Costco’s very strong desire to put a gas station near its Wheaton location against very strong neighborhood opposition has become one of the more epic land use battles in Montgomery County. Costco has now emailed its customers, including yours truly, as part of its advocacy for its position.
I must admit I was surprised that the “open immediately” envelope wasn’t the usual offer for a 20% discount on a far too large quantity of something that I don’t need anyway.
From Facebook
Since taking office, Gov. Larry Hogan has made a variety of small mistakes, such as the Jon Stewart bait of a press conference at the start of the Baltimore riots (“When the Mayor called me, which quite frankly, we were glad she finally did.”). Overall, however, he has avoided major unforced errors as he moved forward in shifting Maryland towards his priorities. Until now.
Yesterday, Gov. Hogan announced that he would withhold $68 million in funding allocated by the General Assembly for education. The money would have gone to fully funding the program that sends extra money to the school systems in the state that are the most expensive to operate. In policy argot, the program is known as the GCEI, or Geographic Cost of Education Index.
Education is Maryland’s brand–we have consistently had the best schools in the nation. Moreover, as a high income state, we are only going to continue to grow incomes and economically with an ever more highly educated and skilled workforce.
It’s an even bigger political mistake. Gov. Hogan has generally been successful in using his position to focus debates and draw lines of comparison between him and his opponents. This time, he drew the line in a way that benefits his opponents.
He may think that he just alienated the teachers’ unions and their Democratic supporters. But education is widely popular around the State and currently by far the best issue going for the Democrats. Instead of missing a chance to undercut them completely by releasing the funds, he handed them an issue.
Even if he had released just one-half of the funds, as widely expected earlier in the day, he would have totally undermined the Democrats. Though they still would have bitterly complained, the public would have discounted them heavily as he moved halfway. He also hurts himself with the General Assembly as he had repeatedly made noises about releasing the funds during the session.
This decision will go down particularly poorly in Montgomery County in which education is like religion. Though he didn’t carry it, Hogan made inroads into Montgomery in the County in 2014. His brand of avoiding social issues like abortion and gay rights but pursuing center-right economic policies positions him well to extend those gains in 2018.
But not if keeps handing the Democrats education as an issue.
Outside of the Town Hall
Two incumbents, Pat Burda and John Bickerman, were on the ballot for the two open seats. No other candidates filed. Bickerman was reelected but Burda got defeated by a write-in candidate, Fred Cecere.
So far, this just looks like democracy in action. And indeed, surprise winner Fred Cecere promoted that view in his one public message on the town’s unofficial listserve since his election:
A week ago, I had no intention of being a candidate for Chevy Chase Town Council. When I was approached by a neighbor and asked if I would accept a write-in vote, I felt honored, but skeptical. I was overwhelmed and humbled by the many people who voted for me Tuesday.
Except that this email does not reveal the depth of secrecy around his stealth candidacy. His supporters actively worked to keep the large majority of people from knowing that he was running as a write-in candidate. An odd approach for someone who has claimed since the election to value “transparency”–one that was labelled a “coup” and a “conspiracy” by various residents.
The level of secrecy behind Fred Cecere’s stealth campaign was only revealed when a town resident exposed publicly an email from Ed Albert:
Vote John Bickerman
Write in “Fred Cecere”
DO NOT vote for anyone else.
We have worked very hard to keep this among the right group. Pls only give those names to those you feel 100% certain are like minded. If you check with me first. I will let you know if they are already covered.
Please vote today for John Bickerman and write-in Fred Cecere. Together, we can TAKE BACK OUR TOWN!. Between 5-8 is ideal for the element of surprise, but anytime is better than no vote.
Ed Albert was one of the prime organizers behind the effort. People like Albert and others who think like him apparently believe that only “the right” people should vote. Rather than run an open campaign based on the issues, they chose to run a secret, stealth campaign. Turnout is very low in municipal contests, especially uncontested ones. The organizers of this stealth candidacy took advantage to get their man elected. As you can imagine, this trickery hasn’t gone down well with all residents.
Two councilmembers seemingly have close links to this rather un-neighborly campaign.
John Bickerman is a professional mediator who heads the two-person Bickerman Dispute Resolution firm and teaches dispute resolution at Cornell. His website says that he strives to provide “ethical dispute resolution.”
Nevertheless, Bickerman apparently was aware of the stealth write-in candidate and defended it at length publicly (see also this Washington Post article) even though his election statement touted his commitment to “transparent and open governance.” Despite this public commitment, Bickerman has refused to answer questions about his involvement except to write:
I am truly saddened by the turmoil and divisiveness that this election has brought to my Town. For the last 25 years, I have devoted my life to resolving conflict and helping parties avoid litigation. Since becoming a member of the Council, I have sought to find ways to find compromise and reduce conflict on the Council.
Except that his actions were anything but transparent–even after the election was over. It’s nice that he wants to “heal some of the open wounds” but it seems insincere not to mention unethical when he helped create them in the first place and did not answer public questions about his participation. More cynical than healing.
Councilmember Al Lang, not up for election, also appears to have been in on the game. Though he also refused to answer public questions on the town listserv about his participation, he handed in Fred Cecere’s financial disclosure form to the Chair of the Town Ethics Commission at the end of Election Day. Lang is tipped to become the Town’s mayor. He is also the CEO of Coteva, Inc.
The major reasons given for the secret plot of a stealth candidate that I have read include (1) disagreement with Town government policy and that people who did (2) felt “disenfranchised.”
Disenfranchisement means denied the right to vote. No one in Chevy Chase has been disenfranchised. Even if one goes beyond to include the idea of representation, Fred Cecere’s supporters already had two representatives on the Council.
If they wanted to gain a third person on the Council, the democratic approach would be to nominate Fred Cecere–signatures from just five voters required. If Cecere’s supporters waited beyond the (very late) filing deadline, the same people who now vocally defend these tactics on the Town’s unofficial listserv could have argued for his write-in candidacy publicly.
The real reason for the secret campaign, of course, was that its supporters likely feared that they couldn’t win an open contest if the “wrong” people were given a say. Al Lang nearly lost last year and held his seat by 10 votes against a young, new candidate. As Bickerman originally won election by a similar margin, he might well have lost an open election.
There are many actions in this world that are legal but aren’t right. This unethical stealth campaign is a perfect example. It wasn’t respectful of their neighbors and fellow voters. In a normal democratic election, people know who the candidates are and make a choice–even if that choice is not to vote.
If anyone has a right to feel disenfranchised it’s the people who were treated badly by not being deemed the “right” sort. Cecere supporters chide people appalled by their tactics for not voting but kept their actions very secret in order to gull people who think differently from them into not voting.
Nevertheless, their actions in doing so may have been legal. Even though Maryland law requires write-ins to file for election for good reason, Chevy Chase does not. But it wasn’t ethical. It is yet another symptom of the decline of civility in our politics. If you feel disrespected by the current people in power, campaign openly for change.
The central legal issue was not the organization of the secret campaign but the failure to turn in financial disclosure forms by the required deadline. While some argued that the statute was vague or clearly did not apply to write-in candidates, others pointed out that all candidates were required to turn them in. Moreover, courts are loathe to overturn elections and rarely do it.
The one point where the plot itself becomes evidence is that the secrecy could well be deemed an effort to evade the State’s ethics laws (i.e. the financial disclosure requirement). Moreover, the secrecy would help overcome the usual burden in election law cases that one should have filed an action in court before the election if at all possible.
In the end, the Town Election Commission refused to certify the election until the question was examined by the Town Ethics Commission. The Ethics Commission broke down 2-1 in favor of seating Fred Cecere. From the account available on twitter, all three commissioners did their best to grapple seriously with the legal questions and gave valid reasons for their vote even if they disagreed as to the final outcome.
The winners may have gained a seat on the Council but they lost the legitimacy that comes with winning an open campaign. As Fred Cecere did not campaign on any issue positions, he can hardly claim a mandate from the Town for his agenda.
As a political science professor and former mayor of the Town, I know politics often isn’t fair. There is also a fair amount of rough and tumble, even if one might expect better in a small town that is really a neighborhood where people often know candidates and see their councilmembers regularly. But this also isn’t how I teach my students about how democratic elections should be–or a model for our kids more generally.
As I write this, six police officers have just been charged in Freddie Grey’s murder and Baltimore remains under curfew in the wake of last Monday’s riots. Much commentary seems focused on assigning blame. In the post, I’d like to focus instead on the consequences and moving forward.
The community desperately needs to hear more about models for better policing and to implement them. There have been major protests against police brutality and other vehement defenses of the police. But there is not nearly enough discussion of how to do it right.
I’d love to see discussion of places that have reduced complaints against the police even as they remain tough on crime. We want the police to fight crime in all neighborhoods. After all, the sharp drop in Baltimore’s murder rate means that hundreds of people–mainly African American–are walking around who would otherwise be dead.
But we also don’t want police treating everyone like a criminal. Even under the “broken windows” theory, the idea is to stop people who have committed minor crimes–not just for going about your business. Has any place figured out a better approach so that the police can do their tough job with fewer abuses and gain more confidence from the community?
Last Monday’s riots have done long-term damage to Baltimore that will require concerted effort to reverse.
Neighborhoods that already lack businesses lost them and they may not come back. Many jobs held by working people doing their best to earn a living have been lost. If businesses do come back, their insurance rates will likely go up.
Equally devastating is that people who may have once thought about investing in Baltimore will likely go elsewhere and take the jobs and the revenue that they would have generated with them. The City and the Governor are going to have to work together to rebuild confidence in Baltimore.
The economic debate can often seem as frustrating as the one surrounding the police. Left-wing types point to the crushing poverty in West Baltimore while right-wing types focus on a lack of responsibility by citizenry. The irony is that both narratives have something to offer but work better together than in isolation.
Well-distributed economic growth has more power than any anti-poverty program. Bill Clinton wasn’t known for awhile as “America’s first black President” because he played the sax but due to the dramatic drop in African-American unemployment with many previously marginal workers brought into the workforce with steady long-term growth.
At the same time, we have to do all we can to provide a helping hand for people willing to work hard and pay their taxes, as Bill Clinton often used to say when running for President in 1992. No doubt people like Pastor Donte Hickman, who has long toiled to provide those opportunities and fight for justice, has good ideas on how to do that. We should listen to them.
In 1968, blacks were essentially outside the power structure. Today, that’s no longer the case with the Mayor, State’s Attorney, and Police Chief along with many police being African Americans. It isn’t stopping their constituents from holding them–or the white politicians who also represent them–accountable. And that’s as it should be.
Courtney Snowden is a businesswoman and parent who ran for an at-large seat on the D.C. City Council in 2014. Though she lost, Courtney gained a lot of deserved respect along the way and has now joined the Bowser administration. I think she had about the smartest advice I’ve heard in the wake of recent events:
Wanna know how to end this brutality against our people? Vote. Run for office. Join the police force. Become a teacher. Mentor a child and help them become a fully functional adult. Protest the systematic oppression of our people, but do it without burning down the few places where low skilled workers can work. Open a business and hire from the community. Learn how to code. Develop an app. Make some money and donate to the candidates and causes that support the creation of an ism free world. Invest in yourselves and your communities.
Become the change you want to see, and then spread it around. I left the private sector to work in government because I am tired of complaining about it. I want to take meaningful responsibility for doing something about it. Join me.
Armando Trull had the story this morning on WAMU complete with a quote from the Seventh State:
Now state Del. Ana Sol Gutierrez of Montgomery County is looking to take the seat, looking to score another notable first in a career full of them.
“I can bring forth a new voice and a new face, a truly immigrant experience that changes the dialogue and changes the way we are looking at human beings in our society,” she says.
Sol began her political career in 1990 after winning a school board seat in Montgomery County and becoming the first Salvadoran to be elected to office in the United States. In 2002, she followed that up by becoming the first Latina in the Maryland State House capturing Van Hollen’s old seat when he went to Congress.
If Sol wins the primary and general election for the Eighth District, she would become the first Latina and first Salvadoran to represent Maryland in Congress. But that may be a tough hat trick, says David Lublin, a political science professor at American University.
“She clearly has name recognition within District 18, which she represents. There’s a difference between getting one in three votes for the House of Delegates, which is where she’s been for a long time at this point, and a vote for Congress,” she says.
Like the other candidates, Gutiérrez will need to raise substantial amounts of money and campaign hard in order to have a real shot at the race. This would represent a change from recent campaigns. In 2014, she raised under $13,000 for her reelection bid to the House of Delegates even as she cruised to a second place primary finish behind Jeff Waldstreicher. She came in first in 2010.
Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, has fired Robert Smith, a Democratic appointee, as head of the Maryland Transit Administration. This move is part of a larger effort to restructure MTA in the face of problems of facing the agency:
The agency is a year late in producing a promised plan for improvements to its beleaguered Baltimore bus network, is facing a class-action lawsuit from transit riders with disabilities who use its Mobility service, and hasn’t met a state mandate that it provide 35 percent of its operating budget through fare revenue since 2005.
Ridership across all MTA transit modes — including local buses, light rail and MARC train service — was down in 2014, though it has rebounded some this year.
The Baltimore bus network has been a particular problem. MTA’s inadequate slow motion plan to improve buses is scheduled over 18 years. The Baltimore Sun reports that the Transportation Secretary plans to review the plan.
Smith explained that aging infrastructure is a big part of the challenges that MTA faces:
“It’s an aging system. The Metro itself is 30 years old. The light rail is at mid-life,” he said.
Evaluating outcomes of legislative sessions, particularly when the Democrats control the General Assembly the Republicans the Governor’s Mansion, often devolves into rating winners and losers. Though there were the inevitable clashes on policy and rhetoric, it was also a productive session.
The sour note finish on the budget, however, was a perplexing surprise in light of the initial bipartisan budget compromise that saw strong support from both sides of the aisle. Bipartisan comity unraveled towards the end of the session.
Though Gov. Hogan’s staff had been highly involved in the budget negotiations that led to the brief budgetary Era of Good Feelings, he decided to insist on adding another $75 million to the pension fund after the compromise was reached.
The Governor’s reinsertion of this demand after agreement had been reached will harm future negotiations with the legislature. It reduces legislative trust that he will adhere to deals and makes legislators wonder if he really prefers an argument to policy accomplishments.
The new attempt at negotiations after the pension demand reemerged also flopped. My colleague, Todd Eberly, largely blames the Democrats for not taking Hogan’s offer to partly reach their goals on education, health and COLAs for government employees in exchange of hewing to his demands on pensions.
While certainly a reasonable enough viewpoint, Hogan’s demands went well beyond pension funds to include passage of virtually all of his other bills. Negotiations in which the Governor expected the whole menu for only partial budgetary concessions were not likely to succeed.
There are further reasons for this failure. Gov. Hogan and his team did not lobby rank-and-file legislators nearly as aggressively as Gov. O’Malley during the legislative session. The lack of contact felt Jimmy Carter-like at times. His staffers need to work not just with legislative leaders but other legislators to advance their bills. President Miller and Speaker Busch are important but they are not the whole General Assembly.
The light lobbying touch may also be a symptom that Gov. Hogan believes that the General Assembly rolled over for Gov. O’Malley and so they should do the same for him. Except that many Democrats often fought with O’Malley and he had to fight very hard to get his priorities from gambling to same-sex marriage passed.
No doubt there is a learning curve for every new governor. While Gov. Hogan was the Appointments Secretary for Gov. Ehrlich, he has less experience in dealing with the General Assembly. His first session was hardly a failure. But whether his second session goes better will depend not just on Democrats but on him.
The Williams Institute released a report dog-bites-man story that support for marriage equality continues to increase across all 50 states and DC. Support is currently at 67 percent in Maryland. (The purple numbers show the outer bounds of 95% confidence intervals. True public opinion has a 19 in 20 chance of falling within these bounds.)
Support for Marriage Equality
Source: The Williams Institute
Apparently, his appearance with the Maryland College Republicans was a hit and is now being followed up with a speech at the Maryland Republican Convention in Ocean City.
This anti-government pick-yourself-up-by your-bootstraps-guy filed for bankruptcy in 2014. So this hypocrite took advantage of the same laws that Republicans regularly deride. DuPree is also no stranger to foreclosure proceedings on property that he owns (see here, here, here, and here). Ironically, this debtor has no compunction about attacking people on welfare as “takers” and thinks unemployed people are lazy who don’t want to work.
This (divorced) ardent homophobe defended Dr. Ben Carson’s lumping together of” bestiality with gay marriage” and then upped the ante by lumping gays with pedophiles and necrophiles:
Anyways the Dr. is right… Marriage is for ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ people… and in no way should it be degenerated into a ‘contract’ between ‘whatever’ and ‘whatever’ be they GBLT or pedophiles, zoophiles, necrophiles, etc. The obsession of the GBLTs is that in their minds everyone has to agree with their delusion of reality. You don’t see religious people wanting EVERYONE to believe in their version of reality. Live and let live. Stick to civil unions and fight for all the rights you may want… the desire to change the meaning of a word is a SICK desire to pervert a word defined/designed to PROTECT children and women and convert it into a word that is a selfish right… not caring at all for the rights of the children nor the women.
A past CPAC blogger of the year, DuPree believes that gays and lesbians can be “healed” after speaking in tongues at a church service, as stated in the title of his blog post with this video:
Similarly, he advertised the story of a “Former Lesbian Christian Rapper says Gays Can Change Like She Did.”
I’d love to see a debate between Howard County Executive Allen Kittleman and Wayne DuPree. It would be interesting to see if young Republicans think which one of these two holds the views that are the past or the future of their party.
Regardless, it certainly places people like the Montgomery County Young Republicans, who would liked to be perceived as tolerant, in an awkward position. The MoCo YRs recently tweeted this at me regarding LGBT rights:
You can’t tout tolerance and have Wayne Dupree speak at your convention.
