Daily Journal (Silver Spring Transit Center, County Debt Limit, Small Business)

January 30, 2012

Today’s T&E committee started with a briefing on a new agreement to govern the Blue Plains Waste Water treatment facility, where most of our sewage is treated.

Then we moved on to discuss the terrible news about problems with the construction at the Silver Spring Transit Center. We do not know yet how this will be resolved but there will be a long delay in opening the transit center. How long? Long. We don’t know.

Then the full council met to discuss legislation that is pending in Annapolis. No real news there but we are working closely with our delegation to protect the county from a proposal to change who is responsible for funding teacher pensions. The state has been responsible for that for 85 years but has managed the pension badly and now wants to foist the pension deficit onto county governments. Montgomery County would be responsible for paying over $40 million in state pension funding in just the first year alone, and according to the state projections these costs are expected to increase about 10% per year.

In the afternoon, at a joint meeting of the GO committee with the Planning, Housing and Economic Development Committee we discussed concerns about small businesses and redevelopment. I was pleased to hear that the County Executive is depositing $2 million into the revolving small business loan program; I requested that the council discuss policy objectives for how those loans would be made. Can we fund clean-tech startups? Child care companies? Can we target the loans to problems we want to address, such as unemployment in the Hispanic community?

I was also pleased to learn that the County Executive is exploring partnerships with community banks to make loans, perhaps helping close deals on certain loans that the banks would not be able to fully finance themselves.

These are promising developments—we can and must do better to grow our own job creator right here in Montgomery County.

The day continued with a final committee meeting to set our assumptions for the capital budget. We set our annual borrowing for that budget at $295 million and addressed some technical issues that will likely result in reducing the funds available for the $4 billion capital budget by another few tens of millions.

To polish off the day, or evening, I met with a group of activists in the Chevy Chase area that calls itself the “District 1 caucus.” Included among them was former Councilmember Scot Fosler. We had an interesting conversation about the nature of the County Executive position. Did you know that Fairfax County does not have an elected County Executive? They have a county manager type position. It was a treat to meet Scot; last Friday I met Bill Scher, also a former council member.

Which reminds me that today I got a call from former Governor Parris Glendening, who is inviting me to join a select group of local officials from around the country in a program hosted by Smart Growth America, the non-profit policy organization that he founded. I was thrilled to get the Governor’s call and I’m looking forward to getting involved with this effort to support and build smart growth champions around the country.

Meanwhile tomorrow at full council session I am introducing a new bill that I drafted on big box retailing issues and considering recommendations I want to make for our county cable plan operations. And tomorrow our T&E committee will return, and possibly conclude, the issue of take home vehicles for county employees that I have been working on for some time.

Lots going on!