By Adam Pagnucco.
In the wake of a request by Council Members Natali Fani-Gonzalez and Gabe Albornoz to fund council-directed media ads, Council Member Kristin Mink now has a spending proposal of her own: she wants to spend tax dollars on canvassing.
In a memo to the council’s Government Operations Committee, Mink writes:
Members of the County Council have a shared priority of including more voices and a more diverse representation of our County’s residents in the legislative process. This requires breaking down language barriers and increasing intentional outreach to residents who are less likely to voluntarily engage with our County government. This effort will not come without a price tag, but we do have cost-effective, proven methods at our disposal.
A tool already used to great effect in Montgomery County is multilingual, conversation-based canvassing by a local nonprofit called Everyday Canvassing.
Everyday Canvassing knocks on thousands of doors to deeply engage communities that are systematically underrepresented in their access to government. Trained canvassers who speak many different languages ask residents open-ended questions, holding often lengthy interviews and frequently following up by phone. Everyday Canvassing then aggregates the resulting qualitative and quantitative data and presents it to policy-makers for consideration.
Mink depicts this project as necessary to bring in more diverse voices to the legislative process and claims it is supported by Chris Cihlar, who leads the council’s Office of Legislative Oversight. I asked Cihlar about that and he responded:
A service that provides OLO and the Council the ability to gather information from populations we may not hear regularly from could be of important use. This year we are completing a report on affordable senior housing, next year we will potentially be doing a report on homelessness. For the senior housing report we developed a fairly sophisticated mail survey methodology. The response rate was very good but only 30%. It would have been nice to supplement those surveys with a significant interview operation. For the homelessness report I am sure we will hear from service providers and maybe a few of the County’s homeless but we won’t be able to meaningfully supplement the report with a significant number of interviews. Anyway, this would be a nice methodological tool to have available. Interviews are an important way to gather information and OLO has little capacity to conduct a large number of interviews and, in particular conduct these interviews among participants not already at least somewhat engaged in the functioning of government or non profit activity.
It’s not unusual for council members to request extra funding but they usually don’t bring up specific vendors in writing. Everyday Canvassing’s board president is Tino Fragale, who was the field director for Brandy Brooks’s 2022 county council campaign.
State finance records show that one member of Mink’s council staff also worked for Brooks when Fragale was there. Three members of Mink’s council staff contributed to Brooks’s 2022 campaign.
Mink doesn’t explicitly ask the council to hire Everyday Canvassing. However, she touts their work in her memo and even provides their cost estimates for projects ranging from $150,000 to $300,000. In terms of the details of the contract arrangement, she says this:
I propose that the Council issue a request for proposals for a company or nonprofit organization to provide on-call canvassing services to the OLO and Councilmember offices (“small projects” below). The Council may also wish to co-create County-wide annual surveys on issues of shared interest (“large projects”).
Let’s think about what “on-call canvassing services” by “Councilmember offices” would look like. Mink’s current in-house project is a website erected by her council office pushing a rent control bill she is co-sponsoring with Council Member Will Jawando. If the council adopts Mink’s proposal, could Mink deploy taxpayer-funded canvassers to assist her in passing rent control or other legislative priorities?
Screenshots from the website created by Mink’s staff pushing rent control.
It’s one thing to give OLO additional research tools. They do valuable work for the council. It’s quite another thing for taxpayers to fund canvassers at the beck and call of individual council members, especially at election time. The council must exercise great caution in evaluating this proposal from Mink.
Mink’s memo can be downloaded below.