By Adam Pagnucco.
Below are the top ten stories on Montgomery Perspective in January 2023, ranked by page views.
2. Planning Board Applicants Revealed
3. Do We Want More Housing or Not?
4. Is This Public Funding of Advocacy?
5. Elrich’s Capital Budget, Quick and Dirty
7. The Best Advice Ever for Public Officials
8. Elrich, Majority of Council Want to Reduce Police Traffic Enforcement
9. How a Republican U.S. House Will Affect Montgomery County
10. Are We Afraid of Political Diversity?
Number one is no surprise: the annual political awards column always gets eyeballs. (Why do you think I publish it?) The rest is a hodge-podge of housing, planning and budget – always go-to issues for people interested in MoCo. I was glad to see the speech by former Council Member Phil Andrews make our top ten. Whether I agreed with him or not, I always saw Phil as the gold standard for how elected officials treat constituents and I hope our current elected folks take his advice to heart.
There are a couple issues in the above posts that will resurface this month and points going forward.
First, tax dollars for interest group advocacy will be an issue in the upcoming debate over rent control. A couple of the organizations pushing the council to install rent control are non-profits who receive significant amounts of county tax money. There are limits on the amount of lobbying that non-profit 501(c)(3) organizations can legally do under the federal tax code. When they also receive taxpayer subsidies while they lobby elected officials, that deserves scrutiny.
Second, there is the issue of crime. This has not been a big deal in the recent past, but it is a big deal now. The unfortunate thing about discussion of crime is that it mainly emphasizes perception, belief and ideology but not facts. Well, I have been working very hard to accumulate facts and guess what? They are messy. But they are what they are, and over the next couple weeks, I will be rolling them out. You the readers can decide for yourselves what you think about them.
More tomorrow!