Montgomery County - What Happened?
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Anonymous
So, vote for Jawando. |
Anonymous
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Thomas Taylor, the superintendent isn't helping matters in MoCo. He is decreasing the size of the Blair and Poolesville HS magnet programs, as well as the Richard Montgomery HS IB program, all to ensure equity by starting 100 new regional high school programs across the county in six new regions.
evidently, regional programs are at the height of fashion in education these days... He tried this at his previous school district, in Stafford City VA, which has 5 high schools. He left before the regional programs began there, to come to MCPS. The school bus transportation system collapsed in Stafford County when they went to implement Taylor's plan. They are still struggling with transportation. I wonder what will happen here with regional programs, with our traffic, and with 26 high schools? And this will go forward without the county's flagship education programs that Taylor is trashing. |
Anonymous
lol never. He's as self serving as Trump and will burn the rest of us down. It just feels more palatable because he's liberal. |
Anonymous
The other two candidates will crush us too. |
Anonymous
Hey, my house is on the market. Shhhh...... |
Anonymous
Friedson, with a somewhat moderate council - Ashman, Yang, Goldberg, Pope, Luedtke, Balcomb, McNulty maybe, and Stewart -- would be a breath of fresh good governance air. They have a lot of damage to clean up. |
Anonymous
No, it will be a steady stream of tax abatements and other financial handouts for developers that the people who live here have to pay for. That’s all it will be. Friedson voted for nearly all the “damage” you speak of. |
Anonymous
You think Stewart is moderate? Noooooo. She was mayor of Takoma Park and blew up the size of our municipal government. We have the highest property taxes in the county in Takoma Park, thanks in no small part to Stewart. |
Anonymous
Yep. |
Anonymous
| Lots of people immigrated from Central America. Growing up in Rockville, everyone was white and Catholic. The demographics have changed substantially. |
Anonymous
It's why I listed her last. She's a progressive but her record on Council has been one of fiscal prudence. Running a municipality is a bit different than what they have to do at a county level, where county provides most services and the municipalities add concierge services on top of that. And that's what those extra taxes pay for. I am not in Takoma Park so I really can't comment on what she did there. But she has been pragmatic at the county level. She works well with others. Knows how to both compromise and build consensus. Elrich and Jawando want tax increases. Here's the thing. If Elrich weren't such an insolent, autocratic "my way or the highway" kind of leader, he could have spent the past year working with council to propose a jointly supported tax increase that most of them could have lived with. With clear goals and outcomes that make it more palatable to residents. Instead he just thinks he's the smartest in the room and people should just do as he says. He claims the moral high ground and for some residents, that's enough to support him. But he completely sucks at governance. Council fights him at every turn. Including these proposed tax increases. And if they own any backbones, you will see services that you care about get cut so we don't get tax increases. We are in this hell hole because of him. Jawando will Elrich 2 if he wins. They have a similar approach and similar base. It's all about the feelings. The emotional tug about shared values rather than any real effective governance. Politically, Jawando is an island just like Elrich. he isn't capable of working with others, collaborating, COMPROMISING. The whole "call the vote" debacle a few weeks ago shined a light on that. look forward to more bad government if he is elected. Stewart is smart. And she works hard to move things along successfully. She collaborates with her fellow Councilmembers. She actually listens to constituents. She thinks through policy and whether it can be operationalized effectively. To her it's more than a social media post or catchy rallying call. That doesn't mean I agree with her all the time. I often don't. That doesn't mean she's right all the time. It means she cares about the integrity of the process and the outcome. None of the three executive candidates comes close to her. They all care about their careers more than about the county. I wish Stewart had run for county executive this time. She would have blown those other three away. Friedson is the closest to Stewart in terms of caring about the integrity of the process and outcome. He's no Stewart but he's worlds better for the county than Jawando. My prediction, tax increases will fail 9-2. Jawando and Mink will be the only votes yes. Jawando as chair of education, will hold 100 work sessions on the MCPS budget, do a LOT of talking, still not find one efficiency, and lazily approve it as written. Because that's what's best for HIM. |
Anonymous
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The biggest I have with Elrich's "one play playbook" of always and only raising taxes, is he makes no effort to improve the services those taxes provide.
Does anyone in Moco feel like schools are great? Roads? Policing? It is just a relentless assault on affordability, with nothing to show for it. He never demands good government, or improved metrics to actually measure the services provided, or holds any kind of tough conversations with the unions. It's just "more, more, more" with nothing to show for it. |
Anonymous
1. Schools aren’t the responsibility of the county executive. If you have complaints about the schools — and you definitely should — school board is the race for you. 2. All three candidates have opposed fixing the roads. That’s one place the council and Elrich have been in broad agreement. Friedson takes it a step further by pretending the private sector can develop more with no impact on infrastructure. 3. Crime is way down, so what’s the complaint exactly? Accountability in the county government is dead. The employee unions won. But Elrich didn’t hand them that victory on his own. In fact, Friedson and Stewart just handed the unions a big victory by sponsoring a bill giving them full control over the pension fund with no accountability. I don’t like higher taxes either but we need the revenue. Friedson made it a lot easier for taxes to be raised by leading the charter amendment a few years ago to allow revenue to automatically increase as fast as property values went up instead of having the default rates tied to growth and broad inflation. His next step was sponsoring bills to exempt his donors from paying taxes entirely. If one of these candidates gets specific about what they’ll cut and what impact their cuts will have on tax rates, I’d happily vote for that candidate. I’m not holding my breath for that to happen because they’ve all voted for all the spending. Jawando and to a lesser extent Glass have so far been the only ones who are realistic about the budget. |
Anonymous
Nightmare. What group which would really presents much of a hindrance? Yang is desparately trying to prove herself to the same hegemonic MoCo political machine to which Friedson and Leudtke are already beholden. Stewart's only hedge, there, is that she furthers initiatives even farther left than that machine generally wants. And this is forgetting that Fani-Gonzàlez has been the true force planning (literally -- back to her days on Montgomery Planning) all of those things for which Friedson took on the role of public face in the past couple of years, hoping to capture votes from outside his district while staving off damage to his district popularity by definitionally limiting effects, there. (All he really has to do, now, to make an election case within his district is vote against the tax increases made necessary by the handouts to developers.) Friedson is as self-serving as it gets. Not that Jawando isn't, just that Friedson's self-service comes by way of niche-wealth special interests to whom he is beholden, while Jawando's comes by way of less-niche-issue-based special-interest groups whom he hopes to agglomerate for a more populist approach. There will be no Friedson-moderating majority on the council. Heck, there was no real Elrich block to these council initiatives, as all his vetos were overridden. And those Jawando votes against/votes against overrides were window dressing -- no real attempt to pull in enough others to make a difference. |
Anonymous
My broader point was as the executive calls for (another) tax increase- do you think any of the above have improved? Is Moco better or worse? As for schools- the executive controls the power of the purse, so he/she absolutely has a lot of the responsibility for the success for failure of MCPS. |