Sound like a bad idea? Hey, if you don’t want to listen to me, then listen to your County Council Members!
I am writing this blog post from the Royal Mile Pub in Wheaton, MoCo’s best scotch bar. And why am I here? I am doing my part to finance transportation projects in the county and so are all my rowdy friends. Bring out another round, barkeep!
This blog has chronicled MoCo’s transportation woes over and over again and the situation has gotten much worse in the wake of the state’s billion-dollar transportation cut. The vast majority of the county’s transportation problems occur on state highways (like Wisconsin Avenue/Rockville Pike, Georgia Avenue, Connecticut Avenue and US-29) or are connected to transit needs. Every year, the County Executive and the County Council send a letter to the state delegation outlining their highest priorities for state projects. And the projects move through the state capital program slower than frozen molasses.
Here’s one example. The stretch of Georgia Avenue between 16th Street and Forest Glen Road, commonly known as Montgomery Hills, is a blighted mess. Crumbling buildings, ugly power lines, hellish pedestrian conditions and more traffic than any other non-interstate road in the county have produced long-simmering discontent among the natives (one of whom is me). The North and West Silver Spring Master Plan contains a plan for redesigning this part of Georgia as an attractive, pedestrian-friendly boulevard and the county has made it its number one road design request to the state since 1999. This past January, the O’Malley administration included $3 million for project design funding, but that fell victim to the recent cuts. If this were left only to the state’s devices, the natives might never see any relief.
Two years ago, Council Members Steve Silverman and Nancy Floreen came up with a novel way to jumpstart state projects: they would use proceeds from bonds backed by liquor profits. Montgomery County has a wholesale monopoly on all alcohol sales and a retail monopoly on hard liquor. As with all things connected to mankind’s favorite beverage, this monopoly is hugely profitable. By leveraging future liquor profits into current capital funds, the county could get some state projects moving.
Hey barkeep – give me a refill on those Goldfishies! For you non-Wheatonites, the Royal Mile’s house bar food is Pepperidge Farm Goldfish. That’s yet another reason to come here. Give us another round of Loose Cannon too (hic)!
Where was I? Oh yeah, transportation. The County Council authorized $104 million in liquor bonds to pay for new projects, but only spent $31 million. So a joint staff panel from the Council, the County’s Department of Transportation and Park and Planning recommended a list of languishing state projects that would be started with the remaining $73 million in county money. The projects are all over the county, ranging from Montgomery Hills to design money for a new Metro entrance at the Intersection of Death to new sidewalks in Kensington to two bus-rapid-transit lines to relocating a treacherous stretch of Georgia Avenue in Brookeville. Most of the spending will finance design because $73 million won’t pay for a lot of construction. But without design acceleration, we will be waiting well past last call to get something actually built.
The council’s Transportation Committee approved the project list last Thursday, so the full council should be considering it soon. So let’s drink a toast to those Council Members! (Hey buddy... (hic) What are their names again?)
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Have a Drink for the Road!
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
MoCo's Alcohol Addiction
Ever wondered why the price of wine is so much higher in Montgomery County than elsewhere. This week, the City Paper went slumming and traveled out to MoCo to explore the operation of the county monopoly on beer, wine and liquor. Montgomery certainly has an interest in the monopoly that goes well beyond constraining the sale of alcohol:
The article missed another certain backer of the monopoly: DLC employees. I bet unionized employees for the Department of Liquor Control do better than equivalent store employees in non-control jurisdictions and would unsurprisingly like to keep their jobs.Standing in the middle of the Department of Liquor Control’s massive, 175,000-square-foot warehouse in Rockville, among nearly $20 million worth of booze, DLC Director George Griffin is pondering the question posed to him: Given the frustrations of some licensees, what service does the DLC provide that couldn’t be done better in the open, free-market system?
“There’s like a big picture and small picture,” says Griffin. “The big picture is that we are controlling alcohol. The people of Montgomery County made a decision to control alcohol…When [alcohol’s] abused, it has devastating consequences.”
Griffin then proceeds to reel off some impressive statistics on how control jurisdictions have lower rates of underage drinking and fewer alcohol-related traffic fatalities for people under 21 than open jurisdictions. (An independent study forwarded to me by the National Alcohol Beverage Control Association seems to confirm his stats.) But then Griffin pauses briefly and delivers a disarmingly direct kicker to his list of justifications for MoCo’s system: “And that’s in addition to the $22 million that we give the county in unrestricted funds.”
On the other hand, the system may drive business out of the County because people can get better selection and prices in neighboring jurisdictions. Total Wine in McClean, Virginia beats has far better prices and selection than MoCo stores. I wonder if anyone knows if the County would make more money simply levying a tax rather than running the business itself. A safe bet seems to be that DLC employees would strongly oppose the abolition of the current regime but that local restaurateurs would thrilled by it.
Monday, February 05, 2007
More Booze in Kensington
At the request of legislators from District 18, the Montgomery County legislative delegation voted to support changes to liquor laws in the "metropolis", as Gov. O'Malley called it at Einstein High School, of Kensington. The changes, requested by the Kensington Town Council, would lower the food-to-alcohol requirement for restaurants to the level used in the rest of Montgomery County and hopefully make it easier for the Town to attract additional restaurants.
