By Adam Pagnucco.
Whether you like him or not, give credit to County Executive Marc Elrich for this: he says exactly what he thinks. Whereas other politicians speak in bland platitudes, Elrich dispenses quickly with niceties before he pivots to blunt talk sure to excite his supporters and provoke his opponents. Elrich showed these tendencies once again in a rip-roaring inauguration speech proving that he is not chastened by his brush with political demise in the primary.
He blasted critics of the county’s economic stagnation with this zinger: “Too often, we can be our own worst enemy and allow well-funded political forces to dictate a manufactured, false, and negative narrative about this County and our government.”
He claimed a long list of accomplishments and said, “We did all of this – without increasing taxes.” That statement required serious chutzpah given that Elrich introduced a property tax hike in his second budget that was unanimously rejected by the county council.
But the real headlines come from his comments about housing, which turned into a major issue in the primary. He said in part:
Reaganesque trickle-down economics suggests that just building more market housing will solve the affordable housing crisis– but the market doesn’t build any more affordable units than governments require them to build and that’s a sad and sorry fact.
If we want different outcomes, then we need different policies that actually create affordable housing.
We will propose taking aggressive steps to increase the County supply of affordable housing, by preserving our affordable housing stock, producing more affordable housing, and protecting tenants from displacement.
We will propose legislation that requires No-net loss of Affordable Housing when existing housing is replaced.
We will propose legislation that replaces our MPDU program with a program that expands the number of units required from new development and serves a wider range of incomes.
And, we will enact a rent stabilization program that will stop the unconscionable rent increases that have plagued some of our renters who make up almost 40% of our County’s population. Rising rents cause us to lose more units than we create. This has to stop.
Not enough for you? Elrich’s prepared inauguration remarks appear below.
*****
That song “This land is your land…” written by the legendary Woody Guthrie in the midst of the Great depression, became an anthem to what America could be and his words are as important today as they were 80 years ago. Our charge is to build a better home for all of us: we know what has to be done and we can do it.
That is what the twelve of us were elected to do in this journey ahead of us.
I am grateful to be here with all of you. I want to start by thanking my family for all their love and support. We all are surrounded by a community who enable us to succeed. I am truly grateful for my community without whom I would not be before you today.
I am pleased to be here with this historic County Council.
When I first broached the idea of expanding the Council, we discussed the impact it could make on the diversity, but I don’t think any of us predicted that it would get us our first majority women Council. This is an important step forward for our County that we should all be proud of.
I want to welcome all of our new Councilmembers and the returning Councilmembers and I look forward to working with each of you for the betterment of Montgomery County.
We also made history in the state. I am very excited to work with our Governor-Elect Moore, Lt. Governor-Elect Miller, Comptroller-Elect Lierman, and Attorney General-Elect Brown. This is truly a historic slate of leaders who all understand how important Montgomery County’s success and priorities are to the state. I look forward to a great partnership with each of them.
I want to recognize our partners in education – Dr. Monifa McKnight, Dr. Jermaine Williams, and Dr. Anne Khademian. Your leadership is key to keeping Montgomery County’s reputation as the education and workforce capital of our state and region, and I appreciate your Leadership.
Finally, I look forward to working with our State Delegation, led by our good friends Senator Ben Kramer and Delegate Julie Palakovich Carr. You have a big job ahead of you, and our County is ready to stand with you to make sure we all succeed. Please join me in giving all our elected officials and County leaders another round of applause.
Four years ago, when I stood before you, none of us could have predicted that we’d be dealing with a global pandemic, an economic disruption, an attempted insurrection, and so much more. But it was COVID that really changed our lives.
When I saw the images of New York City where body bags of covid victims were being dragged out of buildings, I was determined that THAT was not going to happen here.
Because of our collective efforts, we succeeded. The County death rate from Covid was only two-thirds of the national average and if the other 3,000 counties in this nation had the same results as us, there would be over 300,000 fewer dead Americans.
Today, we are the most vaccinated large jurisdiction in the nation. And we did that by turning to our community partners, who helped us reach deeper in our communities and enabled us to achieve high rates of vaccination for all our residents.
Our success cannot be credited to any one leader or institution – it was accomplished by our collective and communal response to this unprecedented health threat.
I thank the public for following science-based advice; I thank our amazing County workforce that pivoted in a matter of days to mobilize and fight COVID , I thank the doctors, nurses and all health care workers for your selflessness, and I thank our incredible nonprofit partners – many of whom are here today – who were there helping to increase testing, vaccinating, and providing access to food and other necessities for those in need. These collective efforts saved lives.
Covid isn’t gone, but we have far more tools to use if we need them. But there was always a bigger picture, and we always knew that every problem that faced us coming into office would still be waiting for us when we emerged from the worst of covid. So, while we were focused on public health, we did not let it deter us from working to move this County forward.
We established our County’s first office of Racial Equity & Social Justice and appointed our first Chief Equity Officer.
We passed an ambitious plan to address Climate Change.
We rightsized our budget, going from a Ninety Million Dollar deficit my first year in office to a Surplus four years later.
We made historic investments in educational funding, housing, early childhood education and in transportation. And I look forward to working with Gov Moore who reiterated again this week that he wants to accelerate the expansion of early childhood education.
We pivoted service delivery to increase collaboration with community partners.
We made sure County employees were fairly compensated.
We worked with our business community to eliminate unnecessary regulations and sped up the permitting process.
We built the County’s first year-round homeless shelter because we decided that when our temporary shelters closed, we were not putting people back on the streets.
We worked with police and the community to begin reimagining public safety – providing more transparency and accountability – and increasing resources and pay.
We maintained our AAA bond rating.
And we did all of this – without increasing taxes.
The County has taken on big projects: starting Bus Rapid Transit, making county properties available for new affordable housing and starting up a new Montgomery College Campus in East County.
And a couple of weeks ago, we announced a new partnership with the University Maryland system to create an Institute for Health Computing in North Bethesda – which the dean of the University Medical System said would make us the Silicon Valley of health computing,
This initiative will provide leading edge computing, data visualization and AI research along with talent from the University system and population data from the University of Md. Medical System.
With our proximity to federal research institutions, a trained workforce, and an ecosystem of booming life science and advanced computing companies, something very important and special will grow here.
We are changing the narrative about the economic future of this County from pessimism to optimism.
Too often, we can be our own worst enemy and allow well-funded political forces to dictate a manufactured, false, and negative narrative about this County and our government.
But the stars are now aligning for a renaissance in our economy built on the foundation that this County has always been known for – a robust education system with a highly educated and trained workforce.
When 75% of voters this November voted to reelect me, they sent with them a message that they want to continue the progress we have made together, and I am focused on delivering on this promise.
We are, no doubt, one of the best places to live, work, and raise a family, yet we face serious challenges.
Our challenge, in the broadest sense, is to build one county for all of us, where our fates are not determined by our zip codes.
So, I want to address four big challenges.
Affordable housing stands as one of our greatest challenges. We are at a tipping point, and Montgomery County has spent too long in fantasyland when it comes to solving this problem.
In the mid-seventies, we launched what was then a signature housing program, Moderately Priced Dwelling Units. This program was designed to serve the teachers, fire fighters and police officers who had a hard time finding housing affordable to them. At the time, our County was 95% white, 4.5% Black and 0.5% other.
That’s not Montgomery County now and tens of thousands of people today struggle to find housing at lower incomes than MPDU’s serve.
Our non-profits can’t produce enough units to meet our needs. Our MPDU program – which requires developers to provide only 12 1/2 to 15% of the units they build to be affordable.
However, we have tens of thousands of households who are severely rent-burdened – paying 50% or more of their income for rents, for whom nothing is being built, and the future projections of who will move here actually make the numbers much worse.
Current policies won’t create the housing we need, and the math simply doesn’t work– getting 15% of new market units as affordable doesn’t come close to meeting existing and projected needs. Like over 50,000 units of not close.
Reaganesque trickle-down economics suggests that just building more market housing will solve the affordable housing crisis– but the market doesn’t build any more affordable units than governments require them to build and that’s a sad and sorry fact.
If we want different outcomes, then we need different policies that actually create affordable housing.
We will propose taking aggressive steps to increase the County supply of affordable housing, by preserving our affordable housing stock, producing more affordable housing, and protecting tenants from displacement.
We will propose legislation that requires No-net loss of Affordable Housing when existing housing is replaced.
We will propose legislation that replaces our MPDU program with a program that expands the number of units required from new development and serves a wider range of incomes.
And, we will enact a rent stabilization program that will stop the unconscionable rent increases that have plagued some of our renters who make up almost 40% of our County’s population. Rising rents cause us to lose more units than we create. This has to stop.
The next challenge we face is climate change, where the news only gets worse, and yet the world dithers around the edges. Half-measures will not stop this impending disaster.
Five years ago today, the County passed the most aggressive climate goals in the country.
There are many obstacles to progress, including climate deniers, the misbelief that there are no solutions, that we lack the resources, or that we simply cannot make a difference. People need models and they need success stories to show we CAN overcome the obstacles, and Montgomery County will continue to be that example of success.
This is how we reduce our carbon footprint.
By helping provide funding for buildings to transition from gas to electric.
By electrifying our vehicle fleet, and using approaches to make this happens sooner than later.
By retrofitting our County buildings for energy efficiency.
By expanding the collection of food waste Countywide and moving to composting.
By expanding the implementation of solar on roof tops, parking lots and field.
By financially assisting marginalized communities most often impacted by climate change to transition to clean energy,
And we will shut down the incinerator, which is both a public health and climate change threat.
In the end we must go on the journey as a community.
A little less than 60 years ago when Dr. King was in the halls of Congress lobbying for Civil Rights legislation, a reporter asked him how he felt about critics who said he was moving too fast and King responded that “they want us to wait another 40 years.”
Well 40 years has come and gone and for almost every metric of what we call success: health, home ownership, income, educational attainment; black people are at the bottom of the metric. We know systemic racism and inequalities permeate our system.
There is work we’re doing to address it:
Our new health officer will bring a focus on Health in All Policies in the County, including working with health providers in the county, to broaden and increase the effectiveness of and access to our community health programs.
We are going through a re-evaluation of public safety because we know that adverse and/or unnecessary police interactions have a disproportional racial impact. We are creating a restoration center to divert more people from the criminal justice system.
And we need to seriously rethink our approach to crime – our jails are centers of punishment, not rehabilitation, we cycle people –from jails to streets and back again, and make it impossible for them to get jobs or rent apartments. Why we think such a system will improve things in society is beyond me. And it’s expensive.
We know that homeownership is one of the keys to bridging the racial wealth gap and creating generational wealth, so we are increasing the focus on homeownership.
Our racial equity office is examining both our operating and capital budgets to scrutinize spending from an equity perspective.
And the East County campus of Montgomery College will open new doors to education.
I’m excited by our new partners in the state, as this is a priority of the new governor, – we have many goals in common and there’s much we will work on together.
And then there’s growing the economy.
We are determined to drive economic development. As a self-confessed progressive and environmentalist, I know we cannot build a better future without better jobs and more resources. Economic progress provides the resources to speed social progress, which costs money.
Over the last twenty years, we watched Northern Virginia’s economy outpace us as they invested more in their transportation infrastructure and weaponized their education assets to better attract businesses. I have often said that if someone is “eating your lunch,” you should figure out how they got it. It was the story of how Virginia landed Amazon that drove me to find academic and research partners for our life sciences sector, that resulted in the Institute for Health Computing coming to North Bethesda
We’ll make the investments in transit and education that we need to succeed. And knowing there’s life beyond life sciences, we’ll continue to help the small businesses who are the lifeblood of our County.
With a new Governor, new Comptroller, and a new General Assembly, we are going get the right deal and project for I-270, I-495, and the American Legion Bridge to ease traffic congestion, save motorists from high-cost tolls, and protect our environment and communities.
What makes me tick?
I have lived in this County since I was ten years old.
I went to my first anti-war demonstration in DC when I was 12.
At 13, I went to the 1963 March on Washington.
I protested the War in Vietnam until it ended– I saw the toll it took on people throughout the Country – and especially those who didn’t look like me, who were forced to fight an unjust war, for a country that would deny them their rights when they came home, while I sat safely in a classroom with my student deferment – which I eventually signed away.
I saw racism up close as a student at the University of Maryland where black students weren’t hired by businesses and couldn’t find landlords to rent to them. Having grown up with overt racism and antisemitism, I was not a stranger to mindless hatred. And I could not accept the politics that ignored the lack of humanity embodied in what I saw around me.
I fought for tenant rights and rent control in Takoma Park and as a teacher at Rolling Terrace Elementary School – I taught kids in a community that too many had forgotten. I saw firsthand the effects of poverty and policy failures.
When you teach children every day for whom every dollar their parents spend on rent is a dollar not available for food, clothes, or fun – when you come to see how business transactions, like paying rent, can impact every aspect of a person’s life -you will start weighing these things in the moral sense.
I’ve maintained that activism and still see myself as an activist. I serve the interests of people and I try not to over-promise – I recognize I don’t have magical powers and sometimes I can’t do what I’d like to do because that’s just the way it is.
But I don’t think that just because you’re an elected representative that the job description requires you to defend the institutions, policies or practices just because they exist. So, I’ve told my staff, at all levels, that if there are better ways of doing things, I am not afraid of change.
Some people see changing as a confession of errors, I see change as a growth opportunity.
At my core I know: Montgomery County is the best place to raise a family, the best place to open a business, and the best place to look to the future.
I am appreciative of all those who helped us get to where we are today and of all the people who believe in our County, and the path we are on. I look forward to the work and partnership ahead with all of you.
I know that Montgomery County’s best days lie ahead. And we will get there together.