By Adam Pagnucco.
Mayor of Somerset Jeffrey Slavin is urging a boycott of the Montgomery County Democratic Central Committee’s (MCDCC) fall gala, one of its principal fundraising events, over a variety of problems in the party county. Slavin is no ordinary mayor. He is a former vice chair of the Maryland Democratic Party, a decades-long player in county politics and a six-digit donor to Democratic candidates and causes both in Maryland and nationally. Slavin’s statement was first reported by Moderately MoCo yesterday but he has since sent it to many other media outlets. It is reprinted below.
Update: The MCDCC Chair has responded to Slavin in MoCo360. Her comments appear after his below.
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Subject: Unless There is an Immediate Change in Leadership, Please Skip the MCDCC Fall Gala
My Fellow Democrats:
I am writing to you as a party leader and longtime donor today because I, like you, have been hearing and reading in the press almost weekly about the scandals gripping our local party. I have decided that enough is enough, and the time has come to take action. I therefore urge my fellow donors and loyal party activists to withhold any fundraising support and to boycott the Fall Gala on October 22 until Chairwoman Saman Qadeer Ahmad resigns.
Countless party officials and Central Committee members have spoken to me in hushed tones about the state of affairs at the Montgomery County Democratic Central Committee (MCDCC). While there is much blame to go around, much of the ethics deficit we have been forced to witness in recent times is directly the fault of Chair Ahmad, who has created a toxic environment through bullying, dishonesty and malevolence. It is time that she put her blind ambition behind her and resign for the good of the Party.
There are a myriad of other reasons to refrain from supporting MCDCC financially this year. I summarize them below.
Incompetence
Like all organizations that handle hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, MCDCC is subject to governing rules and regulations. Its own regulation handbook clearly states there must be a “Spring Ball” (Chapter 66.1, page 176 of the MCDCC Rules Handbook). Instead, MCDCC hurriedly rushed to reschedule its annual fundraiser for the autumn because of the gross incompetence of the current chair to do the one thing a political committee exists to do: raise money to support fellow Democrats. According to Montgomery Perspective, the party barely raised $16,000 in the first six months of the year.
Alarming lack of transparency
Chair Ahmad has called for numerous closed ‘executive sessions’ out of the public eye. Even Committee members have publicly asked for increased transparency, including the live streaming of meetings. Repeatedly, Chair Ahmad has steadfastly refused, despite having a cadre of willing volunteers to assist. If that were not enough, members of the national press have publicly called out the chair for attempting to physically block them from attending MCDCC’s meetings. This unethical behavior has gained condemnation from major organizations like Common Cause Maryland. Such back-room shenanigans and public exclusion erode public trust just as the Democratic Party is trying to brand itself as the party of transparency and inclusion.
Gross Intimidation
The amount of reported behind-the-scene “arm twisting” has reached an unimaginable level. The MCDCC Chair is supposed to be a facilitator, not an authoritarian. Earlier this year, a grassroots organization wrote directly to Chair Ahmad to condemn her use of intimidation tactics, writing: “your actions so far are the antithesis of democracy itself, and put into question the Democratic Party’s commitment to combating bigotry and Islamophobia as core values.”
There are also the now-well known efforts by the current chair to poison the relationship between the party and our county’s educators by taking sides in a partisan dispute earlier this year that threatened to divide the central committee into pro and anti-labor camps. Why she thought this was a wise stratagem is unclear to anyone.
In so many ways, the current leadership of MCDCC is dysfunctional and disenchanted with the basic tenets of the rule of law, not to mention the values our party stands for. Until the chair and her closest lieutenants resign, it would be a disservice to local democracy to donate a single dollar to this wayward committee. Allowing Saman Qadeer Ahmad to remain at the helm would signal that Democrats are no better than Congress in allowing George Santos to remain at the helm.
Unpaid Taxes & Financial Mismanagement
I have never heard of a Democratic Party entity that has been threatened by the IRS with a tax lien. That is, until now. The Baltimore Sun, MoCo360.com and Moderately MoCo have extensive and embarrassing coverage of the failure by MCDCC to pay outstanding taxes in a timely manner. They have also written about the mind-boggling (and ultimately unsuccessful) attempts by Chair Ahmad to lie to and mislead the press and the public over how and when the tax issues were discovered. What would possess a publicly-elected party official to think that Trumpian-style dishonesty about unpaid taxes, of all things, was a wise move here in Montgomery County?
Moreover, the press is now reporting that two individual MCDCC members owe extraordinary sums of money to the IRS and have public liens filed against them in court. While that might seem a personal matter, please keep in mind that taxpayers pay for the primary elections that elect MCDCC members to their positions, and that a whopping 41% of our county’s legislators whose job it is to levy taxes have been appointed to the legislature by the MCDCC! It is a mockery of our entire system of government that people who cannot be trusted to pay their own taxes are today in charge of appointing the lawmakers charged with deciding how much we must all pay in taxes.
Allow me to emphasize another point here: a full third of Montgomery County’s residents are born in a foreign country. Failure to pay one’s taxes is a legitimate reason for a US citizenship application to be rejected by federal authorities. What message are we sending to our fellow county residents and future Americans if we cannot trust Democratic Party officials to pay their due in a timely manner to our government? Do our laws matter if the people appointing so many of our lawmakers do not bother to follow the rules the rest of us abide by? Are the rules different for those who have power? When did we become Donald Democrats?
I am not the only party trustee who is declining to attend this year’s fall gala. Several others have confirmed their discomfort with the direction of the party, as have Democratic Club leaders and community activists. I have gone a step further and requested my financial contributions this cycle be refunded. The behavior by the MCDCC’s leadership is disgraceful, yet Chair Ahmad is not only complicit in trying to sweep such issues under an already crowded rug of scandal, she seems to thrive on it. Enough is enough. We cannot allow our local Democratic Party to be run into the ground like a banana republic.
There are several other issues I have chosen to not address in this letter, including the very undemocratic privileges afforded to MCDCC members in appointing our state legislators. Montgomery County deserves a Democratic Party that is free of unethical behavior and amoral abuses of power. For the good and welfare of our county, I urge you to skip this year’s fall gala.
Yours Sincerely,
Mayor Jeffrey Slavin, Somerset
Former First Vice Chair, Maryland Democratic Party
Former Deputy Treasurer, Maryland Democratic Party
Former Trustee, Maryland Democratic Party
MCDCC Community Service Award, 2012
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MoCo360 contacted Saman Qadeer Ahmad, the MCDCC chair who is the subject of Slavin’s statement. Ahmad denied prior allegations against her and said of Slavin’s statement:
“At a time when the country is watching as Republicans turn on Republicans while grinding our entire country to a halt, it’s a shame, really, it’s truly a shame that a former Democratic Party leader is adopting the same tactics to divide Democrats as MAGA Republicans do,” Ahmad said in an interview with MoCo360. “All in all, I wish Mayor Slavin well.”