By Adam Pagnucco.
Ever wonder why other politicians generally dislike County Executive Marc Elrich? Well, I witnessed a small example on Wednesday night.
On September 25, Council Member Natali Fani-Gonzalez organized a public safety town hall meeting in Wheaton along with the state legislators from Districts 18 and 19. The meeting was attended by more than 200 people. One of the themes of the meeting was governmental cooperation, and it was backed up by representatives of the county council, the General Assembly, the police department, MCPS, the county executive’s office and State’s Attorney John McCarthy. Every state legislator from the two districts except Delegate Vaughn Stewart was present and everyone was on message.
County Executive Marc Elrich at the Wheaton public safety town hall meeting on September 25.
After discussing juvenile crime generally, Elrich wrapped up with the following specific issue.
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Last thing I’m going to say is, I’m all in favor of putting the kibosh on the school to prison pipeline. That has to stop. Legislation is helpful. But, and this is a big but, they don’t belong in jail but they deserve to get help. You can’t have us arresting people over and over again, turning them back to a parent who has already told you they can’t control the child and then having to arrest them again. They need help. We need to build the system that lets us provide these kids the help and guidance they need.
We’ve been asking the state now for over a year to give us the old Noyes facility up in Shady Grove because it’s abandoned. It was a youth detention center. We could use that for treatment, in-patient treatment. We want that center. We have asked them for it. Fixing the air conditioner isn’t going to kill anybody. The state can afford to do that. But that’s the kind of thing we need more of in Montgomery County and frankly in the state. You need a place for kids to go. And you need caring people, not prison guards, caring people who are interested in their health and well-being and can counsel them. We need that kind of staff there to do this work.
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The Alfred D. Noyes Children’s Center is a female youth detention center in Shady Grove that the state lists as temporarily closed. This is the building Elrich wants and chose to complain about in front of 200 constituents. Sitting there during these comments were seven elected officials representing the state.
I asked some of these elected officials what they knew about this issue since Elrich raised it in public. Some knew nothing about it. Others recounted its mention by an Elrich administration official in a pre-meeting held on Friday. Some said that the administration official and Elrich gave them different accounts of what the county wanted.
None of these elected officials were happy about being called out about it in front of hundreds of constituents.
So much for the we’re-all-on-one-team sentiment to which all the other speakers had adhered.
I asked what Elrich’s predecessor, Ike Leggett, would have done had he wanted this building. One source replied, “Ask nicely. Loop in leadership. Keep it quiet until you acquire the building. Thank everyone.” Another source said that Leggett would call a specific elected official, knowing that person had relationships and could knock heads if necessary, and it would get done. One way or another, public criticism was unnecessary. A third source sighed and offered this comment on Elrich: “It makes a lot of sense for him to loop us in. He just doesn’t.”
Are these officials angry at Elrich? Not all of them. They seem to be used to it. One said, “That’s just Marc being Marc.”
Next time you attend a political event, pay attention to how elected officials speak to each other in public. They are so deferential to each other that it can seem a bit odd to all of us civilians. That’s deliberate. Elected officials ask each other for things all the time. And when they do it, they are almost always sensitive to each other’s need to be positively perceived by the public. That goes hand in hand with cultivating the tender egos possessed by most politicians. “My good friend.” “Delegate X.” “Chair Y.” “Let’s recognize that Council Member Z has been working on this issue for many years.” For these folks, making another elected official look bad in front of constituents would be regarded as a hostile act.
It’s an elaborate system of courtesy that Elrich ignores.
At this moment, Elrich’s defenders are reaching out to elected officials and others to get their help in protecting him from a term limits charter amendment that threatens to remove him from office. These officials are naturally inclined to oppose term limits. (Would you want a term limit on your job?) But when Elrich does things like this – and he has a history of doing so – any enthusiasm for helping him is dampened considerably.
After all, the next county executive will probably not be so quick to call them out in public.