunctive Relief that ordered Rhodes and El to avoid contact with each other. El asked for a divorce on 10/16/07 and the court gave them a judgment of divorce on 10/24/07.
That the Defendant has constructively abandoned and deserted the Plaintiff in that Defendant’s cruel and abusive conduct made the continuation of the marital relationship impossible, if Plaintiff is to preserve her health, safety and self-respect. As a result of Defendant’s abusive conduct, Defendant vacated the Plaintiff’s home on or about September 15, 2006. Said constructive desertion was the final and deliberate act of the Defendant and has continued uninterruptedly since such date, and there is no reasonable hope or expectation of reconciliation between the parties.
That the Defendant has persistently engaged in cruelty of treatment, endangering Plaintiff’s safety, health and happiness, rendering the continuation of the marital relationship impossible if Plaintiff is to preserve her health, safety and self-respect. There is no reasonable hope or expectation of reconciliation between the parties.
On 9/14/06, Rhodes filed a Petition for Protection from El in the District Court of Maryland for Montgomery County (Case File No.0601SP022872006). Rhodes wrote in her petition:On September 13th, 2006 at approximately 11:30 p I was laying in the bed, attempting to go to sleep when my husband, Eli, began yelling and screaming at me. When I refused to argue with him, he snatched the covers from my body and continued to yell and scream at me. At one point, he raised his right arm above his head as if to swing at me. At this point I was in fear for my physical safety. Eli has been very emotionally and verbally abusive throughout our one year marriage. He exhibits psychotic and eradic [sic] behavior at times. For example, when the police arrived at my residence tonight, Eli removed his shirt and approached my friend, who is also a Montgomery County Police Officer, in a threatening manner. I am very afraid of my husband due to his eradic [sic] behavior and prior history of domestic violence against his previous wife.
Rhodes received an interim protective order on the day she filed her petition. She received a temporary protective order the next day.
On 9/22/06, District Court Judge William Graves Simmons issued a final protective order on behalf of Rhodes. It stated:That there is clear and convincing evidence that the Respondent [El] committed the following act(s) of abuse:
The judge ordered El to vacate Rhodes’s home, avoid her residence and place of work and not to contact her. He also directed El to participate in an Abused Persons Program.
Placed Person Eligible for Relief in fear of imminent serious bodily harm
Assault in any degree
On 10/16/06, El wrote a three-page letter to the judge protesting his decision. He called the court’s decision a “travesty” and said his experience there was “tormenting and distressing.” He complained that the judge allowed Rhodes to “blindside me” and said, “You allowed my wife, for God sake, to talk about me like a low down dirty maggot.” He wrote, “Courts like yours are damaging, harmful and injurious to my culture by creating a medium for one spouse to quickly end marriages (those that could be reconciled with education, privacy, and time) based on lies and embellishment.” He went on, “I pray that you would insert the enclosed CD and click on the start files that I have enclosed with this letter in order to get a better view of my character. Yes, I said PRAY.” He finished the letter by requesting that the judge “remove the order of protection and replace it with consent to stay apart.” The judge did not do so.
On 1/16/07, Judge Simmons ordered El to appear in court on 2/5/07 and show cause for why he should not be held in contempt for failing to attend the Abused Persons Program. El filed a 10-page response that was not drafted by a lawyer. El’s primary argument was that he did not know about the program attendance requirement (despite the fact that it was part of the final protective order), but he went further. He wrote:During the marriage, Mr. El disclosed very secret and confidential information to his wife about his past marriage. Mr. El disclosed information to Vonda Rhodes based on the sensitive nature of her career. This conversation occurred near the time that Mr. El was participating in a background check. The Respondent [El] has a clear criminal history. The Plaintiff informed the court that on the night in question, she called 9-1-1 because she felt threatened. She also admitted that she called from the bedroom while there was one telephone in each other [sic] room and she voluntarily returned to bed after completing the 9-1-1 call. Mr. El’s career is subject to investigation of lifestyle and sensitivity. From a legal perspective, the openness of the secret should have remained irrelevant to his case. There was no reason to disclose this confidential information to a crowd of her friends that were in the courtroom. This information is not in any criminal background history of the Respondent. Both parties have significant careers and it is considered by the Respondent as a breach of secrecy and a defamation of marriage. This occurrence was told to Vonda B. Rhodes and should have been kept a secret. Secrets between husband and wife should have remained concealed.
El did not elaborate on the content of the “secret.” Rhodes alleged in her original Petition for Protection that El had abused his first wife. Judge Simmons never issued a finding on that allegation.
El promised to attend the Abused Persons Program. He asked the judge not to find him in contempt because, among other things, he was an associate member of the American Bar Association, was a chief election judge during the primary and general elections in 2006, volunteered for the 2006 Democratic Spring Ball, had a pastor who was a Leadership Montgomery graduate and was “a public figure.” El wrote, “The determination that the Respondent is found guilty of violating any court order will be damaging to his political career.” The judge did not find him in contempt and El completed the Abused Persons Program on 4/10/08.
The divorce file, Vonda B. Rhodes v. Elihu Eli El (Case No. 58250-FL), can be viewed at the Montgomery County Circuit Court, 50 Maryland Ave., Rockville. The domestic abuse file, Rhodes, Vonda vs. El, Elihu Eli (Case No. 0601SP022872006), can be viewed at the District Court of Maryland for Montgomery County, 27 Courthouse Square, Rockville.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Agriculture, Environment and Open Space Co-exist in the County – For Now
By Sharon Dooley.
This is the weekend of the Montgomery County Farm Tour and Harvest Sale. Several farms are open for tours, produce picking, sales or demonstrations. Take advantage of the opportunity to visit working farms and orchards and further the efforts of the buy local experiences. Yesterday one of the sites I visited was Butlers Orchards near Germantown. There one can find field fruits for picking such as blackberries or just picked vegetables from the fields for sale in the farm stand. Families unloaded from cars and children hurried to pick their choice of fruit. Let’s all hope that our elected and appointed officials ensure that this experience continues for residents of our county.
To get to this farm one must wander through a tucked away and beautiful area along truly rustic roads that traverse dense forests following meandering waterways with the occasional one lane bridge spanning the streams. Here, only moments from 270 and 355, the din from those bustling roads is not evident as the dominant sounds are those of birds, flowing waters and rustling branches. A youngster was spotting hopping across rocks in one stream as the sun glistened through the trees and the waters sparkled. Occasionally a meadow or farm field is spotted up from the narrow lanes that join the routes sometimes-steep inclines, where trees line the edge of the shoulder less roads. These roads have descriptive names such as Wild Cat or Davis Mill and all are urged to explore these quiet places while we can. Unfortunately, also noted, was a small cluster of luxury homes being built along Davis Mill – how long will it be before these homeowners will demand wider roads and straighter exits from their wooded hide-a-ways? How inappropriately sited this development seemed.
Yet, I was reminded that some of this forested area is being considered for yet another highway – one that would carry the traffic from the mid-county highway (soon to be linked to the ICC) from its current terminus in Montgomery Village up through the Brink Road areas to near Clarksburg. It would go again through stream valleys and Seneca Park, while some routes would continue this passage through some of the virgin forests just described. Areas in the Dayspring retreat center, where meadow habitats and lively flowing waters are now protected, would be threatened with destruction. The county has placed signs at spots along Blount Road and other places noting the potential for this highway. Some potential routes would cross waterways in a dozen or more areas and would change the natural resources, degrade water quality and destroy plant and animal life in large measures. This is not stewardship of the environment – a phrase too often tossed around in political circles these days, but given lip service frequently.
Recently I was among those requesting that the Maryland National Capitol Parks and Planning Board delay planned construction in the western area of Clarksburg near 270 because of the potential damage to the Seneca Creek watershed generally (because of impervious surface runoff among other concerns) and the Ten Mile Creek area specifically. Ten Mile Creek – to those of you who are down county – is an actual ford – where the stream waters are often flowing over the road surface. The testimony from Diane Cameron of Storm water partners can be read here and is representative of comments submitted.
The decision was taken to indeed delay this construction; environmentalists throughout the area applauded this action.
The county has spent millions of dollars to restore and reclaim some of our down county creeks and waterways, so it is a real positive note to see that the planning board took this proactive stand. Now – it is hoped that the council will continue to approve this delay despite demands by builders to the contrary. However we cannot just stop there and applaud; the community must remain vigilant and stop allowing channeling of streams as has happened with negative effects in Clarksburg already along with other sensitive areas in the county. Affected communities need to question claims that this actually protects the streams. It has been demonstrated many times that the straight stream is not the most effective way to direct water flow.
In previous County Council testimony, contractors have noted that they are not always following the county water standards. Recent storms have sent mud and water flowing out from the construction sites along the ICC. Large tracts along the path of this monster highway have been cleared and are now clear-cut with no remaining undergrowth to hold storm waters. A recent article in the Washington Post noted the huge culverts and massive bridges that are being built over sensitive areas of the upper Rock Creek and Lake Need wood Park areas. The environment was supposedly protected with a runway for deer and other small animals. These structures were created which keep the traffic flow above the natural beauty below - supposedly minimizing the negative effects of this three Billion dollar highway. How much nicer could it have been if these natural areas had not been disturbed at all?
Now back to the Farms and the upper county areas of beauty and quiet reflection. Is there will in this county to keep these forests, vistas, and farms and nearby crops? Is there a critical mass of those who would speak up for protecting what we have and keeping the Buy Local movement alive? Are the powers of those who would work to build highways at the cost of life quality and protection of the environment and our heritage greater than those who would protect our current choices for moderate growth? This question gives the county a clear choice and whatever choice is made can provide a critical tipping point for county residents, not just for ensuing decades but also maybe for the entire metro area. Can we – should we ever have to – sustain our growth and provide for food, energy, education, employment, transit and shelter for those who will live here?
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Friday, July 24, 2009
Red Line Opposition is Good News for MoCo Transit Supporters
The Baltimore Sun’s Michael Dresser reports on a new website established by neighbors of one of the Red Line routes in Baltimore. The aim of the neighbors is to fight surface rail on the Red Line and they have drawn support from their state delegation. If the O’Malley administration heeds their concerns and picks an underground option, MoCo transit advocates should celebrate a huge victory.
The arguments made by the Red Line’s neighbors against surface rail are familiar to Purple Line combatants from both sides: neighborhood destruction, pedestrian problems and inadequate infrastructure capacity for light rail. Their coalition may be as large as the group opposing light rail for the Purple Line. And they draw our compliments for their design choices on their website.
Just as Purple Line rail opponents have done, they have obtained the sympathy of three-quarters of their state delegation: District 46 Senator George Della and District 46 Delegates Peter Hammen and Brian McHale. We reproduce their letter to the Governor below.
But here is their problem. As we explained in a prior post, the Red Line fails federal cost effectiveness guidelines as an underground project. A transit project must cost no more than $23.99 per hour of user benefit to be awarded a “medium” cost effectiveness ranking or better. Anything less will endanger a project’s chances of federal approval. Only two Red Line options meet that standard: surface BRT ($18.10) and surface rail ($22.17). The underground options range from $30.42 to $63.93, all having “low” cost effectiveness by federal criteria.
Now here’s where MoCo transit advocates should cheer. The Purple Line has five options with medium cost effectiveness or better: three for BRT and two for rail. (One rail option comes in at $26.51.) The Corridor Cities Transitway has two options with medium cost effectiveness or better, both using BRT. If the state picks any underground option for the Red Line, it will be greatly handicapped against MoCo’s two transit lines in competing for federal funds.
So the O’Malley administration has an interesting choice. Most Montgomery observers believe the Governor has prioritized the Red Line over the MoCo projects by disproportionately targeting the latter for cuts last fall. But the Governor could prove everyone wrong by giving Red Line surface rail opponents what they want: an underground proposal to the feds. Martin O’Malley would be a hero to the Baltimore civic associations. He would also be a hero in the Washington suburbs if either the Purple Line or the CCT won federal approval over the now-hamstrung Red Line.
That would be a rare win-win-win for the Governor, for Montgomery County and for Red Line neighbors in Baltimore!
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Veterans in Office
By Marc Korman.
A recent Gazette article about Ike Leggett’s return to Vietnam forty years after serving in the war there left me wondering what other local politicians served in the military.
The number of veterans serving in the US House and Senate has declined considerably over the years. According to a Congressional Research Service report, there are 96 veterans in the House and 25 in the Senate. That is compared to 398 in 1969 and 298 in 1979. None of the current Congressional veterans are from Maryland. Former Congressman Wayne Gilchrest served in the Marines. Andy Harris, who beat Gilchrest in the Republican primary and lost in the general election in 2008, served in the Navy Reserves. Former Governor and Comptroller William Donald Schaeffer was in the Army as well. I could not find numbers on how many veterans serve in the Maryland General Assembly and whether the number has declined.
Statewide, Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown serves in the Army Reserve and was deployed to Iraq in 2004. Comptroller Peter Franchot served in the Army. Locally, Leggett was an Army lieutenant during Vietnam. Other local elected officials who served in the military are state Senator Rob Garagiola and Councilman Mike Knapp. Garagiola was in the Army Reserves from 1995 to 2001. Knapp served for ten years in the Army Reserves. No one I spoke to knew of any other current Montgomery County elected officials who served in the Armed Forces. But if I forgot someone, I hope someone mentions them in the comments.
One veteran I spoke to thought there was an important political constituency of veterans largely overlooked in Montgomery County. There are over 52,000 veterans in the County according to a Task Force to Study State Assistance to Veterans report. In 2008, Montgomery County established a Veterans Commission to study and make recommendations on veterans issues the County can affect.
After World War II, military service was almost a prerequisite for a political career. As late as the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s lack of service was an issue during his two presidential campaigns, when he ran against two heroes of World War II. Clinton was the first US president since FDR not to serve in the military in at least some capacity.
But as the number of World War II veterans still active in politics declines, so does veteran saturation in politics. I believe there are a few reasons for that decline. First, the entire country mobilized for World War II and over ten million Americans entered the Armed Forces. Far fewer serve now. Second, the veterans who returned from World War II were treated as heroes. But such uniform support did not exist in subsequent conflicts and military service was not as potent a line on a resume for a political candidate. However, public appreciation of veterans has been strong since 9/11 so that trend could be reversing with the new crop of veterans running for political office.
At least one potential local candidate in 2010, Guled Kassim, has served in the Marines. If there are others, I hope they will be mentioned in the comments.
Funniest Facebook Status of the Day (Updated)
Who else but Delegate Saqib Ali (D-39) would write something like this?
I better not find a bone in my taco!
Update: Saqib Ali must have suddenly decided he does not like publicity. Look at this:
Why MoCo’s Helicopters Won’t Fly in Annapolis
As we revealed last week, County Executive Ike Leggett is requesting county funding to augment a federal grant for the purchase of two police helicopters. The County Council is considering the merits of that request. But whatever those merits may be, the Executive and Legislative branches must consider the political consequences of going forward. Simply put, Montgomery’s helicopters could very well throw the county’s Annapolis priorities into a tailspin.
The Executive’s request to the council was remarkably short on specifics. While his request did outline acquisition costs of $248,894 in federal grant money and $279,890 in local funding, it did not estimate the maintenance and operating costs. Council staff volunteered a rough estimate of 1-2% of the total police budget, which under the Fiscal Year 2010 budget would amount to $2.5-4.9 million per year. The Police Department estimates the operating cost at $7.9 million over five years. The county faces a $350 million budget deficit next year.
In normal times, this issue would be kicked around between the Executive and the County Council and eventually resolved. But these are anything but normal times. Montgomery County’s budget is extraordinarily dependent on the state government at the moment. Specifically, two issues will make or break us in the near term.
School Budget Maintenance of Effort (MOE)
State law requires that counties at least maintain their level of local school funding in order to be eligible for state aid increases. Montgomery County requested a waiver from this requirement from the State Board of Education this year owing to its poor economy, its fiscal problems and the tax-limiting consequences of the Ficker Amendment. The board denied its request so the county resorted to an accounting maneuver to get around the requirement. The board has requested an Attorney General opinion on the issue and it is far from clear as to whether Montgomery’s MOE compliance will be upheld.
Our sources tell us that the helicopter proposal has been in the works for at least a year. That means that while the county was crying poverty to the State Board of Education, it was already considering purchasing helicopters. The Executive Branch further postponed its funding request until after the county budget was finalized in May. The state board and other decision-makers in Annapolis may very well conclude that the county made its case for a waiver in bad faith. After all, if it was secretly considering purchasing police helicopters, how could it credibly say it was too poor to afford its MOE requirement? Whatever the ultimate mechanism for settling the MOE dispute, this will diminish the county’s leverage and cast doubt on the veracity of its budget claims, both now and in the future.
Teacher Pensions and State Aid
The state’s desperate budget situation ensures that state aid to counties, and specifically teacher pensions, will remain part of the budget discussions in Annapolis. In Maryland, the state pays pension benefits for teachers, school administrators and support staff. This is one of the few state programs that benefits Montgomery County since it pays its teachers more than other counties due to its high cost of living, and thereby generates higher benefit levels. Montgomery enjoys the highest absolute dollar benefit and the third-highest per-capita benefit of the state’s jurisdictions from this program.
In the last general session, Senate President Mike “Big Daddy” Miller introduced a bill to phase in a handoff of teacher pension costs from the state to the counties. Montgomery would have been disproportionately damaged by that bill. Furthermore, the colossal unfunded liability in the state pension plan – which was, after all, caused by state fiscal policies – could very well be imposed on the counties. But Big Daddy’s plan is far from the worst scenario. A Western Maryland Delegate introduced a bill during the 2007 special session that would have wealth-adjusted the handoff of pensions. That proposal would devastate Montgomery’s finances just as it would protect other counties around the state.
All of the reasons above explain why our state delegation’s highest priority, as supported by County Executive Leggett, is to prevent teacher pensions from being unloaded on the counties. Our delegation must make the case that we are not as rich as the rest of the state thinks we are to have a shot at preventing a Montgomery fiscal catastrophe. But if we appear to be wealthy enough to splurge on helicopters, that case will be laughed out of the statehouse.
We asked our state legislators on an off-the-record basis what a helicopter purchase would do to their efforts to defend our state aid. Here’s what six of them said:
“My first response to that is that it may be a needed purchase, but with the fiscal climate we are all in and are going to be in for awhile, I think purchasing helicopters needs to go on a wish list for better times after we take care of the necessities. A purchase of helicopters would be a hard sell to folks in Annapolis.”
“There’s no question the helicopters are needed. The only questions concern timing and priority. At a time when we are all buckling our belts two notches tighter and the delegation is gearing up for a major battle to maintain Montgomery County’s fair share of state aid and protect teacher pensions, it is appropriate to ask whether this is the right priority at the right time.”
“In this case, like most, the merits may end up getting swallowed by the politics.”
“As we continue to struggle to make the case to our colleagues from around the state that Montgomery County streets are not paved with gold as they mistakenly believe and to argue that our needs and corresponding budget challenges are great, dubious spending initiatives at the local level such as this tend to undercut and undermine those efforts.”
“I think it flies in the face of all of our efforts to demonstrate our need for state aid. I’m sure the state is happy it didn’t fulfill our waiver of Maintenance of Effort funding for educaiton. As a county, we spent a great deal of political capital explaining why we were so poor. The state disagreed and then we proved them right. Hope we don’t have the gall to make a second such request next year, absent some new economic catastrophe.”
“It will be Exhibit A for why we ought to be cut.”
Regardless of its merit or county budget impact, this proposal will kneecap Montgomery in Annapolis. Big Daddy will gleefully embrace MoCo’s helicopters if they make it easier for him to send teacher pensions to the counties. Ike Leggett will no longer be able to draw lines in the sand over teacher pensions if the helicopter rotors are blowing them away. And if the State Board of Education gets a chance to punish Montgomery for its Maintenance of Effort compliance tactics, they will do it without regret.
The Executive Branch has already demonstrated its strategic insensitivity to our state budget leverage, but it is not too late for the County Council to do better. They should send the helicopters back to the launch pad, at least until the county and state budgets improve. If they don’t, the helicopters will crash land at the statehouse - and Montgomery’s agenda will go down with it.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Dereck Davis vs. Jim Rosapepe on Electricity Reregulation
In an email exchange widely circulated in Annapolis, Senator Jim Rosapepe (D-21) and Delegate Dereck Davis (D-25) hold a spirited duel on the issue of electricity reregulation. Davis is the Chair of the House Economic Matters Committee, which has jurisdiction over electric utilities, so he will be a big player in writing any electricity legislation. Come behind the closed doors of Annapolis and read on!
The duel began when Rosapepe sent out an email to many state legislators recruiting them to sign a letter to the Chair of the Public Services Commission (PSC) in support of reregulation.Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 09:17:21 -0400
Dereck Davis, who represents Prince George's County as does Rosapepe, wrote this response:
Subject: letter to PSC on Pepco and electric rates
From: Jim Rosapepe
To: State Legislators
I'm writing to invite you to join Senators Currie, Frosh, Peters, Madaleno, Muse, Kramer, Pinsky, Raskin, Harringon, Lennett, and me in supporting Governor O'Malley's efforts to reregulate electric rates and explaining how his efforts in the Constellation/EDF case will benefit Pepco customers, who we represent, as well.
Please call me on my cell at [number withheld] if you have questions, or let my staff know if you'd like to sign on.
Please let us know by 5:00pm on Wednesday.
Thanks!
--Jim
Dear Mr. Chairman:
We write to express our strong support for your efforts to protect Maryland consumers by reversing the dramatic failures of electric deregulation. In particular, we appreciate your work advising the legislature when the Senate passed the Governor's reregulation this year. This legislation advances new power plant construction and long term energy planning. We look forward to working with the Governor to pass it through both houses of the General Assembly in 2010.
Meantime, since our ratepayers are suffering from excessive rates for electricity produced by existing plants, we applaud your decision to review the Constellation/EDF transaction.
As you know, Governor O'Malley has proposed conditioning approval of this transaction on inclusion of several key protective measures for consumers, including lower rates for customers and launching the return to regulated rates for the future.
Understandably, BGE customers are enthusiastically backing the Governor's strong stance on behalf of ratepayers in this case. We write as elected representatives of Pepco customers to say that moving the Governor's agenda here is very important to us and our constituents as well. Here’s why:
First, the CEG/EDF case and the reregulation legislation we hope to pass in 2010 are aspects of the same battle for consumer rights and a return to fairness in the electric markets. Since Constellation was the major local proponent of deregulation in 1999 and remains its major defender to this day, prying Constellation away from this historic failure will create momentum for reform across the state.
Second, as your consultants demonstrated last fall, reregulation would save ratepayers billions of dollars, even if done in arm's length transactions. They showed how Pepco customers could save $1.6 billion. Deregulation defenders like Constellation have claimed that reregulating rates of existing power would be "too complicated." By restoring healthy regulation and oversight in the Constellation/EDF case, as the Governor has proposed, the PSC would demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of this approach, providing just the model we need for reducing Pepco’s inflated rates as well.
As you move forward in the Constellation/EDF case, we urge you to look for similar opportunities in the Pepco service area to reduce our constituents' electric bills by reregulating their rates. We recognize that such an opportunity may not appear immediately. But Pepco customers, like BGE and all other Maryland ratepayers, have suffered mightily from excessive electric rates. No opportunity to protect our people should be missed.
We thank you for your attention and urge you to continue in your important work.
Senators Currie, Frosh, Peters, Madaleno, Muse, Kramer, Pinsky, Raskin, Harringon, Lennett, & RosapepeFrom: Dereck Davis
And Rosapepe responded with this:
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 11:26 PM
To: Jim Rosapepe, State Legislators
Subject: RE: letter to PSC on Pepco and electric rates
Jim,
Thank you for the invitation to sign the letter below "supporting Governor O'Malley's efforts to reregulate electric rates". I appreciate your diligence and commitment to this most important issue facing our state. Respectfully, I have to decline this invitation on practical as well as philosophical grounds.
First of all, I strenuously disagree with your implied assertion that the enactment of SB 844 would lead to lower electric rates. Chairman Nazarian met with Delegate Brian McHale and myself on February 27th, immediately following the House floor session, to discuss this matter. During the course of this meeting, he very pointedly stated that even if we enacted this legislation "it would take years, if not decades, to fully reregulate" our electricity markets. He further stated that he could not guarantee that our constituents would realize lower rates in the near or the long term future. This admission was especially alarming to me because I had previously heard that it would cost approximately $16-20 billion to fully reregulate. As I know you are aware, utilities would be granted full cost recovery from the ratepayers for these new generation plants. That is a mighty big gamble for no guarantee of rate relief.
Secondly, I am confused by your statement that "Governor O'Malley has proposed conditioning approval of this transaction...". I may be misinformed but I thought that under the Public Utility Companies Article, this decision falls within the purview of the Maryland Public Service Commission. This may seem like a minor point to some but a significant part of the 2006 debate about electric rates centered on the lack of separation between the PSC and the Ehrlich Administration. Many Democrats, including both presiding officers, lamented the fact that there appeared to be a lack of independence being exhibited by an independent body. If what you are asserting is true, then isn't history just repeating itself? Shouldn't we allow the well-qualified, professional regulators to do their jobs without political interference? I am not suggesting we abdicate our responsibilities but by the same token, we should not over-extend our reach either.
Thirdly, I am extremely concerned about Maryland's business reputation. The General Assembly enacted SB 1013-08 after extended discussion among representatives of the governor, legislative leaders, PSC, and Constellation Energy Group(CEG). These discussions yielded numerous benefits for ratepayers within the Baltimore Gas & Electric service territory that totaled several hundred million dollars, including $18.6 million annually until 2016 for the decommissioning of Calvert Cliffs 1 and 2, a one time $187 million credit against residential customer electric bills, and $520 million from PSC Order 75757. It was understood by all parties that this would close the door on the 1999 matter and the state would move forward. It appears that just one year later, the spirit of that agreement is being violated.
In addition to the spirit of that agreement being violated, I am also taken aback by the methods we are employing relating to the CEG/EDF partnership. While I applaud the state's unrelenting commitment to affordable electricity, the end does not justify the means. Our methods and constantly changing energy policies are having a chilling effect on our utilities' bond ratings.
One question I have that no one has answered is what happens if this transaction doesn't go through? The proposed third nuclear reactor at Calvert Cliffs is a major part of the state's future energy plans. If EDF pulls out of the deal or if the PSC denies the deal because certain concessions were not made, Constellation is back in a very tenuous financial position. Not only will this major component of our future energy plan be in jeopardy, a major employer in the state might go bankrupt. Who's going to accept responsibility for all those lost jobs and tax revenue?
Finally, I am interested in knowing the basis of your often stated opinion that Constellation "was the major local proponent of deregulation in 1999." With all due respect colleague, you were not a member of the General Assembly when this discussion took place. You resigned from the House of Delegates effective December 31, 1997, to become Ambassador to Romania. During your ambassadorship, I was a member of the House committee with jurisdiction (Environmental Matters), I served on the legislative taskforce that studied the issue, and I participated in many of the discussions involving the various details. Trust me when I tell you that the utilities, including BG&E, were opposed to changing the current system. They talked a brave game about not being afraid of competition but the fact of the matter is who would want to change a system where they were guaranteed cost recovery for their expenses as well as a guaranteed rate of return? The only entity that was really pushing this policy change was a multi-national corporation based in Houston, Texas.
The House Economic Matters Committee is diligently reviewing all the relevant issues and is committed to finding the best course of action. If the facts support reregulating, then we will lead the charge in that direction. If the facts do not support it, no amount of political pressure will lead us to implement a wrong decision.
DereckFrom: Jim Rosapepe
In reading the above exchange, we are struck by the frequency with which Rosapepe targets Constellation. The energy giant is certainly unpopular and is therefore an inviting political punching bag. That fact may count far more with the politicians than Dereck Davis's concerns over financial issues and business reputation. We are not as cynical as Blair Lee on the political positioning with regards to Constellation, but this exchange makes us wonder.
Date: Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 2:27 PM
Subject: PSC letter -- response to Chairman Davis' message
To: Dereck Davis
cc: State Legislators
Dereck --
Thanks so much for your long and thoughtful letter. Very impressive work -- and at 11:26 at night!
I look forward to discussing these issues in detail with you, as we did early in the last session. It's terrific that the committee is taking up the issue in preparation for the next session.
For now, I'll just briefly respond to each of your points and questions.
First, I agree there are no guarantees in this life -- or in reregulation of electric rates. But Maryland tested regulation for decades and it produced reliable electricity and reasonable rates. Proponents of deregulation promised lower rates and more supply. Instead, in ten years, rates have gone up more than 70% and no new major generation has been built in the state. The governor believes that increasing supply with regulation will hold down rates in the long run, based on the simple economics of supply and demand. I agree with him.
Second, I agree with you that the PSC has the regulatory responsibility to approve or disapprove the EDF investment. But, as you know, the governor has provided strong leadership for consumers by making the state an official "intervenor" in the case and has proposed to Constellation a generous compromise to assure that the benefits of potential PSC approval are shared with struggling ratepayers, not just with Constellation CEO Mayo Shattuck, who is in line for an $87 million payout. The governor's proposal is available on the web and has been widely reported in the press.
Third, I share your concern about Maryland's business reputation. Deregulation made our state less competitive for all kinds of businesses, as well as residential consumers. Lower, more stable energy costs are always a competitive advantage for a business and for a state. The governor has proposed a business-like approach to Constellation's request for the PSC to allow it to be bailed out by EDF. As you know, the management of Constellation almost bankrupted the company, as so many Wall Street banks did, by taking bad financial risks in pursuit of excessive executive bonuses. Consumers have paid the price in higher electric rates. The governor is just seeking a fair deal for our constituents.
Fourth, if EDF decides to withdraw their offer, other investors would no doubt come behind them. As a result of President Obama's efforts, the financial markets have materially improved since last September. But, even at that time, when Constellation faced ratings downgrades because of mismanagement, it had TWO offers -- one from Warren Buffett and one from a consortium of EDF, KKR, and TPG.
Fifth, I agree that I was in Romania, not in Annapolis, when deregulation was passed and that ENRON was the major out-of-state proponent of deregulation. The basis of the letter's statement that Constellation was a supporter of deregulation in 1999 is the recollections of others who were there then, including signers of the letter. We can agree that memories of people of good will can differ. Nonetheless, I'm sure we can also agree that Constellation is today the state's biggest and most aggressive protector of deregulation.
Thanks for your serious attention to this issue and I look forward to working with you on it.
-- Jim
If the politicians really want to save us money, they should send our analysis of how we can save double digits off our power generation bill to their constituents right now. That blog post is one of the most popular items we have ever published.
Individual consumer action may not get politicians re-elected, but it can save Marylanders lots of money. Everyone in Annapolis should be asking themselves which of the two is more important.
Who Are You?
If you are a regular reader, you know that we go absolutely banana-cakes about statistics on this blog. And so over the past month, we have applied our preoccupation with numbers to a new subject: you.
Since this blog’s inception, we have used Sitemeter’s free statistical service to track our visits and page views. But that service, while issuing monthly counts of visits and views, is rather limited in giving us information about our readers. So we purchased a premium account from Statcounter on May 30 which gave us much more feedback about you. And now we are sharing what we have learned.
First, let’s keep in mind the definitions of site visits and page views. A site visit is a series of page views by one person with no more than 30 minutes in between page views. A page view is simply a hit on a particular page. There are always more page views than site visits because many visitors look at more than one page. On MPW, visitors usually average between 1.6 and 2.0 page views per visit.
Even though Sitemeter and Statcounter use similar definitions of site visits, they produce very different results. In June, Sitemeter stated that we had 14,976 visits. Statcounter said that we had 17,108 visits – 14.2% more. The two services were much closer on page views, with Sitemeter reporting 27,705 and Statcounter reporting 27,637 – only a 0.2% difference. Neither service tracks Google Reader subscribers to our content, who number 178 at the moment. All of our statistics thereby underestimate our readership.
This blog’s traffic is cyclical. We hit peaks in the spring of 2008, October and November of 2008, and in the months leading up to the 2009 District 4 special election. Those points correspond to regular sessions of the state legislature and elections. We typically experience lulls in the summer, when state and county news slows down and many readers go on vacation. But the long-term trend is unquestionably up. In June 2009, Sitemeter’s visit count (14,976) was 827% higher than in June 2007 (1,615).
Following is Statcounter’s report on our page views in June 2009. The site traffic at this time of year is about average for us because it does not coincide with a legislative session or an election, but it does not fall during prime vacation time. This data is far from exhaustive. For example, we cannot detect the identity of individual users, but we can detect the identities of some employers and institutions. This is about as close as we can get to answering the question of who MPW readers are.
Page View Distribution by County and State
Bear in mind that many people log in through their employers’ computers and that will affect this distribution. Many of the District of Columbia and Virginia views are probably coming from Marylanders who work in those places. Also, some employers with offices in this area may be branch offices of companies whose Internet service is provided in other states.
Montgomery County: 43.7%
Prince George’s County: 6.4%
Anne Arundel County: 5.7%
Baltimore City: 2.8%
Howard County: 1.5%
Baltimore County: 1.2%
Other Maryland: 2.8%
District of Columbia: 15.6%
Virginia: 6.1%
Other United States: 12.3%
International: 2.1%
Top Localities by Page Views
1. District of Columbia: 15.6%
2. Silver Spring: 14.8%
3. Rockville: 11.1%
4. Bethesda: 4.1%
5. Annapolis: 3.5%
6. Gaithersburg: 3.4%
7. Baltimore: 2.8%
8. Chevy Chase: 2.2%
9. Germantown: 2.1%
10. Arlington, VA: 2.1%
Top Internet Service Providers of Users by Page Views
1. Individuals with Verizon Accounts: 26.7%
2. Individuals with Comcast Accounts: 19.8%
3. Montgomery County Government: 7.1%
4. Individuals with RCN Accounts: 3.6%
5. State of Maryland: 3.1%
6. Individuals with Comcast Business Accounts: 2.1%
7. Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission: 1.3%
8. Individuals with AOL Accounts: 1.3%
9. Individuals with Research in Motion Accounts: 1.1%
10. The Washington Post: 1.0%
Most-Viewed Blog Posts in June
In June, 55.5% of our page views were direct entries onto the home page. The remainder were views of specific pages. These pages received the most views during the month, meaning they were the hottest ones on this blog.
1. Young Guns of MoCo, Part Two
2. Young Guns of MoCo, Part Four
3. Ten Random Questions
4. Is Leggett Undermining Navarro on Day One?
5. Kagan Sweetens Up District 17
6. Young Guns of MoCo, Part Three
7. What ACT is Not Telling You About Rich Madaleno
8. Young Guns of MoCo, Part One
9. Big Daddy Spanks Jack Johnson Over WSSC
10. Maryland Politics Watch: WSSC
Oldies But Goodies
These blog posts were written in 2008 or earlier but still received at least two views per day in June.
1. The Hucker Ballot
2. On Raskin v. Ruben in District 20
3. Who the Frick is Bill?
4. MoCo Most Influential 2008
The Most Downloaded Graphic in June
Now was this a big surprise? The House Majority Leader is almost as kind to this blog as MoCo’s cultural hero, Delegate Saqib Ali.
The user distribution was fairly stable throughout the month, but the specific pages’ popularity varied quite a bit. The Whispers of the At-Large race series once occupied a number of the top spots but was blown away by the Young Guns. We’ll report back on July’s hottest posts in a couple weeks!
Star Chambers of Annapolis
Maryland’s Open Meetings Act, originally passed in 1977, is one of the state’s greatest laws. The act requires multi-member public bodies with a quorum to open their meetings to the citizenry and give them reasonable advance notice of their date, location and time. The statute is generally observed at the state, county and municipal levels with occasional violations subject to investigation by a compliance board. But there is at least one institution in the state that often violates the spirit of the law with no consequence:
The committees of the General Assembly.
Maryland’s General Assembly operates under a strong committee system. Every state legislator is assigned to one committee. That committee’s Chair runs the meetings and schedules consideration and votes on bills. Some committees have sub-committees with their own Chairs. The committees are the location of much of the action in the legislature. They are where the bills are studied and debated, testimony is heard and amendments are usually considered (although floor amendments are also possible). Bills pass, change and fail in committee. If a bill cannot emerge from its committee with a favorable report, it almost always dies.
Technically speaking, committee meetings are open to the public. But some committees discourage attendance at their work sessions, especially by bill advocates. It is common knowledge in the capital’s lobbying community that some Chairs will not hold votes or discussion on bills if their advocates are watching. There is never any official admonition, but merely a long-standing culture that direct observation of the legislative process is discouraged. One lobbyist tells us, “Anyone who operates in Annapolis does not recognize the difference between discouraged and forbidden.”
Those who violate the informal rule are sometimes met with an angry stare, a refusal to consider the bill in front of the violator or even a dead bill. One legislator laughs, “You can come, but you’ll be punished. They will exact street justice on you! It’s a control mechanism they use to allow bills to be killed without paying a political price.” Two old Annapolis veterans tell us it has been this way “forever.”
Another tactic used to discourage observers is snap meetings. Some committee Chairs announce their meetings on the floor, which is open to the public, but do it on short notice. Others just do it on the fly. Out-of-the-way rooms may be picked and agendas may or may not be released. Bill advocates sometimes do not know when their bills are considered and discover their fate after the fact. Subcommittee details can be even harder to discover. While committee votes are recorded (but not released on the Internet), subcommittee votes are not. Part of the lack of notice is due to the madhouse quality of some periods of the General Session, especially near the end. But some Chairs make no effort to inform the public of their committees’ activities ahead of time.
The consequences of access problems are significant. Committee votes may be recorded but deliberations are not. Lobbyists and advocates cannot witness the give and take between legislators as they discuss a bill. As one lobbyist puts it, “You don’t know who screwed you.” One legislator refers to the Chair’s “drawer,” a black hole in which doomed bills are deposited without the knowledge of their advocates. Another legislator tells us, “We have an open meetings act in Maryland for a reason and the committees should comply with its provisions. The unwritten policy of discouraging members of the public from watching voting sessions is more about protecting weak, spineless committee members than it is about serving any legitimate public interest.”
Not all committees operate in this way. We hear that some of the more open ones include Senate Finance (chaired by Senator Mac Middleton), Senate Budget and Taxation (chaired by Senator Ulysses Currie) and House Ways and Means (chaired by Delegate Sheila Hixson). Montgomery County Delegation meetings are open to the public and can be well-attended. The press go wherever they want, assuming they can find out where the committee meetings are and what they are working on.
Delegate Saqib Ali (D-39) was the only legislator to comment on these practices on-the-record. When I asked him whether some committees discouraged public attendance, he replied:It is true. It is one of the irksome things about Annapolis. At least now the House (but not the Senate) make videos of bill hearings available over the Intranet. But still, voting sessions are not available. And the presence of advocates or interested parties during voting sessions can often get a bill killed.
Another example for the legislature is the Montgomery County Council. All council and committee meeting agendas are posted on the council’s website, often a week or more in advance. All staff memos and documents are also posted on the website. Members of the public are never discouraged from attending. A bill advocate can follow legislation through committee all the way to the final vote with no pushback. It is simply the culture of the place.
We ought to be encouraging transparency and accountability, not discouraging it. The New York State Senate just launched a state-of-the-art new website that allows unprecedented public participation in the legislative process. We would do well to emulate them in this regard.... and that's about the ONLY thing we should copy about the New York State Senate!!
Ultimately, this issue comes down to whether the General Assembly will obey the spirit of Maryland’s Open Meetings Act and adhere to the values of free and fair democracy. Running a committee is a challenging job, especially in the last chaotic weeks of a General Session. Last-minute changes and quick meetings are inevitable. But the committee Chairs, and their supervisors in leadership, must make every effort to protect the right of the public to watch them deliberate at every level.
Dear readers, we are going to stay on this issue until we see some improvement. The state legislators should learn to enjoy the sunshine because, ray by ray, it will come in.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Beautiful Takedown of Steele
Post columnist Dana Milbank executed a beautiful takedown of Michael Steele today. You just have to appreciate this for the sheer artistry of it!
Lisa Fadden on Political Pulse on Channel 16 TV in Montgomery County
Lisa Fadden, the Vice-President of the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce, appears on the Political Pulse political talk show on:
Tues, July 21st at 9:30 p.m.
Wed, July 22nd at 6:30 p.m.
Thurs, July 23rd at 9:00 p.m.
Fri-Sun (July 24th-26th) at 6:00 p.m.
Ms. Fadden presents the Chamber's positions and takes tough questions on tax, transportation and budget issues in Montgomery County and discusses other matters as well.
Political Pulse is on Channel 16 TV in Montgomery County.
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.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?
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.
Snippety-Snip!
Michael Laris, the Post's new MoCo reporter, has written a delightful account of snip-snipping between the County Council and the MoCo Delegation. The genteel Ann Marimow would never have written such a gossipy piece. We think Laris is off to a great start and look forward to more guilty pleasures like this tidbit!
Marye Wells-Harley Named to Planning Board
Former Prince George's County Director of Parks and Recreation Marye Wells-Harley has been named to the Montgomery County Planning Board by a 7-1 vote. Council Member George Leventhal voted for Roberto Pinero. Wells-Harley received two votes when she applied for the Planning Board last year. She is a Silver Spring resident and was named one of Maryland's Top 100 Women by the Daily Record in 2004.
This may be the end of the road for Alan Bowser, who has unsuccessfully applied for the Planning Board this year and in 2006, 2007 and 2008. He also unsuccesfully applied for a WSSC appointment in 2007. When the Post's Ann Marimow reported on Bowser's failure to get the appointment last year, her Maryland Moment entry was deluged with angry anonymous comments slamming the Council for not appointing him.
D.C. Blog Misleads MoCo Residents on I-270
DuPont Circle resident Dave Alpert, founder of the pro-transit blog Greater Greater Washington, has launched a campaign against the widening of I-270. We usually agree with smart-growth advocates like Alpert and we admire much of his past work. But this time, he is basing the bulk of his case on misinformation. And as much as we dislike congestion and sprawl, we dislike misleading arguments even more.
Alpert’s fundamental premise is that the $3.8 billion cost of widening I-270 could be used instead for transit. The problem with this reasoning is that the extra lanes under consideration for most of the road’s length will probably charge tolls. Under the option preferred by the Montgomery County Council’s Transportation, Infrastructure, Energy and Environment Committee, those lanes would be express toll lanes, which require vehicles to pay tolls that increase in times of great highway demand. Free-flowing toll lanes attract drivers who pay tolls until the speeds in those lanes fall to the same level as the speeds in general purpose lanes. Those tolls can be used to pay off toll-backed bonds, which can fund at least part of the cost of the project.
Greater Greater Washington calls the I-270 proposal “ICC 2.0.” In a prior post, we described how the ICC was financed:The project’s total cost is budgeted at $2.4 billion. Of that amount, $1.23 billion is from toll-backed revenue bonds, $750 million is from GARVEE bonds (which are backed by future federal aid), $264.9 million is from Maryland’s general fund, $180 million is from Maryland’s Transportation Trust Fund (TTF) and $18.5 million is from direct federal aid. That means that just $463.4 million, or 19% of the project’s cost, is coming from direct expenditures. The remainder consists of borrowed money (though some of that will draw from future federal aid).
So in the case of the ICC, over 80% of the money could not have been used for transit projects. While no one has yet proposed a financing plan for I-270, there is little reason to believe that it will not also include toll-backed bonds and highway GARVEE bonds – neither of which can be put towards transit.
Even more specious is the argument that the I-270 funding can be used to build a light-rail Corridor Cities Transitway. As we have previously explained, light rail on the CCT currently fails the federal cost-effectiveness test, thereby greatly reducing the project’s chances of obtaining federal funding. The only chance for improving the CCT’s cost effectiveness lies in accounting for increased density from the new Gaithersburg West master plan, but Alpert opposes that plan.
So Greater Greater Washington would have us believe that I-270’s toll-based funding – which after all, would not exist without a toll project – can be diverted to a rail project which probably cannot gain federal approval without increased density that they oppose. That is at best a failure of logic. At worst, it is misinformation. In either case, it is a poor basis to oppose the project.
The best arguments against the ICC were that it would lead to environmental damage, neighborhood destruction and auto-centric development. Whether they were right or wrong, those arguments were at least intellectually honest and they can be used fairly against the widening of I-270. The worst argument against the ICC was that its funding could be spent dollar-for-dollar on other projects. That claim was false as applied to the vast majority of the road’s financing, but opponents used it anyway. Greater Greater Washington’s campaign against I-270 follows that tradition.
So if you are inclined to oppose toll lanes on I-270, stand against them for honest reasons. Don’t assume that blocking road projects will help us get more transit, or that Montgomery County will turn into one big DuPont Circle as a result.
Monday, July 20, 2009
MTA Backs Off Spying (Updated)
The Maryland Transit Administration has told the Baltimore Sun that it has pulled back its audio surveillance proposal. Sun reporter Michael Dresser credits MPW guest blogger Paul Gordon for helping to generate this decision. Thanks, Paul and Mike!
Update: The Washington Post's article on this fails to mention that MPW broke this story and that the Sun's poking around caused MTA to withdraw its proposal. What class they have!
Chamber: Delay Vote on CCT, Support Toll Lanes on I-270
Following is the letter from the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce to the County Council.
July 20, 2009
Phil Andrews
President, Montgomery County Council
100 Maryland Avenue
Rockville, Maryland 20850
Re: Corridor Cities Transitway and I-270 Recommendations
Dear President Andrews and Councilmembers:
As you prepare to make your recommendation to the Governor regarding the preferred alternatives for the I-270 Multimodal corridor study, the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce would like to take this opportunity to urge you to act in the best interest for the future economic development and vibrancy of this community. We must make wise investments in our infrastructure that will provide adequate support for our future generations of businesses and residents to thrive.
Corridor Cities Transitway Mode Selection: As we have emphasized in our previous testimony, light rail transit along the CCT alignment provides the strongest opportunity for economic development, and a permanent sense of transit commitment to the I-270 corridor. While we understand that Bus Rapid Transit may be the option that ultimately meets FTA standards for cost effectiveness, we do not believe this decision can adequately be made today without the benefit of approved master plans in Germantown and Gaithersburg West. The Maryland Transit Administration will study the impact of these increased densities on ridership regardless of the Council’s recommendation, which will delay the project 9 to 12 months. Therefore, no urgency exists for the Council to make a recommendation to the Governor until that data is presented. The Council should postpone making a recommendation on mode choice to the Governor until the ridership data includes critical master plans that could change the ridership dramatically. If the Council feels a recommendation must be made at this time, it should be a recommendation for light rail, demonstrating a commitment to making transit work in this very important growth center of the County.
I-270: We continue to urge the Council to select highway option 7, which provides for two additional express toll lanes in each direction on interstate 270. As you know, I-270 is a corridor planned for major job growth, and is already one of the most congested roads in the region. Companies cannot be expected to want to continue to locate in the I-270 Corridor as it simply grows more congested every day, and their employees are forced to sit in traffic. As the State Highway Administration informed the Council’s T&E Committee, widening I-270 will not only positively impact mobility, but will also positively impact the environment, contributing to a net improvement in air quality when cars aren’t spending time idling in congestion. The express toll lanes as provided in option 7 are not only needed for our future, they are long overdue. We urge you to move forward with option 7 so that future companies will select a vibrant I-270 corridor to be a part of, rather than avoid Montgomery County because of our traffic congestion challenges that negatively impact our quality of life.
Sincerely,
Georgette Godwin
President and CEO
Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce
Smart Growth Groups Oppose I-270 Widening
Following is the press release from Action Committee for Transit, the Audubon Naturalist Society, the Coalition for Smarter Growth and 1000 Friends of Maryland.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 20, 2009
Ben Ross, President
Action Committee for Transit
ben@disposalsafety.com
Dolores Milmoe, Conservation Associate
Audubon Naturalist Society
dmilmoe@audubonnaturalist.org
Cheryl Cort, Policy Director
Coalition for Smarter Growth
cheryl@smartergrowth.net
Dru Schmidt-Perkins, Executive Director
1000 Friends of Maryland
dru@friendsofmd.org
Proposed $4 Billion I-270 Expansion at Odds with Montgomery County’s Smart Growth and Climate Goals
The Montgomery County Planning Board recently recommended that taxpayers spend $4 billion on widening I-270 while it voted to deny public funding to a $70 million plan to rebuild Rockville Pike near White Flint Mall that would turn the highway into a pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly boulevard with center bus lanes, and would support a compact, sustainable redevelopment plan.
“We urge the County Council to reject the Planning Board’s misguided transportation recommendations, the result of which would be more cars on the highways and more traffic jams,” said Ben Ross, President of Action Committee for Transit, a Montgomery County citizens group. “The council should ask the State to evaluate some of the many possible transportation improvements for the corridor that don't involve more highway lanes. We cannot pave our way out of traffic congestion.”
Dolores Milmoe, Conservation Associate for the Audubon Naturalist Society, agrees. “Rather than waste $4 billion widening I-270,” said Milmoe, “the county should invest in light rail from Shady Grove to Kentlands; a fast, direct rail connection from Shady Grove to Germantown and Clarksburg; and all-day, two-way MARC service from Union Station to Frederick and Harper's Ferry.” (The latter is already in the state's plans, but remains unfunded.)
The groups, joined by other transportation activists in our area also prefer that part of the money go toward rebuilding Route 355.
“We support turning Rockville Pike into a walkable urban boulevard, beginning in the White Flint area and stretching to Rockville and Gaithersburg,” said Ross. “The people-first approach that has been designed for White Flint would serve as a model to improve accessibility along the rest of Route 355 in the future.”
“At what point in our history would the widening ever stop?” asked Cheryl Cort, Policy Director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, about the Planning Board’s I-270 recommendation. “Meeting the county and state smart growth goals, and reducing traffic, energy use and climate emissions, demands a very different and comprehensive approach -- making transit and walkable streets the top priority.”
"We urge the County Council to reject the Planning Board's misguided transportation recommendations and to ask the County and State to instead evaluate and adopt a comprehensive set of transportation and land use solutions for the corridor that don't involve never-ending highway widening,” said Milmoe. “We want the Council to make a statement against lanes as the solution to the corridor's needs and to adopt transportation solutions in keeping with their expressed commitments to fight climate change, reduce energy use, and implement smarter growth.”
The groups also endorsed the Sierra Club’s recent letter to the Montgomery County Council. The letter provides additional detail as to why all of the groups request a more comprehensive examination of alternatives.
Sierra Club Opposes I-270 Widening
Following is a letter from the Montgomery County Sierra Club to the County Council opposing I-270 widening.
July 19, 2009
Dear Councilmember ,
Re: Montgomery County Sierra Club Statement on I-270 / Corridor Cities Transitway (CCT) Project Planning Study
The plans for widening I-270 reflect a business-as-usual philosophy, a throw-back to a 1950s “roads first” approach rather than a forward-looking one that emphasizes transit and smart growth. We know now that increasing road capacity inevitably leads to greater car use, and then to car-centric residential and commercial construction alongside the new capacity.
We do recognize that I-270 is congested as far out as Frederick, including traffic caused by diffuse employment centers in Montgomery County. But road widening is not the way to solve it and the options the Council is being asked to choose among represent a false choice. Right now you can either choose the straw-man “no-build” option or select one of the remaining options that differ from each other largely in how many new lanes of highway are built and whether any of the lanes will charge dynamic tolls or not. The impact on I-270 congestion of making improvements to public transportation is limited to looking at the Corridor Cities Transitway. The possibility that more extensive and robust additions to the County’s public transit system (over and above the CCT) might be as effective at reducing traffic congestion on I-270 as adding more lanes is not even considered.
The consequences of reaching a wrong decision within the confines of a false choice are serious. The financial cost of any of the alternatives is in the billions of dollars. Just as important are the environmental costs of choosing an alternative that will add several additional lanes of traffic traveling the length of the county.
In order to escape the confines of the false choice now before you, it is necessary to create and then analyze the impact on congestion of a comprehensive transit alternative serving the Corridor Cities and Frederick County. Such an alternative may cost less than widening I-270. A comprehensive transit solution would have a smaller environmental impact. It would support concentrated development at transit stations instead of promoting car-dependent, low-density development. It has the potential to help Montgomery County achieve the 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions called for in county legislation passed in 2008—something that having additional lanes of traffic on I-270 will never do.
We ask that you not select a Locally Preferred Alternative at the July 21st County Council meeting. Instead we request you postpone selecting a Locally Preferred Alternative until a comprehensive transit option is developed and its impact on projected congestion on I-270 is fully analyzed and compared to I-270 widening alternatives.
This is an opportunity for Montgomery County and Maryland to move away from the unsustainable approach of always responding to congestion by building more lanes of highway. At a time when destructive climate change seems increasingly likely in the not-so-distant future and rising oil prices affect our economic welfare today, we truly are at a fork in the road.
Sincerely,
David Hauck
Chair
Sierra Club, Montgomery County Group
301-270-5826
I-270 Opponents Risk Traffic Nightmare
By Richard Parsons.
The Montgomery County Council will soon have another opportunity to comment on long-standing regional transportation plans to add new HOV or managed-toll lanes along heavily congested sections of I-270 in Montgomery County. This is part of a region-wide effort to create a coherent HOV/express-toll lane network to help move interstate and regional through-traffic more efficiently on our major highways and to free up more capacity for local trips. The Council is now considering what comments to submit on the Alternatives Analysis/Environmental Assessment (AA/EA), the latest phase of the ongoing “I-270/US 15 Multimodal Corridor Study.” This study, which has been going on for over a decade, is examining the impact of adding up to two new lanes on I-270, from Shady Grove Road to Frederick, and the Corridor Cities Transitway (CCT), as either a light-rail or bus-rapid transit line from the Shady Grove Metro station north to Clarksburg.
The results of the AA/EA study clearly show the need for both the CCT and the new lanes on I-270. Together, they bring about a dramatic reduction in traffic congestion and the improvements, even compared to current conditions, will last all the way out to 2030 and beyond. The results also provide an alarming look at just how bad traffic conditions on I-270 would be without the new lanes (whether mass transit service is expanded or not).
The bottom line: Traffic conditions on I-270 under the “no-build” scenario would range from “horrific” to a full-blown “traffic nightmare” during both rush-hours. However, with a combination of new managed lanes and better transit service from a light-rail CCT, we can avoid this. These findings are not new: The Planning Board’s TPR Report reached exactly the same conclusions back in 2002, which is why this project was added to the County’s 10-year Transportation Plan at that time. This latest AA/EA document, on which the Council is now being asked to comment, confirms why the widening of I-270 was adopted by the Council without much controversy. All you need to do is look at the numbers from the table below to understand why:
Dramatic Traffic Relief
What jumps out of this table is the dramatic traffic relief these improvements deliver: A 61% reduction in congestion, and several segments that move from stop-and-go conditions at 5-10 mph (without the widening) to freeway speeds of 55 mph and above (with the new lanes). Overall, travel time is cut by 55% to 60% and travel speed increases by 70% to 87%. When travel speeds improve this significantly, not only do you help people get where they are going much faster (a good thing, last I checked), but you also save tons of wasted fuel and unnecessary auto emissions from over 200,000 cars per day stuck idling in stop-and-go conditions, which is the worst possible outcome for the environment (and exactly what the no-build Alternative produces).
State officials who testified before the T&E Committee indicated that most of these positive traffic relief impacts are due to the added capacity on I-270, but the addition of a dedicated alignment for the CCT, which is also included in both build-alternatives, also helps to a smaller degree. The CCT provides a valuable alternative to being stuck in traffic on I-270, but by itself, it does not deliver anything like these dramatic reductions in traffic or even keep things from getting dramatically worse over time. The best solution is clearly doing both, based on the study data.
How Bad it will Get Without the New Lanes
To drive home the point about just how bad conditions would be in 2030 under the No-build Alternative, and how much better travel conditions would be in 2030 with either Alternatives 7A or 7B, Table 2 breaks out the data on “Levels of Service” (LOS) and “Volume to Capacity” ratios (V/C). V/C ratios over 1.0 generally mean traffic is severely congested with actual volumes that exceed the design capacity of the roadway. The “No-build” shows several segments in the range of 1.31 to 1.57 in Montgomery County, which essentially means stop-and-go conditions and long delays. In fact, as you can see below, without the widening, the entire length of I-270 in Montgomery County would be either at LOS “E” or “F” and some segments are very deep into “F.” You can see the difference that adding two new lanes and the CCT will make very clearly in this table:
Adding new lanes makes a lot of these red segments turn green. A similar change happens in the PM rush-hour.
New Lanes Provide Enhanced Transit Service that Complements the CCT
A key point missing from this discussion has to do with transit service, both through the length of the CCT alignment from Shady Grove to Clarksburg, and from Clarksburg north to Frederick. The new lane capacity, especially in Alternative 7A, which provides barrier-separated express lanes, allows you to vastly improve transit service throughout the corridor. With that new capacity, you can run fast express busses from Frederick all the way down to key points like Clarksburg, Germantown, Metropolitan Grove and Shady Grove. With this plus the more local service provided along the dedicated CCT alignment, between Shady Grove and Clarksburg, you have a very robust, effective and efficient transit system offering both local and express service. Transit travel times from Clarksburg to Shady Grove drop by 40% under this scenario. But without the extra lanes on 270, you can forget about transit to Frederick, and you make "express bus" on 270 an oxymoron. And for those who have not been paying attention to the last two decades of studies on this point, rail to Frederick is not a viable option. Not now, not 20 years from now, not 40 years from now, maybe not ever. The numbers could not be clearer.
If the County Council wants to be serious about expanding transit service in this key smart-growth corridor, the plan the Council’s T&E Committee approved is the right approach, with one exception: They should have stood their ground for a light-rail CCT instead of Bus-Rapid-Transit (BRT). The state is going to have new numbers this Fall which may boost the cost-effectiveness data enough to win federal approval for light-rail, and the full Council should hold firm for light rail.
270 is Critical to a Sustainable Economic Future
The difference this project will make to Montgomery County employers located in the I-270 corridor is hard to overstate. It literally will make or break the I-270 corridor and its ability to attract and retain knowledge workers. The kind of traffic conditions shown in Table 2 for the no-build alternative will be the death-knell of our leading employment corridor. Those conditions are simply not sustainable, environmentally or economically. Without these new lanes, we will literally choke the life out of Maryland’s leading job creation engine, the I-270 Technology Corridor.
This would be the opposite of smart growth. Maryland’s landmark 1997 Smart Growth Act specifically calls for transportation improvements to be focused on limited-access highways and transit facilities that link smart growth centers together in existing, already developed corridors like this one. Both the CCT and the new managed lanes on I-270 would clearly fall within the letter and the intent of Maryland’s Smart Growth Act, as every one of the major job and population centers that would be served by this project has already been designated as a “Priority Funding Area” (the technical term for smart growth centers in Maryland).
THE REAL CHOICE HERE:
We all know travel conditions on most of I-270 will become virtually impassable without this project. The study results clearly show that both the new lanes and the CCT are needed. This is why Roger Berliner (hardly a pro-highway kind of guy) and Nancy Floreen (a huge supporter of the CCT) voted to support both the 270 widening and the CCT on the T&E Committee – a vote that was driven by some very compelling data.
The only real question before the Council is which “build-alternative” to support. Alternative 3 is recommended by the County Executive. Alternative 7A provides the most traffic relief and the greatest transit service in the corridor. The “no-build” scenario is simply not an option. Alternative 7A appears to be the best option based on the traffic relief it provides and the superior local and express transit service it provides for the entire corridor.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Buying Local in Maryland
By Eric Luedtke.
Maryland’s Buy Local Challenge week starts July 18th and runs through July 26th – and if you haven’t had a chance to try local food, now’s the time. The premise is simple; just eat one thing from a local farm every day during the week. That’s cake. I mean absolute cake. And once you’ve tried it and found out how simple it is, and how much great local produce there is, my guess is you’ll do it a lot more often than one week in July.
Some of you may already be pretty familiar with the local food movement. It’s been around a long time, but has absolutely exploded over the last couple of years. In almost a perfect storm for the food industry, concerns about the chemicals and processing in store-bought food (see the movie Super Size Me if you haven’t yet), increasing recognition of how long-distance conventional agriculture can contribute to global warming, and the Food Network driven obsession with new and unique food experiences have combined to seriously ramp up the popularity of local foods. And the market has responded – there are now successful farmer’s markets in pretty much every corner of the county, and shares of Community Supported Agriculture operations sell out early each spring. [Pause for definition: Community Supported Agriculture, CSA for short, is where a consumer buys a ‘share’ of a farmer’s produce, the consumer gets a box of fresh, interesting produce each week and the farmer has a guaranteed income through good and bad years.]
I’ve become sort of an expert on living off of local food over the last year. My wife Emily and I are always up for a challenge, and last year after reading a book called The 100 Mile Diet about a couple’s attempts to live entirely off of local food in Vancouver, we decided on a bit of a whim to try out the 100 mile diet for ourselves. For about eight months, everything we ate with only a few exceptions came from within 100 miles of our home in Burtonsville. In some ways, it was a lot easier than we imagined. There are a tremendous number of local food producers within our 100 mile radius, which includes most of Maryland and large sections of northern Virginia and southern Pennsylvania. For practical reasons, we made some basic exceptions. We had a social rule, because when you’re going over to someone’s house for dinner it isn’t exactly polite to refuse to eat the food they make. We made exceptions for coffee (which neither of us can live without), spices (who wants bland food?), and baby food and formula (although we began making a lot of our own baby food out of local produce, and ended up using almost no store-bought food for Colin, our now 16 month old son). And still sticking with the spirit of the hundred mile diet, we ate local food as much as possible in places we went, which meant that the only time we had orange juice during that eight months was when we visited my in-laws in Florida.
But it absolutely forced us to rethink the way we eat – something we had taken for granted. We’ve always tried to buy good organic produce as much as possible, but eating entirely local forced us to give up the idea of instant gratification in food. Our modern food system can get us pretty much anything at any time we want – Strawberries in September, Broccoli in January – without paying much attention to what’s in season. On a purely local diet, we quickly found that we couldn’t have anything we wanted when we wanted it. Our angst about that lasted about a week, until we figured out that it’s pretty easy to preserve foods at home. We froze berries, corn, beets, green beans, and local meats. We bought a water-bath canner, which is surprisingly simple to use, and canned our own peaches, plums, tomatoes, tomato sauce, pickles, jam and jelly, applesauce, and rumtopf (a German preserve saved for winter where summer fruits are preserved in rum and sugar). We even air dried our own chilies – though if we had only had the good sense to spend a few bucks on a food dehydrator we could have made our own dried fruits and jerky as well. It also took some time to figure out how to work substitutions – you can use honey in place of sugar in some recipes, some local fruits in place of citrus, etc.
And we researched. A lot. If you look hard enough, the internet has a lot of information about where to get local foods. I like to bake and we ran out of our existing flour pretty quickly. It took us an exhaustive internet search to find Wade’s Mill, which is the closest working flour mill in our region, milling almost entirely local grain. We found and started going to farmer’s markets in Olney and Silver Spring. We signed up for a CSA – at the time we used Sandy Spring CSA but switched to Evensong Farms this year because we liked that the farmer there tries out more heirloom varieties of vegetables and unique things we hadn’t tried much before. We started going to pick your own places like Butler’s Orchard in Germantown, Larriland in Howard County, and Blueberry Gardens in Ashton. We learned about new foods we hadn’t tried but which we now love like ramps (a wild leek that tastes intensely of garlic and onions), gooseberries (which our son loves), and stinging nettle (which tastes a little like spinach and obviously needs to be handled very carefully). Even with that experimentation, there are local foods we never got the chance to try, like paw paw, a local native plant whose fruit supposedly tastes tropical. And we got to know producers personally, which was by far the best part about our experiment. Farmers are great people.
We gave up on the experiment mid-winter, when it became clear that we hadn’t preserved nearly enough food to last us through. But a lot of the habits have stuck with us, and the vast majority of our food is still local. We’ve become sort of local food evangelists among our friends, giving away our preserves and telling them about how fun pick-your-own is while they stare at us oddly. But, joking aside, a lot of people we know have started getting into local food as well, and all over the country. It’s an exciting time to be trying it out. In any case, one local food per day over the next week shouldn’t be too difficult, and I encourage you to give it a try. I’ve included some more links below to help you get started.
Farmer’s Market Directory: be sure to ask the farmer if food is local or organic – not all farmer’s market products are.
Pick Your Own Directory
The Montgomery County Farm Directory: a big pdf
USDA Guide to Home Food Preservation
Seasonal Food Calendar
Some of our favorite producers (not all are organic growers):
Apples – Heyser Farms (also carries local eggs and dairy, though not all produce is local)
Cheese – Firefly Farms
Flour – Wade’s Mill
Honey – The Bee Folks
Produce – Evensong Farm
Produce – Charlie Koiner
Thanksgiving Turkey – Maple Lawn Farms
Friday, July 17, 2009
Virginia Republican Advocates for "Bullet Box" Against "Tyranny"
Read more about it in this Post article.
Maryland Transit Administration Wants to Record Our Conversations
By Paul Gordon.
Imagine you’re sitting on the MARC train, having a conversation with someone you’re close to – your husband, maybe, or a close friend. You’re hardly talking about classified material, but you still don’t want people listening in to your private conversation. So you keep your voices down. You look around to make sure you have some space around you and as much privacy as you could reasonably expect in a public area. It’s the sort of thing that happens every day.
Except this time, without your knowledge, someone is listening in. Someone from the government. Because the state is recording your conversation on the train.
Personally, I find the idea of the state recording people’s conversations on public transportation creepy, something I would expect from the old Soviet Union.
But that’s exactly the scenario that came to mind when I read the Maryland Transit Administration’s request for the opinion of the Attorney General. Last Friday, the MTA submitted a letter asking for an opinion of the Attorney General on the following questions:
1. Can MTA lawfully make audio recordings of the conversations of passengers and employees on board public transit vehicles operated by or under contract to the MTA?
2. Does the Maryland Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act,§§10-401 through 10-403 of the Courts and Judicial Proceedings Article, Annotated Code of Maryland, require MTA, when using audio recording devices on board transit vehicles operated by or under contract to it, to obtain the consent of passengers and employees before recording their conversations?
3. If the answer to Question 2, above is in the affirmative, through what means can consent be obtained, e.g. can MTA obtain passengers’ and employees’ consent by posting signage on board its vehicles containing words such as, “This car (or bus) is subject to video and audio surveillance?”
Now I am no expert on Maryland state law in this area. But I am an expert at being an American citizen living in a society where I don’t expect the government to be recording my every word. And from that perspective, I find the MTA letter alarming. The fact that a state agency wants to record passenger conversations – and is even asking if there’s a way to do it without our consent – makes my blood run cold.
Yes, it may help the government detect or prevent crimes. Who knows, it might even stop a terrorist. But that is not the only issue. If it were, we would not need the Bill of Rights. Putting limits on government power has always meant that not every crime will be stopped, and not every guilty person will be punished. That is the price of liberty.
Of course, the Attorney General can only address whether the MTA can record passenger conversations. Whether the MTA should do this is a matter for our elected officials in Annapolis to address.
The Reporting Life, Part Five
By Kathleen Miller.
6:30 to 7:30 p.m.
Now’s the time when you send your story over to an editor for review and let your mind rot a bit while you surf Facebook, Perez Hilton or Media Bistro Fishbowl D.C. - if you’re me. It’s also a good time to scan your competitor’s websites, make sure there was nothing major that broke and they’re already reporting while you wrote your story on something entirely different.
The editing process usually is fairly painless. The boss reviews your article, catches any glaring typos and asks you for more detail if they feel like there are some holes in your work.
Most days, I look at my stories afterwards and thank God for editors. The good ones will make your story flow 100 times better than it was before, slice out extraneous information and make sure you spelled George Leventhal’s last name as Leventhal, and not Levanthal.
There are bumps in the road, however, even with a good editor. A few years ago, I pitched a story about county fair woes, including the fact that they seem to attract gangs and nobody I know goes to fairs anymore. My editor loved it. He lived in Montgomery County and heard much of the same from his friends and neighbors, nobody takes their families to the fair anymore, largely because they’re worried about crime.
The greenlight was given. I started reporting and spent four days talking to police, fair operators and residents. The people I stopped on the streets of Rockville said exactly what my boss and I had predicted: essentially, “We don’t go to the fair anymore, we used to but our friends were robbed last time we went and it’s just not safe.”
Except I had a major problem: the stats didn’t back up that sentiment. In fact, the Montgomery County fair had record attendance the year before, and while police had detained an armed, known gang member outside the entrance gates, there hadn’t been a major incident inside the fairgrounds.
I had informed one supervisor of this, and said I was going to have to write the story differently, focusing on how despite record attendance there are new concerns for fairs. I.e., police have to be more vigilant about crime and with the economy tanking, many vendors can’t afford to travel to as many fairs as they used to do.
The other editor, however, read the final version of my story and found it totally unacceptable. He wanted the original idea we’d discussed. I told him I couldn’t write that because the facts didn’t back it up.
We fought. And fought and fought and fought. In a weaker moment, I walked outside and sat in a park near tears. There was no way I was going to let the story appear in print with my name on it if I didn’t agree with the underlying premise. On the other hand, he’s the boss. He has the final say.
I debated playing the reporter’s only trump card: I could pull my name from the story, tell him he was free to run it as he wished (which he can always do without my permission anyhow), but I didn’t want my byline attached to it. It’s an approach that makes everybody unhappy, but it is the last thing a reporter can do when battling with an editor.
I’d never done it before, and it didn’t get that far that day. I’m not sure either of us was ecstatic about the final version of the article, but I felt it was fair. We talked about the crime concerns, used anecdotes and quotes, but also noted the record attendance and that the biggest local incident had been averted by cops outside the Montgomery County fairgrounds.
There is often a natural tension between reporters and editors. We’re hired to write and report stories, and they’re hired to question them and improve them. It is literally their job to correct what we do. The system probably functions best when they’re comfortable challenging our work and we’re comfortable standing up for it, but it does require a thick skin on both ends.
Conclusion
Once the editing’s done, a reporter is free to go home - where, as I’ve noted, they’ll often continue compulsively checking facts long after the day is supposedly over.
Then, it’s time for bed, when the worries sink in that another publication will have a story you didn’t or have dug deeper than you on a given topic.
Trust me, there is nothing worse than getting beat on a story. It can happen in all sorts of ways. You can be flat-out oblivious to something. In my case, see Washington Post reporter Ann Marimow’s “County Executive to get $65,000 Bathroom” story. I was clueless there was any sort of bathroom brouhaha whatsoever. Or similarly Post reporter Miranda Spivack’s scoop “Report on Water Quality Withheld.”
You can be looped-in on a topic and miss a major development that another reporter catches. In my case, see Janel Davis’s “Disability Retirement Review Nets Another Employee.”
And, perhaps most painful of all, you can have the story but be holding out for one more comment, one more fact and lose the whole thing in the process. This happened to me in Marimow’s “Montgomery Disability Practices Under Fire.”
It works both ways, however - I received friendly emails from other local reporters congratulating me on a story I broke that there was a federal investigation into the disability retirement packages of two former Montgomery County assistant police chiefs.
This winter, other news outlets followed a story I broke at the AP about a congressman from the Bronx that had collected thousands of dollars in property tax credits over ten years by claiming his primary residence was in Montgomery County although he was registered to vote and drive in New York. Bloomberg and the Post followed the story shortly thereafter, noting that a high-ranking California congressman had similarly exploited the Homestead Property Tax credit for his Anne Arundel home.
Again, competition should work both ways - and when it does everybody benefits. Reporters work harder when they know somebody is chasing the same story, and the audience gets more-informed articles.
This area is lucky to have The Washington Post as the paper of record - however, that’s generated a sense of entitlement among many local folks that complain when the Post doesn’t cover this county issue or that county issue. The Post, like most media organizations, is dealing with financial strains that don't allow them to run every story their reporters pitch. In many newsrooms right now, there is a battle for space that pits reporters against other reporters and editors against editors at the same paper every day to score a spot for their article.
To those in the community who feel slighted, I say cry me a river - you’ve got plenty of other places to go to pitch stories and read local news.
Make use of them. The Gazette has dozens of reporters covering Maryland, the Examiner sets aside space for at least six Montgomery County stories a week. This blog itself is read by most insiders, activists and reporters in the area.
You never know. Bob Woodward got his start at the Sentinel, and Maureen Dowd covered some of the issues surrounding Robin Ficker’s first ballot referendum victories on landfills and sewage sludge for the now-defunct Washington Star.
If it’s a good story, it will capture the public’s attention no matter who covers it.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Senator Jennie Forehand Files for Re-Election
Rockville Central has her statement. Senator Forehand, who has served in the Senate since 1994, will be challenged by former Delegate Cheryl Kagan.
The Gaithersburg West Master Plan and the Magic Carpet
By Donna Baron.
The Gaithersburg West Master Plan is by all accounts unique among master plan nightmares. Not only has the Montgomery County Planning Board proposed to bury a large portion of the county in traffic, it is also permitting Johns Hopkins Real Estate to destroy one of the most beautiful Civil War-era farms left in the county, Belward Farm. In order to create a “Science City”, this plan will bring 40,000 more workers plus the residents of 5,000 multi-family housing units to an area that is less than two square miles, is already highly congested and is located five miles from the nearest Metro station.
Belward Farm
To justify these phenomenal numbers, the County and Johns Hopkins Real Estate announced that our established residential suburban community would become an urban “transit oriented development”. To effect this abrupt change, the County has rolled out 45-year-old plans for the Corridor Cities Transitway (CCT), a rapid-bus that will meander through the area. Granted, the CCT would be a nice addition to our transit options, but the County, the developers and the politicians portray it as the magic carpet that will solve all of our transportation problems while allowing unlimited increases in density.
However, many areas of Montgomery County offer special challenges to those who would seek to increase transit ridership. The Planning Board and the developers have spent the past 50 years creating auto-dependant subdivisions filled with cul-de-sacs and limited access to secondary roads. Residents cannot get out of their subdivisions without their cars, so in order to go anywhere they have to think about where they will park their cars.
Curly Streets and Cul-de-Sacs
To make matters worse, the Planning Board, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to limit parking near the CCT stations. If residents cannot get out of their subdivisions without their cars and then must drive to the CCT, where will they put their cars once they get there? My guess is that they will drive to their destination rather than to the CCT.
Another troubling aspect of the proposal for the CCT is that the County has said it will be necessary to propose the addition of approximately 50,000 people to the “Science City” in order to secure funding for the CCT. However, the CCT is only expected to carry 15% of the population leaving 85% of the added population in their cars. This works out to be about 42,500 additional cars destined for the already congested roads in Gaithersburg, North Potomac, Rockville and Potomac.
To handle the 42,500 extra cars, the Planning Board has proposed six- and eight-lane highways around and through the “Science City”, complete with multi-level highway interchanges. And the state is examining options for I-270 north of I-370. However, these super highways will do little to mitigate the traffic on the other roads throughout the area. There is no assurance that the two-lane roads and the rural roads won’t be hopelessly clogged with traffic. Further, there is no assurance that those who live in the many subdivisions will even be able to get out of their subdivisions given the greatly increased level of traffic on the secondary roads.
And to make matters even worse, Johns Hopkins Real Estate is using the “Science City” and the CCT to justify building monstrous high-rises for 15,000 people on the pristine 107-acre Belward Farm despite their promises to the former owner, and despite the deed restrictions they accepted in order to purchase the farm for a fraction of its value. Even though Belward Farm is immediately adjacent to three established residential neighborhoods, JHU’s proposed high-rise commercial complex will have the density of a downtown area near a Metro station complete with 150-foot buildings.
In a suburban area where it is highly unlikely that most of the residents will be able to stop driving their cars, how can the addition of 42,500 cars on six- and eight-lane highways, with multi-level highway interchanges, be called a transit oriented development even if there is access to a rapid-bus?
It is easy to get lost in the circular reasoning used to justify the various and seemingly veiled objectives of the Gaithersburg West Master Plan. But it is clear that this plan needs to be rewritten in an honest, straight-forward manner with development that is in scale with our community, infrastructure that is appropriate for a suburban setting, and plans for Belward Farm that will respect and maintain the character of the farm. The opposition to this master plan is so widespread a website called www.scale-it-back.com has been created by civic and community organizations to voice our objections and offer alternatives.
Finally, to quote Royce Hanson, Chairman of the Planning Board, “Development of great centers need not occur at the expense of existing communities.” If only he and his Planning Board colleagues supported these words in deed.
Belward Farm and the "Science City" from a Presentation by Johns Hopkins Real Estate
Donna H. Baron, Coordinator
The Gaithersburg - North Potomac - Rockville Coalition
www.scale-it-back.com
The Reporting Life, Part Four
By Kathleen Miller.
5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
Now it’s time to write. Everybody goes about this process differently.
The lede, or first sentence of an article, is arguably the most important part of a story. You’re trying to hook readers and summarize the story at once, typically in less than 40 words.
I personally prefer to dive in, throwing all my information onto the page and allowing the story to shake out as I write it. My boyfriend, who I’ve occasionally had to double byline stories with, takes the opposite approach. The kid will literally spend an hour visiting dictionary.com and using an online thesaurus to revise and rework every single word in the lede until he’s totally satisfied with it before thinking about the rest of the story.
I’m too anxious. Plus, I think while you’re writing the rest of the story, it often helps hone your lede and reminds you of what the overall point here is. That being said, his ledes are typically better than mine. But his stories are often late.
After the lede comes a nut graph, in which you put the whole story in context, generally referencing the background elements that led to the breaking news. For example, if council members voted to restrict homeowners’ rights to add-on to their homes, the nut graph may mention that “mansionization” has been an issue in Montgomery County for years as neighbors complain that some people’s massive reconstruction efforts block other people’s sunlight and intrude on their privacy.
It’s basically as simple as that typically, with the story filled out by quotes and insight from people on both sides of whatever issue is being covered.
There is a new school of thought in journalism championed by the AP’s Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier that says reporters should “cut through the clutter,” or essentially call bullshit as they see it.
I took a journalism ethics class in graduate school where we learned that during the McCarthy era, many reporters felt professionally restricted, only able to report exactly what McCarthy and his targets said, and not offer any independent insight or analysis about the situation. The press in those days, apparently, was often far less-educated than the people they covered, and there was a sort of hesitance to challenge authority or do anything other than basically act as stenographers.
Last summer, Fournier said in a memo to AP reporters that they should “write with authority.” “The AP's hard-earned reputation for fairness and nonpartisanship must not be used as an excuse for fuzzy language when a clear voice is demanded, nor should it force us to give both sides of a story equal play when one side is plainly wrong.”
Fourner said that shortly after Katrina struck, he had “dutifully reported” that President Bush had said nobody anticipated the breach of the levees, when, in actuality, many experts had actually predicted a major storm would bust New Orleans’ flood-control barriers.
“In the past, that’s all I would have written;” Fournier wrote in the memo. “Readers would get both sides of the story and then be expected to draw their own conclusion. This time, I went a step further and simply wrote: He was wrong. Why not? Why force the readers to read between carefully parsed lines when the facts are clear? Why not just get to the point? The president of the United States was wrong. The governor lied. The congressman broke his promise. The preacher, the CEO, the banker, the coach, or whomever, failed. Don’t mince words... Too often we depend on the government and its critics to tell us what happened, and we end up with he said/she said stories that never get to the bottom line.”
It’s an interesting concept. I think it’s both smart and dangerous. If you’ve covered an administration or an issue for years like Fournier or many of his team, you are probably an expert in your own right and deserve the power to call it like you see it.
You can’t use that style every day, in every story or on every topic, however, or you risk editorializing. There are some topics - for me, environmental policy - where at this stage of the game, I have no business calling BS or cutting through the clutter. I’m too green, (yikes - pun unintended) to take on that role. In others, like local immigration policy or WSSC drama, I feel like I’ve been in the weeds enough to cut through the crap on occasion.
Tomorrow: 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
District 20 Challenger Sends Out New Email
District 20 challenger Eli El sent out the following email last Tuesday night. He is making an early start in this campaign.
FRIENDS OF ELI
Hello Friend,
The Exploratory Committee for Eli El for Maryland State Delegate is very grassroots based. We rely on volunteers to help us accomplish our goals. Our campaign has been built one volunteer and one neighborhood at a time. Your help is critical to our victory. You can help provide the much needed resources to ensure that I am elected to the Maryland House of Delegates. The website has been updated, and you may now access the volunteer form by navigating to www.friendsofeli.com, then clicking on "volunteer".
Once we get started, your help will be absolutely critical to winning the campaign. It is the people of the great State of Maryland who keep us grounded, and you are the people I wish to serve. In the coming months, I want to listen to your ideas and desires for legislation because it is the people, not just the legislature who must live with the laws we will enact. Please take a moment to fill in the requested information and we will get in touch with you as soon as possible. We appreciate your support. With your help, we really can make a difference. Please e-mail and/or fax the form to: f: 866.783.2515 e: eli@friendsofeli.com
Feel free to forward this e-mail to your family, friends, and professional contacts.
Sign up to volunteer today!
Best Regards,
Eli El
--
Please Note:
This message was sent by Eli (eli@friendsofeli.com) from Friends of Eli El Exploratory Committee. To learn more about the Exploratory Committee, visit his website at www.friendsofeli.com or www.thisguyisreal.com Click here to be removed from our mailing list.
Exploratory Committee: eli@friendsofeli.com
7209 Flower Ave., #6; Takoma Park, Maryland USA
www.friendsofeli.com
Why At-Large?
By Marc Korman.
Back in June, MPW covered the rumored challengers for the at-large County Council seats. But with every incumbent expected to run for reelection, why are these candidates looking towards an at-large raced instead of district level runs?
Working off the list of ten rumored candidates previously discussed, here is each challenger and the district they live in:
Rumored Candidate and Council District
Jane De Winter: 1
Peter Fosselman: 5
Larry Giammo: 3
Guled Kassim: 4
Ben Kramer: 4
Cary Lamari: 4
Chris Paladino: 4
Hans Riemer: 5
Steve Silverman: 5
Becky Wagner: 1
Before launching into an analysis, a few caveats. One, some of these rumored candidates have said that they are not running, at least privately. But I kept everyone on the list used in earlier posts. Two, Adam did note in previous posts that Larry Giammo and Chris Paladino could also be candidates for district council races.
One motivation for running at-large could be political perception of where the weaknesses are. As has been covered at MPW, Duchy Trachtenberg has had difficulties with the coalition she brought together to win in 2006. Whether the broader voting public cares or if this will affect the mechanics of her campaign, I leave to others to speculate. Marc Elrich ran for the County Council numerous times before winning his seat in 2006. As of January, he had the least amount of funds raised or on hand of any of the at-large members. On the other hand, George Levanthal and Nancy Floreen are viewed as pretty safe, with $60,000 and $33,000 in the bank respectively. Levanthal was the top vote getter in the 2006 Democratic primary, while Floreen was the top vote getter in the general.
Another reason to run at-large is that many of the prospective candidates have tried and failed to win district seats in the past. Ben Kramer, Cary Lamari, Chris Paladino, and Hans Riemer have all run and lost (in Paladino’s case, he dropped out) in district County Council races at least once. Two other prospective candidates, Guled Kassim and Peter Fosselman, ran and lost a district level delegate race. Of course, that does not necessarily foreclose a later victory. Roger Berliner lost a special election for the district 1 seat in 2000 and came back six years later to knock off the guy who beat him.
Finally, for potential candidate Steve Silverman, an at-large seat would be a return to the office he previously held.
That means that of the rumored candidates strictly for at-large seats, only De Winter and Wagner do not have a previous election indicating they should be looking at an at-large slot over a district challenge.
Both of these candidates live in Roger Berliner’s district (Note: Councilman Berliner is my councilmember and I have worked with him through my capacity on the Montgomery County Democratic Central Committee). Will one or both of them decide to challenge Berliner instead of entering a crowded at-large field? Will Berliner have difficulty in a Democratic primary if there is no serious Republican candidate as there was in 2006?
Leggett Supports Rail CCT, HOV Lanes to Frederick
Following is a two-page memo from County Executive Ike Leggett to County Council President Phil Andrews. For some reason, we cannot locate it on the county government's website.
The Reporting Life, Part Three
By Kathleen Miller.
1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Shortly after lunch, it’s time to start assessing what information you’ve got, and what information you lack. It’s time to fill the holes in your story and often time to dash out to cover a press conference or meeting.
If the event’s a ribbon-cutting for a new recycling center or workforce housing program, it’s a safe bet the press isn’t there to cover the excitement. Often, it’s the only way you can pin down a number of influential people or elected officials on other issues. Or eavesdrop on what other reporters are asking.
You feel slightly sleazy as a reporter when you’re standing next to somebody from a different paper or station and literally taking notes on their questions. But you quickly learn they do it to you, and it’s better than the alternative, letting them have the elected official to themselves, including any juicy tidbits they might drop along the way, or getting sucker-punched by an article in the next day’s paper.
3:30 to 5:00 p.m.
About mid-afternoon, it’s time to start assessing what information you’ve got, what information you lack and what information you absolutely can’t live without. It’s also time to play tough-guy with your sources. Remind them of your need for information and that the story will run with or without their comment.
I think sometimes people think it’s best to say no comment on touchy subjects, but I couldn’t disagree more. If the story’s gonna run, it’s gonna run. The reporter will be given a certain amount of space to fill, and if you’re sticking with “no comment,” you’re giving the other side more space for their spin.
It is the journalist’s obligation to attempt to give both sides a chance to speak, but they’ve done their job by trying to reach you by phone and e-mail. If you’re not returning their messages, that doesn’t mean they won’t run the article. It just means you won’t get a chance to present your case.
Sometimes you’ll see different terms tossed about for “no comment.” A “could not immediately be reached for comment” generally translates into “we called them at the last second and they weren’t there to talk” or “this story is breaking right now and they didn’t answer their cell phone.”
A “declined to comment” means “we reached them with plenty of time, and they weren’t mean about it, but they wouldn’t touch the subject.”
A “refused to comment” means “we’re mad they won’t comment, they’re mad we’re writing the story but they won’t say anything on-the-record,” - loosely translated, of course.
This is also the time when sources will try to play tough guy with you, a.k.a try to kill a story.
Last December, I was tipped off that an assistant fire chief had crashed a county-owned vehicle into a cop car while driving home from a Redskins game. I called several county sources about the tip. One tried to kill the story by making me question my own reporting skills and news judgment. He told me I was late, that everybody else had the story days ago, and that no other reporter in town thought it was worth running, so he wasn’t sure why the Examiner and I were so interested. Said with just the slightest hint of derision, of course.
It worked for a few minutes. I got off the phone and thought about whether I wanted egg on my face for this story while I was applying for another job. Whether I wanted egg on my face in general, if this all turned out to be no big deal. Whether I should bother pursuing it, if as this guy said, nobody else thought it was worthwhile.
Then I realized that at face-value, this story was interesting. “It’s my worst nightmare to crash into a cop car,” I said to the source during another phone call, “and I don’t drive a county-owned vehicle.”
Even if the story turned out to be nothing more than a simple “Thank God that wasn’t me” article for readers, it’s worth noting that a county’s assistant fire chief crashed into a cop car while in a county vehicle. Not Watergate-level news, but certainly worth a few head shakes, even if the guy turned out to be stone cold sober.
So we ran the story. A spokesman for the fire department noted there had been questions about the assistant chief’s sobriety, but said he’d seen nothing that proved he was drinking. My bosses ran it on the inside of the Examiner, in a single-column story, no pictures, no big, bad headline. We played it straight.
And the next day the emails and phone calls poured in. People had been talking before the story ran. I was contacted by folks who said they were county residents and their firefighter neighbor had mentioned the incident, others who said they had previously heard firefighters at a lunch spot discussing the accident themselves. They said the assistant chief had been drinking at the Redskins game.
Four days later, we ran a second story after it came to my attention the county had in fact tested the assistant chief’s blood alcohol level after the crash. The police had not done so, but a personnel office did the tests as a matter of course after an accident involving a county vehicle. They told me they wouldn’t release the blood alcohol test results, citing personnel confidentiality rules. The Post followed the story that day as well, with several of their reporters looking into the issues.
I wound up getting a new job shortly thereafter and moving to a Annapolis to cover the state legislature for the Associated Press, but I always wondered what those blood alcohol tests said, and wondered if we’d ever know.
We do know now. The Post’s Spivack stuck to the case, and was able to get a copy of the blood-alcohol test results. The guy blew twice the legal limit, hours after the accident. Luckily no one had been seriously hurt.
This is why competition is good, why it helps to have multiple papers competing for stories and access to information. I may not have had the right contacts to ever obtain those test results, but Miranda Spivack did. Maybe her editors weren’t interested in running the story at first - pure speculation - but they got interested after the Examiner ran it. Or maybe the county official lied to me about the Post passing on the story in the first place.
And this is why it matters to trust yourself, and not be swayed from a story by a person who questions your judgment.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Great Article on Crab Houses of the Eastern Shore
If you like crabs, you are going to get hungry in a hurry reading this terrific article in the New York Times.
Ike Leggett on "Political Pulse" on Ch. 16 TV during the week of July 13th
Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett will be on the "Political Pulse" political talk show on:
Tuesday, July 14th at 9:30 p.m.
Wednesday, July 15th at 6:30 p.m.
Thursday, July 16th at 9:00 p.m.
Friday, Saturday and Sunday (July 17th-19th) at 6:00 p.m.
Mr. Leggett announces his candidacy for re-election on the Show and discusses his difference of opinion with the County Council over the Ambulance Transport Fee (which was projected to generate $90 million of revenues over 6 years for the County). He gives his view on how Governor O'Malley is doing in these tough fiscal times and also discusses his recent visit to Vietnam, where he served in the Vietnam War as a U.S. Army Captain 40 years ago.
Political Pulse is on Channel 16 TV in Montgomery County.
Democrats Offer Advice to GOP
Dear readers, we recently congratulated the Maryland Republican Party on the excellent financial performance of their Chairman, James Pelura III. (Excellent, that is, for the Democrats!) Well, some conservatives didn’t take too kindly to our post. But we will not let such misunderstandings interfere with our much-renowned spirit of being helpful. And so we went to our extensive spy network inside the Maryland Democratic Party to ask for their advice on where the GOP should go from here. And boy did they give it!
#####
I hear Sarah Palin’s looking for a job. She might make a great state party chair, dontcha know. And John Ensign might be looking for a job too, although in the case of hiring him I’d advise state Republicans to lock up their women.
My advice? Just truths. Those who bitch about the party and money probably haven’t given much. Those who declare what the “party” is and does - and do it loudly from talk radio or on the net - usually don't have a clue what the party is or does. The Chris Caveys of this world kill political parties because they’re all about themselves and everyone else knows it except the press. Political party executive committee meetings are open to the public and the press, something few people know. Let’s get some popcorn and pull up a chair when this one meets. If they close the meeting, they’re admitting the party doesn’t care what the people think. This is proof that for the MDGOP, the vision of Reagan is dead while the angry whining of Limbaugh is alive and well and eating the party alive.
They need to moderate their positions on issues. They need to recruit credible candidates. They need to work at the grass roots. They need to have folks at the national level not undercutting whatever they’re trying to do at the local level. Not much interested in providing greater assistance than that, sorry!
Only advice: find another state!
The GOP should just pack it up for 2010 and start looking toward 2014 when, perhaps, they’ll have a better handle on the fundamentals of being a political party. Perhaps they will have some ideas for how to govern as well, instead of just being the Party of “No.” It’s not even clear who the GOP think their constituency is - corporate interests, the well-to-do, religious right - because they just use a scattershot approach of saying Democrats are bad without providing their own vision. It’s time for the Grand Old Party to fold their tents for 2010 and use the time for some soul searching - perhaps they may be a viable party by 2014? We’ll see.
I got nothing for you. Sorry. The Maryland Republican Party is populated by one-note loonies, with a few kindly souls mixed in who are unwilling to stand for anything remotely progressive, lest they have to expend energy educating their base on why they aren’t doing what Rush Limbaugh says a good Republican should do.
They could follow the wisdom of Virginia Republicans and refer to the high population and economic growth areas as the “fake” Maryland and continue to dominate elections in Caroline, Dorchester, Kent, and Somerset Counties, the “real” Maryland.
Rehire John Kane. He has a knack for saving on labor.
The problem is that Republicans only contribute money if they have a good chance to own and then loot the government. Maybe the state party could get in line for federal stimulus money with their former super-donors like the corrupt mortgage brokers and Wall Street investment bankers who are still soaking the taxpayers.
The State GOP should resort to robbing banks. Why? Here are three good reasons: 1) It beats the present strategy in which they have a fundraising apparatus in place but aren't actually raising any money! 2) It’s a great populist branding tool (think John Dillinger and Robin Hood), and 3) If this fails to generate revenue for the party, well, at least gangsters get to wear great clothes and date hot chicks! That beats winning elections any day!
I think they should hold a “Guns and Ammo Bake Sale.” They could ask all their party members and their kids to donate just a few of their extra AK-47s and M-16s lying around the basement and some large-capacity magazine clips stuck between the sofa cushions and really rake in the dough. They might even be able to get Sarah Palin to host, since she’s not doing anything other than studying up on the “Bush Doctrine” and the Country of Africa.
A wise man marches to victory only after he stops shooting himself in the foot.
Ike Wants Police Helicopters; Council Has Questions
The County Executive and the Police Department are requesting funding for a new police helicopter program. The police want to apply for $248,894 in federal grant money and are asking the County Council for $279,890 in local funding to acquire two helicopters. The police have not detailed the annual operating costs, but council staff believes they could account for 1-2% of the total police budget. Under the Fiscal Year 2010 budget, that would amount to $2.5-4.9 million per year. Council President Phil Andrews sent a long list of questions to the Executive Branch that he would like answered by Thursday which we reproduce below.
But here are our questions. First, when we cannot afford to give the police officers raises, how can we afford helicopters? Second, why did the Executive Branch wait until after the Fiscal Year 2010 budget was set in May to send in this request? Third, how does this impact next year's expected $350 million budget deficit? And fourth, what is our state delegation supposed to say when they make a case for state aid to Montgomery in Annapolis?
Montgomery County Council
Rockville, Maryland
Office of the Council President
Memorandum
July 13, 2009
To: Tim Firestine, Chief Administrative Officer
J. Thomas Manger, Chief, Montgomery County Police Department
From: Phil Andrews, Council President
Subject: Proposal for Montgomery County Police Department Helicopter Unit
The Council has received notice from the Police Department of the County’s intent to apply for $248,894 in Federal funds to assist in funding an aviation helicopter unit for the Montgomery County Police Department. The grant application indicates that $279,890 in costs will be funded with non-Federal funds, which the Council understands from Council staff to be the County’s Drug Enforcement Forfeiture Fund (DEFF).
As the Council has not received any written information, other than this grant application, or a briefing on the proposed helicopter unit, there are many questions about the cost of the proposal, its benefits to the County, and how it ranks in the Executive’s funding priorities. The Executive and Council have continually placed a priority on funding for public safety, even in this current fiscal crisis. However, it is not clear what the long-term annual costs of this proposal are and how they will be paid for once the grant and DEFF monies are spent.
Please provide to the Council by noon on Thursday, July 16 a written overview of the current proposal and a five-year cost estimate. I recognize that this proposal is different from the proposal forwarded to the Council in 2001 by then Chief Moose. However, I will note that the 2001 proposal said that, “The average helicopter budget for an existing program is around 1% - 2% of the total law enforcement budget.” This memo will also reference some other information from that proposal.
Please include as a part of your response answers to the following questions:
1. What are the benefits to the County from having its own police helicopter unit and why is it needed now?
2. Please confirm that the County is expecting to acquire two helicopters. If not, what is the expected size of the helicopter unit?
3. Where will the helicopters be housed? What is the annual cost associated with any lease or facility upgrades?
4. After the initial refurbishment, what is the expected annual cost for maintenance including parts and labor?
5. How many hours is the Department expecting the units will be in service and how many miles are they expected to fly in a year? What are the expected fuel costs for the annual mileage?
6. How will the County provide insurance for this program and what is the expected annual cost? The information provided in 2001 included a preliminary response from Risk Management that the County Attorney’s Office felt the County could not self-insure for the full amount of the aircraft and that supplemental insurance would be needed. A preliminary estimate, not based in a detailed application, was that supplemental insurance might cost $50,000 per year.
7. How many staff will be assigned to the unit? In 2001 the staff was proposed as one supervisor, five pilots, and five observers (two officers would be in the aircraft). It was felt that pilots should be police officers rather than civilians. If a lower number of staff is now being recommended, will the helicopter be ready for dispatch 24-hours a day? If not, what will be the impact on helicopter response time?
8. What divisions will police officers assigned to the helicopter unit be reassigned from and how will their current assignments be filled?
9. Will the Department have memoranda of understanding with municipal, Park, or State police regarding when the County will respond to requests from these agencies?
10. What is the expected useful life of the helicopters that are being acquired? Does the Executive branch propose establishing any type of sinking fund or internal service fund account in motorpool for a planned replacement?
11. Please confirm that the DEFF is the source for the non-Federal funds. If not, what is the source of funding?
12. What is the current balance in the DEFF? While the Council recognizes that there are detailed items funded by DEFF that should not be publicly disclosed, what were total expenditures from the fund in FY08 and FY09, and what were the major categories for those expenses?
13. What are the total planned expenditures from the DEFF for FY10, and what are the major categories for expenditures in the coming year?
14. Assuming the DEFF is the source of funds, why is the creation of a helicopter unit a higher priority than other items that might have been funded with DEFF monies, such as additional in-car video cameras?
15. If as Council staff understands, it is expected that the DEFF will cover the non-Federal costs in FY10 and FY11, what source of funding is expected to be used for the ongoing costs beginning in FY12?
The Council is very interested in understanding the benefits of establishing a helicopter unit, but we must also make a decision regarding the long-term costs. As you know, the Executive and Council have reduced police officer positions, eliminated a recruit class, and considered having to limit public access to at least two police stations. In addition, some of the other grants that already been applied for, such as the crime lab expansion and COPS hiring grant, will have future fiscal impacts. The State will likely be sending additional reductions to the counties. It would be unfortunate if the County established this new unit only to find that it is not sustainable after the grant period ends.
cc: Councilmembers
Joe Beach, Director, Office of Management and Budget
Nancy Navarro Calls for District 4 Parkland Acquisition (Updated)
Following is the press release from the Council Member's office.
Update: The resolution was endorsed by the Audubon Naturalist Society and the Montgomery Countryside Alliance and passed on a 7-0 vote.
Councilmember Nancy Navarro Calls for District 4 Parkland Acquisition
Proposed Parkland Purchase Would Mitigate ICC Impact & Protect Environment
Contact: David Moon (240) 777-7953 or david.moon@montgomerycountymd.gov
ROCKVILLE, MD – As part of her ongoing desire to mitigate environmental impacts from the ICC, Nancy Navarro announced her staunch support for a County Council resolution to approve the purchase of 52 acres of land for Burtonsville’s Fairland Park. The parcel contains old growth forest over 100-years-old, as well as wetlands and bogs that would serve as a buffer for the ICC, which is located only 1.5 miles away. Groups ranging from the Sierra Club of Montgomery County to the East County Citizens Advisory Board endorsed the purchase.
Navarro noted: “The ICC cuts aggressively through District 4, and as a result, the residents of my community are shouldering many of the highway’s negative impacts. But by saving this delicate land from development, the County would be taking a step forward to demonstrate basic fairness. We transferred so much land to the State for ICC construction, that it only makes sense to take advantage of these rare opportunities to preserve replacement land.”
The land would be sold to Montgomery County by Fairland Development LLC, at a cost of $8,750,000, which has been negotiated down from the original asking price of $11,550,000. If the County Council rejects the purchase, this sensitive land will undoubtedly be developed into 109 housing units. Navarro highlighted the fact that this acquisition would not have been possible were it not for the weakened financial conditions in the development and housing industry. “The housing crash has presented Montgomery County with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to protect and preserve land at a steep discount.”
The County Council will vote on this resolution during its July 14th session today.
The Reporting Life, Part Two
By Kathleen Miller.
Around 10 a.m.
Sometime around 10 a.m. every day, an editor would saunter over to my desk and hit me with the inevitable: what’s going on Kathleen?
Editors have to tell their bosses what to expect, to give them an idea of the number and the magnitude of the stories that will appear in the next day’s paper and coordinate the layout and need for photos or graphics. There’s no grand conspiracy_it’s basically as simply as a reporter telling their editor a handful of things going on in the area and the two of them hashing out what’s worth covering.
And, I hate to break it to you but hard news - i.e. breaking developments in policy changes, a crime, a vote on a controversial issue or investigative reporting into a potential scandal, cover-up, conflict-of-interest or ethical lapse - is always, always, always going to win out over “fluff,” i.e. a story about a group of kids cleaning up a highway or a fundraising effort for a local shelter, no matter how nice and inspiring the fluff is.
My mom - a first grade teacher at a Catholic elementary school in Northern California - disagrees with this approach. She used to send me e-mails when I worked for the AP in Cheyenne, Wyoming, suggesting I do a feature on a group of nuns in a remote part of the state that were making their own all-natural soap. “You never write about anything positive, Kathleen…..”
One day, feeling particularly empathetic to the need to highlight good over evil, I mentioned her line-of-thinking to my boyfriend, a reporter who covers Virginia for the Examiner. He paused for about one second and totally dismissed the idea.
His take: we cover counties that employ at least ten people each for the sole purpose of promoting the region’s image. They’re called public information officers. On the other hand, how many people get paid to bring questionable or controversial acts to the public’s attention? Most counties have an inspector general. Montgomery’s IG Tom Dagley does great work - you need no more evidence than the fact that many county officials chafe at the mention of his name. However there are probably more county council members than IG office staffers. So that leaves the media, a shrinking group these days.
Perhaps it’s grandiose to see it as our mission to be the public’s watchdog, but when we don’t question or investigate enough - i.e. Bernie Madoff scandal, economic collapse or oh, say the Iraq War - we’re also the public’s favorite punching bag. You can’t win. I’m siding with the boyfriend over Mom on this one.
Every morning, I’d try to have three or four story ideas ready-to-go. There’s usually a give and take between the reporter and the editor. My bosses would let me know what sounded like the biggest story to them. If I felt passionately that something else was more important, I’d fight for it. You try to wind up with a story you’ll shoot to deliver and a back-up you can guarantee you’ll deliver.
Why? Because every reporter knows what it’s like to have a story fall-through on them. Occasionally you’re working with inaccurate information, sometimes you can’t get an essential call returned or access to a necessary document and at other moments you’ve just simply bitten off more than you can chew in one day.
On top of that, every reporter knows what it’s like to have an editor approach their desk around 3 p.m. and say, “We’ve got another hole in the paper, what can you give us?” Sidenote, for people looking to get media coverage, this is where press releases and friendly relationships can be very handy.
There definitely were times when this happened and stories that I never would have pitched at 10 a.m. and editors certainly wouldn’t have accepted before lunch time start to sound real good.
10:30 to 1:30 p.m.
From that moment on, it’s all about working the phones and sending emails. I try to make as many contacts as possible before lunch because frankly, you never know if/when people will call you back or if you’re even contacting the right people.
Sometimes, in the course of a conversation about a totally unrelated topic, a source will mention something that beats all pre-conceived story ideas and you have a new focus for your day.
In Montgomery County, residents should rest assured that - love them or hate them - you guys have an unusually hard-working, motivated bunch of elected officials. And sometimes just giving one of them a call to press them on a point would lead to a much bigger and better story. They really do know what’s going on and they can certainly back up the positions they take with anecdotes, facts and logic.
I realized you can learn a lot just by shutting your mouth on occasion and giving people a chance to tell you why they felt a certain way. I called now-Council President Phil Andrews once in spring 2008 to discuss some relatively wonky concerns he had about the collective bargaining process. In asking him why your average resident should care, he gave me a fascinating tip that was probably common knowledge inside Montgomery County government, but surprising to me and many readers.
He noted that the county was eight years late on a promise to equip cop cars with video cameras, a promise made by Montgomery officials as part of a settlement brokered after an unarmed black man was shot and killed by police in the ‘90s. The victim’s family had accepted a smaller settlement if the county agreed to install the cameras, but conflict between county and union leaders meant the agreement had never been fulfilled.
To make the story even better, the late Johnnie Cochran had been involved in negotiating the settlement. I hung up and googled the story. There were links to the agreement but nothing about the fact it hadn’t been followed. I called the local attorney who’d worked with Cochran on the case and he was astounded. He’d never thought to make sure the county had lived up to their end of the deal, nor had the victim’s family. Yet eight years had gone by without the cameras that were common in many neighboring counties.
Moral of the story? Sometimes, just giving people a little time to explain their views will yield far better stories than the reason you called them in the first place. It doesn't matter if you side with Andrews or organized labor (who argued the agreement violated the Maryland Wiretap Act, which requires the consent of all parties before conversations can be recorded), it's an interesting - and I think still unresolved - story.
Tomorrow: 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Post Runs PR Content as News
The Post's Howard Kurtz gives the following account of the newspaper's decision to run an article from a hospital's in-house PR magazine as "news." Why did they do it? The health section editor admitted that buyouts had eradicated her staff, forcing her to rely on freelancers - even including PR writers. Contracting Out
The lead story in The Washington Post's Health section last week, on why some people seem immune to AIDS, focused in part on a top physician at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The work of researcher Bruce Walker, who runs the hospital's Partners AIDS Research Center, was first spotlighted in the third and fourth paragraphs. The article ended with a dutiful disclosure that it was condensed from one that had run in Proto, the magazine of, yes, Massachusetts General Hospital.
What gives? Health Editor Frances Stead Sellers, who obtained the piece without charge, says Proto is "one of the best biomedical magazines," that the article was by an established freelancer and that she was transparent about the story's origin. "The cure for a perceived conflict is disclosure... I felt with this piece I was bringing something very interesting to readers," she says.
The magazine is produced by Time Inc. Content Solutions, where spokeswoman Carrie Jones says the hospital gets to review all copy and "to bask in the reflected glory" of a high-quality publication.
Sellers, who had run an earlier piece from Proto, says early-retirement buyouts at The Post have cut the weekly section's full-time staff from four to none, forcing her to rely heavily on freelancers. "If I had a whole bundle of reporters, I wouldn't be thinking of doing this," she says.
Print MSM to MoCo: Adios!
So you thought the print mainstream media (MSM) was undergoing changes? Wait until you read this!
Washington Post
MoCo political reporter Ann Marimow is on maternity leave. We hear that when she comes back, she will not cover MoCo anymore. Because she lives on Capitol Hill, she may receive a local D.C. beat. Her replacement will be Michael Laris, who has covered Virginia for the Post. MoCo schools reporter Daniel DeVise is now covering higher education and will be replaced by Prince George's schools reporter Nelson Hernandez. We do not know whether Hernandez will report on both counties or just on MoCo. The Post is reorganizing its specialty reporters to cover regional beats. Accordingly, we hear that investigative and land use reporter Miranda Spivack may be covering other counties in addition to MoCo. We are a big fan of Spivack's reporting and we would like to keep her focused on our county. We do not want to share her! In addition, the editor of the Post's Montgomery Extra section is leaving.
Gazette
Ace local political reporter Janel Davis, one of our all-time favorites, is resigning. Fred Lewis, the Silver Spring editor, is also leaving. Lewis replaced long-time editor Jim Brocker a year ago, an event that helped to precipitate our epic Crisis at the Gazette series. In addition, commentary editor Georgia McDonald is retiring.
Turnover happens in the media just as it happens in other industries, but the extraordinary economic pressure on MSM businesses may be exacerbating it. Marimow and Davis have covered MoCo since 2006. Both have developed into very good reporters who know their way around the county. No matter how talented their successors may be, they will not be able to perform at their level for quite awhile. And remember, we have elections coming up next year.
We wish Ann Marimow and Janel Davis well. It's getting pretty lonely around here.
Berliner Calls for New Transportation Policy on Wisconsin Avenue
Montgomery County Council Member Roger Berliner, who represents Bethesda, North Bethesda, Chevy Chase and Potomac, is calling for the state to consider a “Sustainable Transportation Corridor” approach to Wisconsin Avenue. Berliner points out the impending transportation challenges in the Bethesda-White Flint vicinity and rightly notes how current policy emphasizes intersection capacity improvements above other solutions. Berliner states, “It is increasingly clear that pavement alone is not going to get the job done and would be counterproductive to our long term energy and environmental objectives, which can be met only if we significantly reduce vehicle miles traveled, expand transit options, and encourage more biking and walking.” We reproduce his letter to the Governor below.
Montgomery County Council
Roger Berliner
Council Member
District 1
July 13, 2009
Governor Martin O’Malley
100 State Circle
Annapolis, MD 21401-1925
Dear Governor O’Malley:
I am writing to ask you, Acting Secretary Swaim-Staley, and our legislative leadership to explore new legislation or regulations that would enhance coordination between state and local governments, harmonize land use and transportation objectives, and provide priority funding for “Sustainable Transportation Corridors.”
Modeled after a similar policy in Oregon, the goal of this program would be to ensure that future investments in state highway segments that (1) are of extraordinary economic significance to the state; (2) are experiencing unacceptable levels of congestion; and (3) straddle urban smart growth areas, are considered in the context of our larger public policy objectives of reducing vehicle miles traveled and supporting livable communities.
Regrettably, our current approach to significant state roads that bisect our increasingly urban county too often focuses on isolated intersection improvements in one area totally divorced from the larger context. The result can be short term “improvements” that are actually counterproductive in the long run. As the County Council representative of the communities that surround the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, I have witnessed this possibility first hand. Indeed, it is this experience that led me to explore other models that might serve our state and community better.
To the credit of your people in the State Highway Administration, who recently testified before our Council, they are trying hard to come up with a plan that would provide immediate short term relief to a looming traffic nightmare. As you appreciate, under the Base Closure and Realignment Act (BRAC) the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda is expanding and will reopen in 2011 as the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. This expanded facility will treat twice as many patients, add 2500 new jobs, and increase traffic on a roadway that is already subject to unacceptable levels of congestion.
At the same time, just to the north of the expanded Medical Center, the Montgomery County Planning Department is currently drafting a new “White Flint Sector Plan,” which calls for compact mixed-use redevelopment. The Plan envisions the transformation of a section of the Rockville Pike into a multi-modal urban “boulevard” with a landscaped median, street parking, wider sidewalks, bike lanes, a grid of streets to take pressure off Rockville Pike, and much needed mass transit improvements, including the possibility of bus rapid transit.
Yet, to date, we have not stepped back collectively and assessed the needs of the entire Rockville Pike/Wisconsin Avenue corridor, without question one of the most important transportation corridors in the entire state. It is increasingly clear that pavement alone is not going to get the job done and would be counterproductive to our long term energy and environmental objectives, which can be met only if we significantly reduce vehicle miles traveled, expand transit options, and encourage more biking and walking.
The aim of legislation creating Sustainable Transportation Corridors would be to establish that broader context, to bring the best of urban planning and progressive transportation policies together to support sustainable and vibrant communities, and to give priority to such areas of statewide significance.
Governor, I know that you and our legislative leaders are firmly committed to sustainability. The legislation that you and our state legislature have championed puts Maryland at the environmental forefront. In my view, legislation creating Sustainable Transportation Corridors is consistent with and builds upon this commitment. I commend it to you and our legislative leaders for your consideration.
Respectfully,
Roger Berliner
cc:
Secretary Beverly K. Swaim-Staley
The Honorable Mike Miller
The Honorable Michael Busch
The Honorable Rich Madaleno
The Honorable Brian Frosh
The Honorable Bill Bronrott
The Honorable Susan Lee
The Honorable Ana Sol Gutierrez
The Honorable Al Carr
The Honorable Jeff Waldstreicher
The Honorable Bill Frick
The Honorable Brian Feldman
Great Concern Over State Budget (Updated)
This blog is drowning in direct entries to our "More Warnings of State Budget Apocalypse" post from Friday. That post, which contains a copy of a letter from state budget official Warren Deschenaux to the General Assembly leadership about the dire state of the budget, is now accounting for 31% of our traffic. The visits are not coming from any central source. Rather, the post is spreading virally through emails and is attracting particular attention from state and county governments, charities and contractors. We should be used to the state's perpetual budget difficulties by now but Deschenaux's letter is unusually blunt about Maryland's fiscal abyss.
Update: Now it's 38%.
The Reporting Life, Part One
By Kathleen Miller.
A reporter’s day starts with a pit in your stomach as you trudge to the end of your driveway or turn on your computer to see exactly what the competition has that you missed.
Our day often ends hours after we've climbed into bed, awakened with a start from a dead sleep, eyes wide open, palms sweating and mind racing about whether we triple-checked a figure, spelled a name like Schwarzenegger right or are going to be screwed by the headline an editor sticks on our story.
Most of us care about what we produce and we take our work seriously. We know people’s reputations are at stake and that if somebody is kind enough to call us back, they deserve to be quoted accurately.
I know. You probably don’t believe me. According to the recent Pew Center Annual Report on American Journalism, less than 50 percent of people think news organizations are moral or helpful to democracy. Adding insult to injury, the majority of people surveyed also said they believe our stories are often inaccurate.
My name’s Kathleen Miller and I’m a former reporter for The Washington Examiner and the Associated Press. For the past three years, I’ve paid the bills as part of the so-called mainstream media, the past two years of which I’ve covered Maryland, most of that time focusing on Montgomery County.
Now, I’m one of the unemployed masses, a healthy chunk of whom, it seems, hail from the news industry these days.
I’m self-aware enough to realize a common perception among many people - PR types and government officials especially - is that journalists are lazy, biased, blood-sucking leeches or something along those lines. Let me tell you how I see it.
We’ll start at the beginning.
7 a.m. to 9:30 a.m.
Contrary to popular belief, a typical day working in the media does not begin with any sort of axis-of-evil collaboration between reporters and their editors about how to bring down a particular political party, interest group or advance a given agenda.
Rather, it starts with reporters absorbing each other’s work and following blogs like this one.
Print reporters tend to show their faces in the office a little on the later side, like 9:30 or 10, unless you’re working for a wire service that has a specific staffing schedule. This does not mean most of us are sleeping in or watching the Today Show. While I’m downing my breakfast, I like to devour everything other news outlets have put out that relates to my beat - praying/wishing/hoping that there’s nothing the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, MPW, WTOP, WAMU or the Gazette has that was going to totally blindside me.
Like it or not, I think it’s better to know what other media outlets are reporting as soon as you wake up in the morning - both so you can think of what you’ll say to your boss if you got beaten on a story and so you can get a jumpstart on putting calls in to follow any of the competition’s work with your own second-day look at the issue.
You learn a lot from other people’s articles: sometimes you kick yourself for not tracking an issue or calling a certain person the day before and sometimes you scratch your head and wonder who thought that story would make for an interesting read. Regardless, it always expands your knowledge of the area you cover.
Reporters, like readers, are drawn to different kinds of stories, and if say, wetlands or the Purple Line don’t make your pulse race, it’s still good to read articles about them from people who naturally gravitate to those subjects.
Tomorrow: Around 10 a.m.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
The Reporting Life: A Preview
One of our favorite MSM (mainstream media) reporters is Kathleen Miller. Ms. Miller covered Montgomery County for the Examiner and the state legislature for the Associated Press. We particularly appreciated her reporting on Delegate Luiz Simmons’s (D-17) position on slots, the state government’s anti-union website, the O’Malley administration’s transit project cuts, the preference of some County Executive staff for buses on the Purple Line and House Majority Leader Kumar Barve’s property tax issues. Now, we have truly lucked out: in an exclusive five-part series, Kathleen Miller is spilling the beans on what it’s like to be an MSM print reporter in Maryland.
Some of our readers have questioned why we discuss the media as much as we do. Let’s make one thing clear: you cannot understand politics without understanding how politicians reach out to their constituents. And even in the era of blogs, that demands understanding how the MSM acts as a conduit between elected officials and the public. Kathleen Miller lifts that veil in a way that has rarely been done in Maryland. If you are a politician, a wanna-be politician, an activist or anyone else trying to get attention, her description of a day in the life of an MSM reporter is a must-read for you. Read on tomorrow!
Metro Operator Caught Sleeping
This video is rapidly acquiring cult status. For more details, look here.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Post Ombudsman Covers Dinnergate
Washington Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander offers a thorough report on the Dinnergate scandal today. He details participation by four newsroom editors in planning the event, none of whom said it was wrong prior to the scandal's surfacing in Politico. Alexander writes, "By having outside underwriters, The Post was effectively charging for access to its newsroom personnel. Reporters or editors could easily be perceived as being in the debt of the sponsors. And by promising participants that their conversations would be private, those attending would be assured a measure of confidentiality that the news department typically opposes." This is a must-read.
Friday, July 10, 2009
More Warnings of State Budget Apocalypse
In a letter to the General Assembly leadership, state budget official Warren Deschenaux is predicting a $700 million budget deficit in FY 2010, a $1+ billion budget deficit in FY 2011 and an “underlying structural gap” of $2 billion. He declares, “The present course of State finances is plainly unsustainable.” In all likelihood, the state will be dealing with the worst of these problems when federal stimulus aid dries up. We reproduce Deschenaux’s letter below.
MPW on Political Pulse
Political Pulse from Crossing Georgia on Vimeo.
Here's a bit of political junk food offered by yours truly on Charles Duffy's great interview program, Political Pulse. This show was aired on May 26 and May 28.
China Bans MPW
County Council Member George Leventhal, who is traveling to China, reports that their government has blocked access to Maryland Politics Watch. But the Communist censors, employing what is known as "the Great Firewall of China," have not blocked Just Up the Pike. How much is Dan Reed paying them?
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Town of Chevy Chase Town Council Meeting
Here is my summary of the meeting held on July 8th:
The Town Council started its meeting with a moment of silence in memory of Kelly and Sloane Murray following the pledge of allegiance.
**Town Manager’s Report**
Town Manager Todd Hoffman gave his first formal and written report of the past month’s activities. Councilmember Al Lang requested that it be posted to the web and the Council supported this idea.
**Charter Amendments**
I introduced two charter amendments. The first would allow the mayor to serve two consecutive terms before needing the unanimous consent of other councilmembers before continuing in that office. Currently, the mayor may serve for only one year before unanimous consent is required. The second proposed amendment would mandate that the Town hold referendums in the manner of Town elections rather than forcing everyone to show up to vote at a town meeting at a specific time and day as currently outlined in the Charter. The introduction of the first amendment was approved 4-1 with Councilmember Lang dissenting and the second was introduced with unanimous approval. The Council plans to hold public hearings on both amendments in September.
**Native Canopy Tree Program**
I introduced a resolution to allow the Town to implement the Native Canopy Tree Program proposed by the Environment Committee and supported unanimously by the Council at the previous meeting. The program would support the planting of canopy trees on resident property to help promote the tree canopy. The Council unanimously approved the resolution and reviewed implementation plans drafted by Town Staff. We also learned that six residents have already requested trees. The Council will consider the budget transfer needed to pay for the program at its September meeting.
**Building Code Amendments**
Several members of the Land Use Committee, including Chair Donna Kirk, Sue Blacklow, Kathy Flaxman, Lees Hartman, Dedun Ingram, Joe Rubin, and Bruce Russell, presented their Committee’s detailed proposal to amendment the Town Code to clarify and remove inconsistencies regarding the current rules regulating land use as well as reduce the need for variance requests. Among many other proposals, the revisions would change the definition of the rear setback line so that residents with irregularly shaped properties would have more regularly shaped building envelope. (My understanding is that none of the changes would reduce the amount of buildable land.) The changes would further make it easier to replace existing walls without the need for a variance.
The proposals were not discussed or debated at this meeting. The Council plans to hold a work session to consider these complex rules and then hold a public information session in advance of a public hearing. Everyone on the Council was grateful for the enormous amount of work which clearly went into putting together the thoughtful and lengthy report on this complex issue.
**Water Management Program**
The Council reviewed proposed operating procedures drafted by Staff with input from the Public Services Committee for the proposed water management program proposed by the Public Services Committee and supported unanimously by the Council at the last meeting. The Council would like to move forward with the program and will hold a public hearing on it and consider the transfer of funds within the budget needed to pay for it.
**Committee Operating Procedures**
Councilmember Pat Burda and Community Relations Chair Ann Wild presented and the Council reviewed the proposal of the Long-Range Planning Committee regarding committee operating procedures. The Council discussed various ideas for improvement, focusing on various ideas to promote openness with an emphasis on making sure that residents are aware that they can attend any committee meeting as well as committee minute reporting. Other proposals concentrated on coordination among the committees and with Town Staff.
Democrats For Pelura (Updated)
Maryland Democrats had better hope the state Republican Party does not get rid of embattled Chairman James Pelura III. From a financial perspective, Pelura is the best Republican Chairman the Democrats could ever hope to have.
Pelura and some Republican elected officials may disagree on the state party’s role in setting policy. But few people would disagree on the central role of any political party apparatus: helping its candidates win elections. That means training activists, registering voters, communicating with the press, criticizing the other party’s candidates, getting out the vote and channeling activity towards critical, and winnable, races. All of the above takes money.
Much of the discontent with Pelura is directed to his inability to raise money and clear the state party’s debt. Let’s put those party finances in perspective. Both the Democrats and the Republicans maintain county party organizations, each of which has its own treasury, along with the state organizations. Furthermore, both parties have federal funds which must be used to promote federal candidates. The sum totality of all these party funds augments the individual candidates’ funds to wage battle at election time.
Here are the most recent financial statistics for all Democratic state funds in Maryland:
And here are the most recent financial statistics for all Republican state funds in Maryland:
Among the county organizations, the Republicans do not trail the Democrats by much. GOP county funds had a collective total cash balance of $148,562.65 in January 2009, fairly close to the Democratic county total of $171,733.69. Only one county organization, the Queen Anne’s County RCC, had any debt, and that was just $500. Three Republican county parties – Montgomery, Harford and Anne Arundel – raised and spent more than $20,000 each. Only one Democratic county party – Prince George’s – did so. None of this makes up for overwhelming Democratic registration advantages throughout the state. But at least some of the Republican county parties are trying to stay in the game.
The same cannot be said at the state level. In terms of state funds, the Democratic state party had $161,898.48 in January 2009 with no debt. The Republican state party had $57.96 with $57,272.24 in debt. Of the debt amount, $40,672.24 is in “outstanding bills due.” Who is owed and how soon will they come to collect?
But there is more. Consider the condition of the two parties’ federal funds.
The Democratic state party and the Montgomery County Democratic Central Committee together raised $805,140 and spent $929,077 in the first five months of this year. (MCDCC raised more money than 15 state Democratic parties.) They recorded a final cash balance of $98,001. The Republican state party raised $128,099, spent $128,187 and finished with just $1,547.
Let’s restate this in pure and simple terms.
Republican state party, state cash balance, January 2009: $57.96
Republican state party, federal cash balance, May 2009: $1,547
Republican state party, debt, January 2009: $57,272.24
Under James Pelura III, the Maryland Republican Party is flat on its back. It cannot help protect GOP incumbents. It cannot devote any resources to helping defeat First District Democratic Congressman Frank Kratovil. And the staff turmoil under Pelura guarantees that donors will stay away as long as he continues to serve as Chairman.
And so keeping Pelura in place should be a top priority for Maryland Democrats. Once his Executive Committee starts to push him out, Pelura will need legal advice to remain in place. We should start a defense fund for him right now. Let’s call it “Democrats for Pelura.” Do we have any takers?
Update: According to the Sun, the state GOP’s problems are now $77,500 worse.
Will Maryland Follow DC?
WTOP reports that Gov. O'Malley thinks we should recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states:"I think that it's very difficult to deny equal rights to people when it comes to rights that are disbursed by a government rather than a faith or a church," O'Malley said Monday on WTOP's Ask the Governor Program. "If the person has these rights under another state, I think we're sort of pressed to deny those rights. So, yes, we probably should respect those rights."
The District recently moved to take this step so Maryland's action would be nothing new in the region. One can understand why the District chose this route rather than legalizing same-sex marriages as getting this legislation past Congress quite difficult. Maryland's choice results from politics of a different sort. The General Assembly won't pass it. Gov. O'Malley seems willing to have gay marriages in the State but doesn't want the credit from Blue Maryland/blame from Red Maryland. Ironic though as we used to be the place people came to get married more easily and with less fuss. No renewing of the fine tradition of eloping to Elkton. Instead, we'll be forcing couples--and their wedding business--to go elsewhere.
O'Malley has been cold to the idea of legalizing same-sex marriages in Maryland, but has promoted the idea of civil unions.
"I believe that if we were to have civil unions, there would be no question about whether or not we would recognize unions in other states. And that's the way to move forward."
Before making any changes to state laws, O'Malley is waiting for an opinion from Maryland's attorney general.
"If the law allows that, then that's what we will do."
O'Malley's remarks come as a new law in the D.C. recognizing same sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions is set to take effect on Tuesday.
Winners and Losers in the Maryland Blogosphere
From our dataset on 38 statistics-releasing Maryland blogs, here are three that are on the way up as well as a category of them that is stalled.
Headed Up
Inside Charm City 
Inside Charm City is the leading news aggregator in the Baltimore area. Its traffic swings wildly with current events, getting enormous spikes from posts about Michael Phelps and Miss California, Steve McNair and local fireworks schedules. The blog has caught on as a central location for Baltimore MSM links, leading the state in visits in five of the last six months. Its great weakness is that it has virtually no original content. Still, Inside Charm City’s success demonstrates that Baltimore is hungry for blogs, and if an independent, original political blog ever set up shop there, its site traffic would explode.
Rockville Central 
Brad Rourke and Cindy Cotte Griffiths have created a true online gathering place for the City of Rockville. Their site carries a mix of news, editorials, announcements and pictures that many residents have adopted as an indispensable resource. Local politicians are particularly watchful as many have submitted guest posts and city elections are approaching. Rockville Central has been the second-most visited local blog in the state after Inside Charm City over the last two months.
Annapolis Capital Punishment
Not so long ago, Paul Foer was known as “PMF” on the liberal blog Free State Politics, where he was a frequent target of Red Maryland’s conservatives. Well, Foer is getting the last laugh. His Annapolis Capital Punishment blog, which follows Annapolis city politics in minute detail, beat the statewide Red Maryland in site visits for the first time in May. Foer’s numbers should stay strong as he has a mayor’s race to cover.
Heading Down/Stalled
Red Maryland and Conservative Blogs
Free State Politics, a multi-author liberal blog, was the leading political blog in Maryland starting around 2006. Red Maryland, a multi-author conservative blog, was founded in July 2007 and passed Free State Politics in site visits in October 2007. That started a 13-month reign atop the state’s political blogosphere that was ended by MPW in November 2008. But Red Maryland’s slide has been much longer than that. The blog peaked in January 2008 with 14,614 site visits. Its June 2009 level was 7,859 visits, or 54% of its high point.
Red Maryland’s decline is echoed by a broader stagnation of the state’s conservative blogosphere.
The 15 conservative blogs that release their site visit statistics have together combined for around 30,000-40,000 monthly visits since October 2007. Their peak month, January 2008, occurred in the immediate aftermath of the special session’s tax package. The conservatives’ stall is noteworthy considering that the state’s entire blogosphere has been growing rapidly.
The state’s right wing has been plagued by infighting between the state Republican Party Chairman and its elected officials, staff disruption at party headquarters, pointless bickering over how to deal with the anti-Obama comments from Anne Arundel County and collapsing voter registration and electoral performance. Those facts may be combining with a general lack of morale to stall conservative blogdom in Maryland.
We’ll have a closer look at MPW’s readership next week.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Cheryl Kagan's Kickoff Speech
From her June 15 fundraiser. More videos of former Delegate Paul Carlson and former District 17 Senator Mary Boergers appear here.
How Re-Regulation Will Cost You Money
Yesterday, we revealed how Pepco customers can save up to 13.7% off their power bills by switching to a new power supplier. BGE customers can save up to 9.8% off their bills by doing the same thing. But “re-regulation” will block your ability to save yourself money. Why?
In the old days, utilities were vertically integrated companies. They generated power, transmitted it to substations and distributed it to customers. But they had to answer to government regulators, who set their prices. Those prices had to allow the utilities to recover their costs of servicing customers. Otherwise, they would be unable to remain in business. The prices also had to generate a reasonable return on investment. After all, if stockholders could not get steady dividends and occasional capital gains by buying utility stocks, no one would buy them and none of those of power plants or utility lines would have been built. Because of these characteristics, the old system did nothing to protect consumers from the gigantic price spikes that occurred in 1972-1975 and 1978-1982.
Deregulation changed all that. In Maryland, Pepco and BGE were forced to sell off their power plants so they could purchase electricity from competing suppliers. (BGE wound up selling its plants to another member of its corporate family.) Competition was supposed to keep prices low. But the plan did not work immediately for two reasons. First, the alternative suppliers were slow to show up. Second, retail prices were capped from the time the deregulation law passed in 1999 through 2006. Deregulation’s architects thought enough power suppliers would enter the market by 2006 that rates could be allowed to float and competition would keep prices down. Instead, BGE asked for a 72% rate hike to make up for seven years with no price increase. Political hysteria ensued.
Fast forward to the winter of 2008-2009. Competition has arrived. As we stated yesterday, Pepco customers can pick from five electricity suppliers and BGE customers can pick from ten. But few people took advantage of those opportunities and rising utility bills put the issue of “re-regulation” back on the table. The Senate passed a bill that would have given the state’s Public Service Commission the right to order utilities to build new power plants and regulate the rates they charge. Never mind the fact that it would take decades to build all of these new plants and no one knows exactly how many billions of dollars they would cost. And never mind the fact that business customers, who spend massive amounts on electricity, opposed the bill and were organizing employee cooperatives to take advantage of competition. Some in the General Assembly were determined to save us from the deregulation regime that the General Assembly, of course, created. But the House of Delegates’ Economic Matters Committee stopped the measure on a 21-2 vote. As Delegate Brian Feldman (D-15) said, “There's a risk, if we screw this up, of unintended consequences.”
Here is the unintended consequence. The “re-regulation bill,” as amended, contained this language:The commission shall develop and implement a plan for residential and small commercial customers to transition from a program of customer choice of electricity supply and electricity supply services established under subtitle 5 of this title.
So remember how you can switch suppliers and save double digits off your power bill? “Re-regulation” will put the brakes on that. Why?
Remember how the old regulated system works. Even though regulators set electricity rates, utilities are allowed to recover their costs from customers and realize a return on investment. So if the “re-regulation” bill passes and the Public Service Commission orders Pepco or BGE to build a new plant, they will be entitled to pass on the cost of building, operating and maintaining that plant to you. Plus, they will be allowed to earn a profit. Under today’s system, if Pepco or BGE raised the price of their Standard Offer Service, which is their default price for electricity, you could switch to another power supplier to save money. If the state forced either of them to build a new power plant and their customers deserted them to avoid paying the construction charges, the utilities would be unable to pay their costs and earn a profit on the plant. So to keep the companies whole, the state would have to limit competition and force you to pay for all of this. The problem would be compounded if the plant owner bets wrong, builds a plant that runs on a fuel that later soars in price and seeks to pass on those costs to now-captive customers like you. Is that a risk you want to bear?
Think about it this way. Today, you have the ability to shop around and save money on your power bill right now. Pepco customers can save up to 13.7% by purchasing their power from Washington Gas Energy Services. Ask any politician who supports “re-regulation” if any law they can pass will save you 13.7% right now. And then ask them exactly when any law they can pass will save you 13.7%. See how they answer you. And then think about whether “re-regulation” is truly in your interest.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
What Is The Strategy?
By Marc Korman.
I usually do not write about national politics unless there is a Maryland tie in, but since Adam posted Sarah Palin’s resignation speech and I am so confused by her strategy, I could not resist.
If the plan is to run for president in 2012, declining to run for reelection certainly has precedence. Mitt Romney chose to stand down in 2006 despite having only served one term as governor of Massachusetts partly because he knew a reelection campaign would require him to take positions far to the left of the 2008 Republican primary electorate and could easily end in defeat (think Bob Ehrlich).
Even resigning from a position to run is not new. Bob Dole left his Majority Leadership position and the Senate in the summer of 1996 to focus on his bid for the presidency. Of course, by that point he was already guaranteed the Republican nomination.
But resigning before her first gubernatorial term is complete to focus on an election three years away is an interesting strategy. The best explanation I have heard is she wants to make some money in the private sector, which she can do through book deals, speeches, and slots on corporate boards much easier outside of the governor’s office. She can combine that and campaigning between now and the midterms in November 2010 and then switch over to a full campaign effort leading up to the 2012 election.
Perhaps Palin has also looked at some of her potential competitors and found that being in office is not so important. Mitt Romney will have been out of office for over five years by the time the 2012 Republican primary season heats up. Newt Gingrich resigned from the House of Representatives shortly after he won reelection in 1998, giving up his role as Speaker in the process. Perhaps Palin plans to use him as a shield.
But political strategy aside, Palin’s decision and her comments are just plain strange. One particular section jumped out at me:And so as I thought about this announcement that I wouldn't run for re-election and what it means for Alaska, I thought about how much fun some governors have as lame ducks... travel around the state, to the Lower 48 (maybe), overseas on international trade - as so many politicians do. And then I thought - that's what's wrong - many just accept that lame duck status, hit the road, draw the paycheck, and "milk it". I'm not putting Alaska through that - I promised efficiencies and effectiveness! ? [sic] That's not how I am wired. I am not wired to operate under the same old "politics as usual." I promised that four years ago - and I meant it.
As best as I can tell, Palin is essentially saying that governing is about elections. If she is not going to run, she cannot govern. I suppose the good news is if she were to win two White House terms, she would step aside in January of 2017 since as a lame duck she would have no purpose.
Maybe more to the story will come out. There could be a scandal. Perhaps she is planning to challenge Lisa Murkowski for the US Senate or Michael Steele for the RNC Chairmanship. Maybe she has plans for a think tank. But whatever her plan, resigning before her term is complete strikes me as strange. There may be no single action that disqualifies someone from the presidency, but turning your back on those you represent is probably pretty close.
Big-Time Interest in Electricity Savings (Updated)
Our post on saving money on electric power is drawing a lot of attention. At the moment, 48% of all of our traffic consists of direct visits to that post. Some of the visitors are coming from the Facebook pages of Delegates Saqib Ali (D-39) and Kirill Reznik (D-39), both of whom are alerting their constituents to this opportunity. Thank you, Delegates!
Update: Gaithersburg City Council Member Ryan Spiegel has also linked to this post from Facebook and is quoted in an article on consumer choice in today's Town Courier.
How to Save Money on Your Electric Bill Right Now
Over ninety percent of Marylanders can save money on their electric bills right now. You don’t need to write the Governor. You don’t need new legislation. You don’t need any help from politicians. You can do it NOW.
First, let’s understand how Maryland’s electricity market works. Under deregulation, utilities like Pepco and BGE do not generate their own electricity. They buy it from other suppliers. Sometimes those suppliers are subsidiaries of the same parent company (as is the case with BGE’s parent, Constellation Energy) and sometimes they are not. But you as a consumer have the right to choose your generating company and your utility will then distribute the power to your home or business. If you do not choose a generator, the utility will sell power to you from its suppliers under a Standard Order of Service (SOS) price. Ninety-seven percent of state residents do not exercise their right of choice and instead purchase SOS, but you don’t have to be one of them. The SOS price is not always the best price. Sometimes, you can find a better one.
The state’s Public Service Commission website allows you to find the power generators who sell in your area. In Pepco’s service territory, there are currently five suppliers you can choose: BTU Energy LLC, Clean Currents LLC, Horizon Power & Light LLC, Pepco Energy Services and Washington Gas Energy Services. BGE’s service territory has ten suppliers. All of the suppliers’ websites are listed and you can find out their offers.
How do you shop? First, find out your utility’s SOS price to compare, which is the average cost per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity generation and transmission. Utilities report this figure on their websites. Pepco’s SOS price to compare for residential customers is currently 12.51 cents per kWh. If you are receiving SOS – Pepco’s default supplier – this is the average price you are currently paying.
If you are a residential customer receiving BGE’s SOS, you are currently paying an annual average of 11.97 cents per kWh.
Now let’s check two of the alternative suppliers in Pepco’s service area. Let’s start with Clean Currents, a company based in Rockville which specializes in supplying wind power. Clean Currents is now offering both Pepco and BGE customers a rate of 11.2 cents per kWh for power that is 50% derived from wind energy and a rate of 11.7 cents per kWh for 100% wind power. That means Pepco customers can save 10.5% off their power bill and BGE customers can save 6.4% and simultaneously increase their use of wind power by switching to Clean Currents.
It gets better. You can save even more money with Washington Gas Energy Services (WGES). In Pepco’s service area, WGES offers electricity at a base rate of 10.8 cents per kWh. The rate goes up if you want higher percentages of wind power. That same base rate of 10.8 cents is available in the Baltimore area. That means Pepco customers can save 13.7% off their power bill and BGE customers can save 9.8% by switching to WGES.
These rates will not be in effect forever. But by looking for the best deal every year or two, you can save a bundle of money. Deregulation, which was intended to lower prices through competition, did not work when competitors were not present. But now they are in both the Washington and Baltimore areas. And now you know how to make this market work for you.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that some politicians in Annapolis are trying to take away your ability to save money. We’ll reveal how tomorrow.
Monday, July 06, 2009
DC Madam Lives Again
This belongs in the category of "Can't make this stuff up." We have had a handful of readers access our "Washington Post Readers Erupt Over Dinnergate" post by searching for the term "DC Madam." Indeed, a Google blogsearch on "DC Madam" currently ranks our post fifth on the search results page.
Jim Smith is Not Running for Comptroller (Updated)
Courtesy of WBAL, following is a statement by Baltimore County Executive Jim Smith announcing his decision not to run for Comptroller. That's an interesting decision given his recent appearance at a Committee for Montgomery meeting and this fundraising speech strongly hinting at a run. So what is going to happen to his nearly million-dollar war chest? Will Smith's Chief of Staff, gubernatorial brother Peter O'Malley, have a say?
Update: Jim Smith probably won't be running for Senate because he lives in District 11, currently represented by Democrat Bobby Zirkin. We would not be surprised if Smith wound up in Governor O'Malley's cabinet. There are currently openings in Transportation and Labor.
Update 2: The Baltimore Sun is now speculating on the fate of Smith's war chest.
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After much deliberation, I have decided not to run for Comptroller in the 2010 election. Although this has not been an easy decision, I am confident that I am making the right choice. Having spent many months thinking about the duties of Comptroller in the State of Maryland, I have concluded that it is not a position to which I aspire. I have never pursued any elected office because it was expedient. I always sought the opportunity to serve because I thought I could make a real difference-as a councilman, a judge, and currently as County Executive. I did not feel that passion when considering a run for Comptroller.
To those of you who have supported me as County Executive, and encouraged me to consider a statewide run in 2010, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your enthusiasm is amazing, and I am truly grateful for your counsel and support. Rest assured that I remain committed to public service, and I look forward to finding new ways to serve in the future.
Working together with the people of Baltimore County, we've created a renaissance that is visible from one end of the County to the other. I am excited about what we've accomplished, and I am energized by the work we have left to do. There are eighteen months left in my term as County Executive, and I am focused on completing what we started.
Washington Post Readers Erupt Over Dinnergate
The Washington Post’s readers are roaring with fury at the newspaper’s Dinnergate scandal. As of this writing, nearly 700 comments have poured into Howard Kurtz’s article on the debacle, more than 200 have been posted to the Ombudsman’s story and almost 600 have descended on the publisher’s apology. Here’s a sample of what the readers are saying. Mark our words: after this, the Post’s endorsement is going to matter a whole lot less next year than it did in 2002 and 2006.
Post reader comments:
I have never seen a news organization self-destruct more quickly than I have the Washington Post today. You just flat-out offered flattering stories in exchange for $250,000 bribes. Unbelievable.
This is shameful, just shameful. The Washington Post has lost whatever journalistic integrity it had left. No wonder newspapers are dying.
This hurts. Up until now, I considered the Washington Post to be one of the few outstanding news sources in the world. Now, I will have much less trust in its reporting. This is not the fault of marketing. This is the fault of the publisher, who obviously knew all about this money grab. I can’t help but believe those in charge of the newsroom knew about it, too. Remember, credibility is very fragile. This episode put a huge crack in the credibility of the Washington Post. What a shame.
Would someone please explain to someone far outside the Beltway why a newspaper thinks it should broker interactions between government officials and those seeking favorable treatment from the government?
What’s black and white and red all over? Answer: a blushing Washington Post. And well you should be embarrassed with the disclosure of a newspaper running a salon for-profit special interest escort service. Your bankrupt journalistic ethics are now exposed for all to see.
The Washington Post only found this story fit to run in the Style section today. I'll bet if it happened at the Washington Times during the Bush years they would have run it on the top of the front page.
The Post does a lot of excellent reporting of difficult and complex issues. There’s a lot of great journalism there, and a lot of honest people. But this! This is shameful! It calls into question everything the Post reports. Now every time I read a Post article (if I continue to read the Post at all...), I'll have to wonder, “Did any special interest groups pay tens of thousands of dollars for off-the-record access to the article's author or to its editor, and if so, did it influence what I'm reading?” The answer to both questions may very well be, “No.” But once I have to ask those questions, the answers doesn't really matter; the damage is done by the need to ask. If decision makers at the Post can't understand how completely wrong this was, they have no business running such an important newspaper.
Obviously, Pelton is taking the fall for what is an - appalling - idea of Weymouth’s. These “salons” are a disgraceful idea, and they are a symptom of how the Post is a) desperate for revenue, and b) no longer the swashbuckling institution that it was in the Watergate era. The Washington Post was a national treasure back in those days. In the past 20 years, however, it has become everything bad about everything bad.
Ridiculous? Last week I would have said so, but after today... ehhhh, not so much. After all, if the Post would sell space in its publisher’s own living room to raise money, then it’s certainly capable of selling space on its Op-Ed page, isn’t it?
Now we know why WaPo editorial board member Ruth Marcus just came out opposing a health plan which would allow a government entity to compete with insurance companies. Clearly you can’t sell tickets to big insurance companies if they think that you support a plan which would compete with them. It is incredible how sleazy the Post’s relationship with those in power has become.
Let me get this straight...the Washington Post charges special interests ten to twenty thousand dollars to attend “parties” with Post newsroom reporters. Do the special interests have to pay more to actually write the articles that appear in print? How much would it cost me to write a Krauthammer editorial?
It seems to me that the Post’s staff’s objections amount to arguing about the pattern on the skirt worn by a sh***y pig. This tale suggests that privileged access (and its consequences) is endemic at the Post and in Washington’s political culture. We need to realize that the reporting on health care is probably no more honest than that of the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Would that we had half the courage of the Iranians.
So you’ll be taking big bucks from insurance industry executives and lobbyists so that they can dictate the talking points to your stenographers - I mean columnists - so that they can catapult the propaganda - I mean opine - on what a very bad, terrible, horrible, socialist, fascist and communist thing it would be for 47 million Americans citizens to have a public option for their healthcare. Got it.
REPORTERS COMPLAIN ABOUT STRESS OF JOURNALISTIC PROSTITUTION (WASHINGTON DC) Embittered Was Po reporters complained about the stress of Journalistic Prostitution. “You have to write 2 stories, say one praising Obama and one criticizing Obama.” “The articles have to be posted on a secure online website for bidders only before the NYSE opens at 9 eastern.” “Then if someone buys the Deletion rights or worse yet demands a fictitious source, you have to get the rewrites ready immediately or your future price as a reporter will track down,” complained a dispirited reporter. Reporters were pleased, however, with their pay under the new contingent fee arrangement for the revenue streams generated by Wash Po articles traded on the NYSE futures market. And since the scandal occurred before a holiday weekend, no one will remember by Monday.
I looked at the Politico story a second time....one of the most striking portions is this: “She made it clear however, that The Post, which lost $19.5 million in the first quarter, sees bringing together Washington figures as a future revenue source.” In other words: the Washington Post is perfectly happy in being the pimp between lobbyists and the White House.
So, if the National Rifle Association would “sponsor,” say, $250,000 worth of these “salons,” could we buy some fair coverage? I would think so. Is there any other way to read it?
What’s the big deal? This was just an attempt to formalize WaPo’s role as pimp arranging trysts between wh*res (gov’t) and their johns (lobbyists).
They got caught, plain and simple. It was not a mistake. It was not an oversight. They got caught.
Presstitutes.
This boondoggle is not conspiracy, as some suggest. It’s gross incompetence. The Washington Post is just a public high school but with a little more money. There are a few highly-overpaid and idolized superstars around which all business turns. Aside from that are the masses of hard workers who somehow still have their jobs, but will never get any recognition, a raise or a “thank you.”
If pimping out the Post is done in such plain sight, one shudders to think what journalistic malpractices publisher Weymouth executes behind closed doors.
Newsboy yells out: “I got your Post for sale, right here! Post for sale.” Bystander: “Tell me boy, what’s the headline.” Newsboy: “Mister, that is the headline.”
So who’s getting fired for this? You’ll let go talented journalists for downsizing, but your idiotic marketing clowns get to come in to work on Monday? Everyone involved in this should get the ax. Maybe the Weekly World News is hiring.
How much to spin George Will’s bowtie?
I’m a former editor of a (very) small local weekly. There is NO WAY that Katherine Weymouth DID NOT know about this. I refuse to believe that her marketing team would EVER put such an idea onto paper without her knowledge and consent, even if it was just a “trial balloon.” So, there are only two possible conclusions to be drawn - 1) either Weymouth is totally clueless about how the newspaper business is supposed to work, or 2) she is absolutely desperate to increase revenues. I opt for the latter. But if that’s true, and she’s willing to even entertain the idea of compromising the Post's integrity for cash, things must be very, very bad indeed.
Good lord! This is nuts. Now, anyone attempting to contact a Post reporter will have to wonder whether their calls would be returned more quickly - or at all - if only they had paid to sponsor a salon.
The Post’s credibility on local news was destroyed long ago by sloppy, inaccurate reporting. The editorial page has been biased and excessively influenced by certain Montgomery County politicians like Councilmembers Andrews and Trachtenberg. The Post is so bad that I cannot rely upon it for accuracy in any matter. Therefore, this is no surprise, but interesting to see the Post brass try to spin and worm out to avoid full responsibility for what this is: disreputable, shameful, unethical conduct.
I do really like the part about $250K for “non-confrontational access.” The simple translation of that deliciously accurate phrase is “We’ll kiss your ass for $250K; you just tell us how hard.”
Gee, and here I thought all the grammatical and spelling errors this newspaper has been making lately were serious problems. Thanks for putting it in perspective, Washington Post.
If Katherine Weymouth had any integrity she would now resign as publisher of the Post. Of course, if she had any integrity, she would not have been pimping the Post in the first place.
Unbelievable. It doesn’t matter what you call it, this is prostitution. It would be nice if news organizations actually felt their loyalty was to the readers, but I guess those days are long gone.
The DC Madam lives!
Now that Ms Weymouth has had to cancel the Salons, what’s she going to do with the 10,000 cocktail weenies and the 500 pounds of imitation crabmeat that are in her freezer?
People are going to remember today as the day the Washington Post died.