Note from Adam Pagnucco: Former Montgomery County Planning Board Chair Gus Bauman sent out the following open letter yesterday. Bauman has been active in county affairs for more than fifty years in a variety of capacities. I will relate more of his biography after printing his open letter, which appears below.
Open Letter
By Gus Bauman.
Montgomery County is at an existential moment in time, and the trends that really matter—economic and political—are pointing ever deeper into the downward economic spiral the County has been in for fully 20 years. Over a million people live in the County, and few are paying attention. You can’t blame most of them. Once dominant press coverage is virtually non-existent unless it’s to cover crime or some blatant scandal. The daily Montgomery Journal is long gone. The Washington Star, gone. The Gazette, gone. The Washington Post, AWOL.
Except for a few blogs and Internet “papers” that try to cover a smattering of local government and politics, they still can’t replace, much less duplicate, the once deep coverage of politicians, candidates, and local officials that the local newspapers had achieved through the early years of this century.
Now, these days, the public only really knows what campaign brochures promise (and rarely mean) or what misinformation, lies, and propaganda they peruse on the Internet. And if you read something somewhere, then hell, it must be true.
But you can’t blame just the voters. Not entirely. They are too busy getting the kids to school and soccer, shopping for necessities, doing the laundry and the yard work, just making a living. After all, most people are simply living lives of quiet desperation. No, the real fault to the current County tailspin is in the ever-larger number of sub-par egos running for County Executive, County Council, State Senate, State House, School Board. And these people are increasingly getting elected. And why not?
We no longer have local press institutions that long served, through editorial boards and banks of reporters, as stringent interrogators of candidates, shining a light on who these people really are, what they have done, and, just as critically, not done, for all to see and judge in the clear light of day. Adding to this breakdown of gatekeepers, we no longer have a vibrant political party structure at the local level that can winnow out the incipient inferior wannabes. Now, these very same district party officials are too often among the wannabes. Piling on to this breakdown in merit, we no longer have candidate debates crisscrossing the County, witnessed by hundreds or thousands, covered by a press corps for everyone else to learn about and evaluate. Today, the most important influencers are the public employee unions.
The result? More and more, we are faced with ballots full of names of individuals who have achieved little, who barely know the County or its people, who are running not to achieve something for the County but merely to be somebody. Instead of electing somebodies we are increasingly being urged to elect nobodies. And with the breakdown of press and party gatekeepers, it is quite easy to do.
The middle is largely ceding control to the ideologues. For the absence of critical thought is a hallmark of a nobody and a necessary prerequisite for the ideologue. The adults in the room are harder to find. And when they are found, they are so appalled at where things are moving they largely flee the room if only to preserve their sanity.
So where is Montgomery County today? Because of this weakened state of political affairs within the County, brought on in part by a passive County Executive followed by an ideological one, the County has been suffering from a depleted local economy for some 20 years. It got by, however, because its biggest industry—government—essentially subsidized the citizenry through not only high-paying public sector jobs but also related private sector businesses, thereby boosting the local taxbase with comfort.
But no more. That day is over. The federal government‘s extreme reductions in jobs and programs, even if some are restored in later times, will never recover what there was in its heyday. The domino effect on State resources are already being felt. And everything from the top will assuredly fall upon the lowest governmental level, the County.
The handwriting is on the wall for any who care to acknowledge the bracing truth. Unless Montgomery County’s political class is finally willing to actually fight for the worth, the value, the necessity of building a strong, vibrant private sector, of fighting for big businesses as well as small businesses, of actually getting out there and saying, “We want you here and we value what you can add to a great County,” unless the ideologues can be shunted aside for some wise adults, the vaunted public services County citizens have grown so accustomed to will slowly wither on the vine.
Gus Bauman chaired the Montgomery County Planning Board from 1989 through 1993. He has also been a legal counsel for the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, a Democratic candidate for county executive in 1994, a member of the Blue Ribbon Metro Funding Panel in 2004-05, chair of the Maryland Blue Ribbon Commission on Transportation Funding in 2010-2012 and a practicing attorney. Bauman lives in Silver Spring.