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July 8, 2006, McGinty's Public House, Silver Spring: Kick Off

So, here I am, at my own event - no one staring at me with a sign telling me I have 30 seconds left in my 1 minute answer to the question "What are the most important challenges facing the county and how will you solve them?" No sound bytes!

I like it, but I promised Dale not to take this opportunity to unleash my wonky analytical side. Let me start by saying something about why I'm running.

Why I'm Running

I was going to say, "I'm running to make a difference", but that's not good enough. George Bush made a difference - he made it worse. Bobby Ehrlich made a difference - he made it worse. The End Gridlock Team made a difference, too and they made it worse. Everyone wants to make a difference, the real question is what kind of difference do you want to make.

In my life, I have tried to make a positive difference for others. I started in the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement in the Sixties, and at the University of Md I was among those leading the charge to integrate, really integrate, the College Park Campus.

In my personal life, Karen and I became foster parents to two Downs syndrome boys. I moved to Takoma Park and got involved in tenant organizing and I still do that.

I was elected to the City Council and have been a leader on progressive issues: the environment, affordable housing, recognizing the right of employees to organize, expanding youth opportunities so our children have meaningful after-school programs to keep them out of harms way. We became a sanctuary city, we sponsored resolutions against the Iraq war - before it started - and against the Patriot Act. We put ourselves on record for the Purple Line and against the ICC.

And I stayed involved in County issues - the Friendship Heights Master Plan, the Silver Spring Sector Plan, the incinerator, the fight for adequate funding for education. I served on the County's transportation policy review task force and the Silver Spring Advisory Committee - and this project, in which we are meeting today - is the kind of project that I advocated for almost ten years while working with community leaders here in Silver Spring and yes I did fight the mega-mall monstrosity and the Triangle project before it.

We are one Community

What drives me is a desire to make things better for all of us - to affect the lives of people in this county in positive way whether they're in an apartment on Houston Ave and working hard just to get by every day, whether they're in Clarksburg and facing a long commute and wondering about their schools, or whether they're in Bethesda and concerned about traffic congestion, pollution and the education of their children. WE are all in this together and when you ask people what they want, it doesn't matter what the color of their skin is, they're beliefs, their politics, their gender or their orientation - most people want the same thing: a community where they can safely raise their families, a community where education is a priority, a community that values the environment, a community that offers services that make our lives richer, and most of all a livable community.

I'm also making this fight as part of an effort, going on across this county, this state and this country, to take back, recapture, put the soul back in - however you want to say it - the Democratic Party. To revitalize this Party as the party of the working class and the middle class. To reclaim this Party as the representative of the public interests, not handmaidens of the special interests - that's what the Republican Party is for. I know that I make some of the machine politicians nervous, but how many defeats does this party have to sustain before it sinks in, that the less that the common people see us as representatives of the public good, the less reason they have to hit the D on ballot lever. Our inconvenient truths are our political problem.

So I'm proud that I'm the democrat on the True Vote Lawsuit against the State of Maryland - a lawsuit aimed at requiring Maryland to adopt a voting system with a paper trail, because our current system is vulnerable and corruptible pass the state legislature for two years.

I'm a proud Democrat who would not/will not turn to the Bush EPA and the Ehrlich EPA to get approval of a road that was rejected by the Clinton EPA - for god sakes, how do you attack these Republicans on their environmental record when you go to them for projects that benefit your contributors?

No Developer Influence

Which leads me to the third thing. Contributors. I don't take money for developers, their land use attorneys or corporations doing business with the County. It's illegal in other states, it ought to be illegal here. But in MC we will watch Democrat politicians gloating about Abramoff and the corrupting influence of special interest money on the Republicans while 6 of the 9 Council members receive half or more of the their campaign contributions from the development industry. For Republicans, big money symbolizes their corruption, but here democratic politicians will say that these are our "friends" and they're not buying influence. Tell that to the neighbors around Belt Middle School. And what about Montgomery County.

I'm going to lead off by talking about growth and development. Big surprise. I want to make a couple of things "perfectly clear." I am not against development and I'm not against business. I do not advocate "no growth". Development is not the only thing I care about - but I start with it because it is the gate-keeper to those issues that I do care about.

Infrastructure before Development

My policy approach is simple. Development should proceed only where the infrastructure exists to support it and the standards of what I mean by "support it" have to be sensible.

The End Gridlock Team will say, "The Planning Board recommended 1% growth, we settled on 1 and a half percent, so what's the big whoop, Marc?"

There are two big deals. First, the Planning Board said they should have recommended 0% growth because we're so far behind we need to catch up. Second, and more importantly, it's not the rate that matters, it's the adequacy of the infrastructure. The levees in New Orleans didn't care whether the waters rose at 1% or 1.5% and hour, what mattered was that when the capacity of the levees was exceeded, they broke. We have exceeded the capacity of our infrastructure, our situation is getting worse, not better. We have to proceed very carefully. And that is not a radical idea.

What's gone wrong? For example, by this Council's standards all schools have capacity, including all those schools with trailer parks. By the school system's definition of capacity only 3 of 24 clusters have adequate capacity. As Rockville Mayor Larry Giamo said, "So much slack is built into the school test, that it will never serve to limit development."

The same is true of the roads test - Failure is in fact the definition of adequate capacity - something that might make sense in an urban core, but doesn't make sense when extended beyond the core. MC politicians are trying to persuade you that we are urban and should have urban densities, but we have a suburban road system which when combined with urban density, is a prescription for disaster. Everybody, whether you're going to grocery store, or ferrying your kid to some activity, winds up on the same arteries carrying commuter traffic.

Who will pay for the Infrastructure we Need?

I will work to reinstitute a real adequate public facilities test, I will not support definitions of adequate that equate with overcrowding and road failure - and I'll vote to reinstitute Policy Area Review so that developers are responsible for the true impacts of their projects.

You'll hear the End Gridlock Team, though they're running from that name as fast as possible, tell you that they imposed Impact Fees. I say "great," I advocated for that. But they don't tell you that the effect of policy area review payments they eliminated when combined with their impact fees yields a net loss to the County of about 330 million dollars over the next five years.

So if you want the infrastructure either tax payers will have to pay greatly increased taxes, or we'll do what we've been doing for the last 12 years and get the growth without the infrastructure. Do you really want more of the same, only worse?

Finally on this issue I want to say that the County's development priorities are badly skewed. Most jobs come from local small businesses, owned by people live in our communities, and share our common concerns. WE have too often, in the name of development allowed the displacement of small business, with no place to go, to make room for corporate chains or worse, to make room for no businesses at all. Our economic development focuses on the high profile industries and attracting corporate employers (who often don't even pay state taxes and who are brought here with promises of local tax abatements), while we do nothing for the mom and pops except encourage them to "learn how to compete" - ignoring the fact that the doubling or tripling of rents is an insurmountable obstacle for many small shop owners. I will work to refocus our economic activities on retaining a strong small business component. I said earlier that growth is a gate-keeper.

Park and Planning has said that new growth costs more than the revenues it generates, and we know that infrastructure costs exceed developer payments. I don't know about you, but to me, this looks a problem - a long-term problem.

Every dollar spent trying to catch up, is a dollar not spent meeting existing needs. Every new school in the sprawl area equals older schools not renovated or expanded, or closed schools not reopened. Every expansion of development requires fire and police to serve more people with near constant resources - like Takoma Park losing its fire truck to SS because SS lost its to the up-county. We have enormous unmet demands in health care, mental health care, recreation, senior programming - and they will stay unmet as long as we continue create the demand for even more services from developments that cost more than they the revenues they generate.

Affordable Housing

We are hemoraging affordable housing and have no plan to stem the loss or replace the units. Developers who once shunned affordable housing are lapping up lucrative density bonuses to build a pittance of new units - a quantity that pales to what is being lost. I will focus on investing in retention and be looking at strategies that reduce the loss of affordable units. This is bad for the community, bad for the victims of displacement and bad for businesses who will lose their workers.

The "Gap" Still Exists

We have a serious problem in our public schools. I have said repeatedly that things are not as good as they appear. The lower grade gains are not being sustained, the SAT scores show a persistent and deep achievement gap, that the Maryland state assessments, when you dig beneath the surface, also show an enormous gap. For example, in fifth grade reading you'll find that the 50% median score for White students, is the score of the 95th percentile of African American and Hispanic students. So while the County can demonstrate greater success measured by which grouping students are in, I can tell you that within those groups there's a top, there's a bottom and which students are where will not surprise anyone. We need to do more. We need to reduce class size beyond second grade.

We need to provide more support services to students who need them, without requiring that they receive an evaluation of needing special education. We need more pre-k programs to prepare children for school and we need more after-school programming to provide both academic and social support. We need to open our eyes to the reality that not everyone goes to college and not every decent job requires a college degree and then provide educational opportunities that will lead students into jobs if they're not going on to college. I know that this will have a cost, I know that you know that failing to do this will also have a cost. Preventing problems is cheaper than trying to keep the lid on problems we allow to happen.

Tax Justice Should be Our Issue

In the end it all comes down to money. In the County there has been a steady shift of the tax burden to homeowners and off of commercial property. Our tax policies are skewed in their favor. WE need to recapture the issue of tax justice and tax fairness from the Robin Ficker and the Republicans. The biggest tax we control is the property tax and there are ways to make it more progressive, to make sure that the burden is shared more equitably between the corporate community and our citizens - and they should be happy to pay because every dime we invest in the quality of life in Montgomery County is a dime invested in making this the best place to locate a business in this area. When I say my goal is building a livable community, to the extent we succeed ,all of us - from Brian Foulger to Pat Powell benefit.

Finally, why does my literate feature the logo "no developer influence." It's there because I'm neither naïve nor a fool. Big contributors, at every level, contribute because they want influence on the decisions of policy makers. You shouldn't be able to buy influence.

Does it mean I won't talk to these guys? Absolutely not. I'll talk to anyone, I'll welcome them in my office, I'll hear their ideas. I'll support them when I think it's good for the County, and do the opposite when it's not.

The point is, they shouldn't have to, and no one should have to, write a check in order to be heard.

I listen for free - to everyone.