Anonymous wrote:read a great article that said in summary - Amazon played all these cities. It got local governments to promise billions in taxpayer dollars to one of the wealthies companies in the world & Amazon had them spending money to compile valuable data about the locales that it can use for its business. They forced governments, which implicitly have a duty of transparency to citizens, to sign NDAs and keep the info secrect.

They held out the dream of possibly bringing jobs to areas that desperately needed them & SPLIT the jobs between areas that would be OK w/o them. Do the 2 areas get to revise their bids & lower them by half to reflect half the jobs going to another area?

NOVA will be a mess. Traffic is already a mess, metro is unreliable & the housing market is already moving out of reach. This past weekend, Metro had the great idea to close the entire Metro subway stop starting Friday - on a holiday weekend - delaying traffic around the airport for miles. It was poorly advertised. Even flight crews were delayed & people were getting out in the rain walking to the airport from the jammed traffic.

Be grateful that MoCo dodged a bullet as the taxpayers of Virginia will be footing the bill for years to come.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/F14E6ADA-B5C2-11E7-B859-4A9090A04A23

It was Maryland promising the billions with a capital "S." Virginia inked this deal with half the incentives NYC offered Amazon, and will be paying less than half per new HQ2 worker compared to Queens. Keep dodging those bullets, MoCo...

Anonymous wrote:Who keeps voting these jokers back on the county council? And why is every at-large member from Takoma Park/Silver Spring? Citizens need to be more vocal about asking them to not raise taxes, they just raised them two years ago...not sustainable. Moco needs to cut programs, not raise taxes. Just need one no vote on the council.

A good start is ranked-choice voting. We had a clown car of over 30 candidates for county council, just on the Dem side, in the primaries who are vying for 4 spaces.

You can see what happens when we have too many -- the County Exec primary was a 6-way race on the Dem side, so a candidate needs to just court a fringe group and get enough votes from them, while the moderate vote is spread across 5 other candidates. Elrich won in the primary by 77 votes over Blair, thanks for tying up union support.

To give you an idea of how 'big government' Elrich is, his _transition team_ alone is 180 people! What are they all going to do?!

https://bethesdamagazine.com/bethesda-beat/politics/whos-who-on-county-executive-elect-marc-elrichs-transition-team/

Obama's transition team in 2008 was 450 by comparison.. for the entire country.

Who keeps voting these jokers back on the county council? And why is every at-large member from Takoma Park/Silver Spring? Citizens need to be more vocal about asking them to not raise taxes, they just raised them two years ago...not sustainable. Moco needs to cut programs, not raise taxes. Just need one no vote on the council.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MoCo will move forward. People have to learn how to stop voting far left and vote what’s best for economic interest. We also need to think about implementing policies to stop making it an immigrant haven. For example, we have stopped donating to Casa de Maryland. Gaithersburg, Wheaton and other parts of the county can not afford more crime ridden neighborhoods and our schools cannot afford to be secondary parents.

This Democrat agrees that we need to stop the non documented immigrant haven policies and figure out how to attract ethical businesses to MoCo. We need to move forward. As a new resident, I think MoCo has rested on it's reputation of 30 years ago and is just now realizing it can't coast along doing the same old same old.

MoCo has not realized a thing. the same people who caused this mess were just voted back into the council. My BIL's business recently failed. He is financially ruined and decided to sell the property. Imagine his surprise when he had to pay 5% of the total sales price to the county for some ridiculous transfer tax on commercial properties. he is already in the hole, sold at a loss and had to pay an additional 90K to good ol' montgomery county. this place sucks.

MoCo will continue the usual anti-business policies, like voting yesterday to raise minimum wage even on 1-employee "companies" (households):
https://bethesdamagazine.com/bethesda-beat/politics/county-council-approves-minimum-wage-law-adjustment/

Then they will conveniently forget the report just issued by their own Office of Legislative Oversight, saying the county is in dire financial straits:
https://bethesdamagazine.com/bethesda-beat/government/compensation-costs-report-paints-dark-picture-for-countys-future-economic-prospects/

This X100. They will raise taxes for the entire county and raise taxes for the schools. The BOE will then direct all the new tax money into the lower performing schools letting the higher performing ones fall apart. The BOE will engage the crazies in the east to announce their county wide diversity rebalancing project aimed at taking down the top performing schools. This will freak out potential buyers even though they will probably never do anything. and further drop the the real estate values. If they do take down the W schools and defund the magnets then MoCo drops down near Baltimore City in terms of school quality so game over.

MoCo will continue the usual anti-business policies, like voting yesterday to raise minimum wage even on 1-employee "companies" (households):
https://bethesdamagazine.com/bethesda-beat/politics/county-council-approves-minimum-wage-law-adjustment/

Then they will conveniently forget the report just issued by their own Office of Legislative Oversight, saying the county is in dire financial straits:
https://bethesdamagazine.com/bethesda-beat/government/compensation-costs-report-paints-dark-picture-for-countys-future-economic-prospects/

Anonymous wrote:MoCo will move forward. People have to learn how to stop voting far left and vote what’s best for economic interest. We also need to think about implementing policies to stop making it an immigrant haven. For example, we have stopped donating to Casa de Maryland. Gaithersburg, Wheaton and other parts of the county can not afford more crime ridden neighborhoods and our schools cannot afford to be secondary parents.

This Democrat agrees that we need to stop the non documented immigrant haven policies and figure out how to attract ethical businesses to MoCo. We need to move forward. As a new resident, I think MoCo has rested on it's reputation of 30 years ago and is just now realizing it can't coast along doing the same old same old.

MoCo will move forward. People have to learn how to stop voting far left and vote what’s best for economic interest. We also need to think about implementing policies to stop making it an immigrant haven. For example, we have stopped donating to Casa de Maryland. Gaithersburg, Wheaton and other parts of the county can not afford more crime ridden neighborhoods and our schools cannot afford to be secondary parents.

Yup I'm worried we aren't going to be able to afford to maintain the quality of life here

We will be fine, what we should worry about is the about high number of illegal children taking up the roster rolls of schools. Amazon is not a savior, if we want to be competitive, stop voting straight Democract and become bipartisan.

Yeah MoCo is toast.

Bezos is just a shiny candy coated Walmart. He's not a 1960's manufacturer bringing pensions, big benefits and improving neighborhoods. He is doing the minimum like every other large corporation to suck out every last half cent for profit. I'm not a sjw and I dislike Hillary and Bernie..however this guy is Walmart on steroids..No city he brought his company into is better off. Take a look at Seattle. As a previous poster mentioned now that Amazon has played a game with these cities and gotten them to sign NDA’s they essentially know when each city will go through economic development. They will now when real estate prices will jump and drop, they have access to all sorts of things the general public does not. Amazon will be purchasing land across the county and outbidding regular citizens the very antithesis of our constitution where the land belongs to the people.

read a great article that said in summary - Amazon played all these cities. It got local governments to promise billions in taxpayer dollars to one of the wealthies companies in the world & Amazon had them spending money to compile valuable data about the locales that it can use for its business. They forced governments, which implicitly have a duty of transparency to citizens, to sign NDAs and keep the info secrect.

They held out the dream of possibly bringing jobs to areas that desperately needed them & SPLIT the jobs between areas that would be OK w/o them. Do the 2 areas get to revise their bids & lower them by half to reflect half the jobs going to another area?

NOVA will be a mess. Traffic is already a mess, metro is unreliable & the housing market is already moving out of reach. This past weekend, Metro had the great idea to close the entire Metro subway stop starting Friday - on a holiday weekend - delaying traffic around the airport for miles. It was poorly advertised. Even flight crews were delayed & people were getting out in the rain walking to the airport from the jammed traffic.

Be grateful that MoCo dodged a bullet as the taxpayers of Virginia will be footing the bill for years to come.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/F14E6ADA-B5C2-11E7-B859-4A9090A04A23

Anonymous wrote:MoCo works pretty hard to suppress real estate values. There is a contingent of people who WANT MoCo to stay cheap and affordable for low income, working poor and lower level professionals. They tend to get supported by the unions and get elected. Not getting Amazon works for them. They really don't care that everyone in Arlington will make a ton of equity and have a rich tax base from all the new professional level jobs because those aren't the type of jobs that they could ever get anyway.

That's very elitist of you.

Should these lower level people eat cake instead?

MoCo works pretty hard to suppress real estate values. There is a contingent of people who WANT MoCo to stay cheap and affordable for low income, working poor and lower level professionals. They tend to get supported by the unions and get elected. Not getting Amazon works for them. They really don't care that everyone in Arlington will make a ton of equity and have a rich tax base from all the new professional level jobs because those aren't the type of jobs that they could ever get anyway.