February 2006 Archives

Dear Readers,

Those bad boys want to take our fire truck away!

You know how everyone says the city council is always thrown into the role of being reactive rather than being proactive? It doesn’t get any more reactive than this!

And just when we thought we had it all settled.

This comes only a couple of years after the end of a long, difficult and often contentious struggle over the location, configuration, and size of the new fire station (to begin construction in the fall of this year). The new station was designed with the assumption that it would house our beloved hook-and-ladder Truck #2 which they’ve tried to take away more than once before and been blocked by the city council.

In his second month on the job, the new county fire chief Thomas W. Carr, Jr., has stepped into the hornet’s nest that is our proud and feisty city. He came to the Feb. 22 city council meeting with a Power Point presentation “proving” that Truck #2 (affectionately known as “Jumbo” for the stuffed elephant that hangs from the ladder just in front of the windshield - actually a tool to help the firemen assess the ladder’s angle) would be more useful to the county’s overall needs if it were relocated to Station #1 in Silver Spring.

Oh, is that the sound of swords being sharpened behind the city council podium?

He said it was nothing personal, but hey, it’s his job to place COUNTY (not city) resources where they will do the most good. Unfortunately for Takoma Park there is an increasing need up-county for “resources.”

But, fear not, he said, this will be a negligible change. To prove it he showed maps. Currently, according to the map, Takoma Park is covered in blue, indicating the hook-and-ladder response time is less than 6 minutes. If Truck #2 were moved to Silver Spring, the westernmost part of the city would still be in the blue, the easternmost section would be in blue (within range of a hook-and-ladder truck in Prince George’s County), but the central part (you know, the Maple Avenue corridor of high rises where a hook-and-ladder truck would be essential) was GREEN.

Not to worry, green indicates a less-than-8 minute response time, reassured Chief Carr, and a less-than-8-minute response is perfectly adequate. In fact, a 8 minute response time is the department’s goal response time. Our less-than-6-minute response time amounts to an unnecessary frill, he seemed to imply.

The council members were busy loading the cannons.

Ready, . . . aim, . . .

It was continuous fire, each council member taking a turn. It can be summed up with the words of council member Bruce Williams, “We’ll fight you every step of the way!”

Marc Elrich zinged: “The buildings (in Takoma Park) haven’t gotten any shorter and they haven’t gotten any newer.”

Most of them pointed out that the county council allowed up-county development but didn’t charge any fees to purchase the additional fire fighting resources needed. Why, they asked, should the city then be asked to sacrifice our resources? In short, they told Carr, buy more trucks, and charge it to the developers.

No clue whether the county chief was moved. He didn’t say one way or the other. More on this later, readers.

In other council news an interesting debate occurred between new council member Colleen Clay and veteran member Marc Elrich. In a work session staff-briefing about city rent stabilization (which, you remember is under review right now), Clay asserted the position that if a community (read: Takoma Park) values affordable housing (remember Gilbert’s analysis of this term?) it should spend money on affordable housing, and spread the cost around so everyone shares the burden, not foist it onto a small group (read: landlords).

She objected, she said, to the characterization of all landlords as rapacious exploiters. She did not glance sideways at Marc Elrich. Some, she admitted, were big corporations with vast holdings, but individual landlords who owned small buildings with just a few units in them should not be lumped in with these.

She said these people were not profiteers but were similar to business people who might open a small restaurant.

No homeowners in Takoma Park, she said, would be willing to lower the selling price of their homes so that poor people could afford them, and they certainly wouldn’t want a law passed that would require them to.

Aha! In the short time I've been regularly observing council meetings, this is the most openly anti-rent control statement i’ve heard from a council member. So far there has only been an uneasy agreement that all the council members are for "affordable housing."

Marc Elrich, who is probably the most pro-rent control member, responded that unlike a restaurant, housing is a fundamental need, and that even the Supreme Court has judged that government regulation of rents is permissible. Landlords of any size, he said, are investors, and the profitability of rental properties in Takoma Park can be shown by how often they are sold and resold.

He cited the rows of rental buildings on Roanoke Ave. which, he said are indeed owned by a large corporations with rental properties all over the county. These, he said, were not individuals using a single rental property as a retirement hedge. “This is a place to make a lot of money.”

It would be nice to have an affordable housing plan, he said, but it is costly, and as there is no such policy in place, and nobody (read: Council Member Clay) has offered a comprehensive proposal for such a policy, then we have to keep the policy we have - until such a proposal has been made.

The Mayor, though she agreed that this was an important debate, said this was not the question before the council and it was getting late.

Before they left the subject, however, council member Terry Seamans remarked briefly that “we’ve skirted around this issue for years.” and he looked forward to a comprehensive discussion on affordable housing, which Mayor Porter has proposed, and he looks forward to hearing at that meeting “proposals for a better way to do affordable housing” He did not look sideways at council member Clay.

Accusing the city council of trying to “pull a stealth move,” Ward One Council Member Joy Austin-Lane objected to reducing by $10,000 the $25,000 pledged to the Safe Roadways Committee a few weeks ago.

At that Jan. 17th meeting some earnest young committee representatives presented three proposals that they felt would encourage mass transportation and bicycling:

1) Painting bike “sharrows” - chevron shapes showing safest place to ride - on street pavement to show lane is shared by bikes,

2) Installing bike-rack parking around town in 41 locations,

3) Provide ride-on schedules in more bus shelters.

Then, the city council said that $25,000 could be taken from the city’s reserve fund for these projects, but at the February 13th meeting, Council Member Bruce Williams suggesting reducing the amount to $15,000, saying he was loath to deplete the reserve fund by so much. He said “shame on me” for going along with the proposal in the first place, blaming the oversight on fatigue at the time, joking he “was brain-dead” that evening. Your Gilbert suspects that it was more of a case of buyers' remorse than fatigue, as he distinctly recalls an apparently alert discussion Williams held with committee members that evening regarding the unfamiliar term “sharrow" just prior to the settlement of the $25,000. Of course, he may have been talking in his sleep!

Council Member Doug Barry agreed with Williams. He stressed that he didn’t mean to diminish the work of the committee, but he admitted to doubts about the projects, particularly the one providing Ride-On schedules in bus shelters, which he said was more appropriately the responsibility of Ride-On.

Williams suggested that the smaller amount could fund an initial pilot project and if it worked, and if Ride-On kicked in an amount, they could reconsider additional funding.

Mayor Porter agreed this would be prudent and it seemed as though council had reached consensus when Austin-Lane spoke up and somewhat self-righteously objected, saying it was a “bad move” to wait until the citizens committee was no longer before the council to “make a stealth move.”

The rest of the council did not see it that way, she was the lone vote against it. The Mayor assured Austin-Lane and the public that there would be a second reading of the amendment and there would be opportunity for public comment before the final vote.

Austin-Lane was the lone voice of dissent on that one, but when she later raised objections, this time about seeking funding for the community center gym, she had allies.

The subject before the council was a presentation by staff of state legislation impacting the city. One of these was the opportunity to get state bond funding for the gymnasium.

The Mayor and her supporters on the council, particularly Marc Elrich and Bruce Williams, have been insistent that a gym will be built. They have acted as though the Mayor’s reelection indicated a mandate to proceed. Others on the council are more mindful of the controversial morass they got into over the planning and construction of the community center. There have been charges of incompetence and arrogance, and they don’t want similar charges leveled about the gym construction.

Whether or not the community wants a gym built was not only a difference of opinion, it was a clash of different versions of community center history. One side said that the council, bestowed with a grant, rushed into the community center project without planning it first, Then, with the support of the “usual” activists, but with no real data to show what the community wanted, came up with an elaborate design that far exceeded the budget.

The Mayor and others who had been through the process said this was historical revisionism, that the community had been rigorously surveyed and canvassed, that if anything, the community wanted too much and the plans had to be scaled back, and that there had been preliminary planning before the initial state grant came in.

Again it was Austin-Lane who first raised objections. She said she felt uncomfortable pursuing state bond funds before the community was consulted about whether they really wanted a gym. She felt the public was being eliminated in the process, urging a public meeting in March where the public could comment.

The Mayor said her recollection was that the last time the subject was discussed the public wanted information on what sort of plans were possible and what alternative plans would cost. Since there was no new information about this, she said, there would be no point in having a public meeting until certain preliminary information was gathered. Meanwhile it was prudent to line up funding, if needed. Otherwise the city would have to wait another year.

Colleen Clay, though she represents the Mayor’s ward, did not back her up on this issue. She said the feedback she’s gotten from the community is that funding drove the previous plan, not the other way around, and that not all of her consituents support having a gym.

Marc Elrich jumped in, asserting that this was a rewriting of history. The gym, he reminded the council, was what started the project in the first place. It was the most widely supported part of it, and was left for last because of how the funding and construction developed. Council member Williiams backed him up, saying the gym is indeed important to the community.

Council Member Seamens spoke next, aligning himself with Austin-Lane and Clay. He supported developing a plan before getting the money, and seeing what citizens want in a gym, “if we decide to build one.” He feels residents want a more organized, more inclusive approach to the gym. He said he finds no fault in how the council proceeded with the community center, but he said there is a public perception that it could have been done better. He saw no harm in forming a committee to determine community interest in a gym.

The Mayor, appearing to sidestep the controversy, said that though she agreed that it is critical to engage the public in the planning, that was not the question before the council. The question before them was the state bond bill and whether the city should put in a bid for the money. She added there already is a liaison committee in place which is getting community input on the gym. She suggested moving forward with the bond bill, then setting up a planning process, “moving forward at each stage.”

She asked if anyone on the council was against the bond bill. in response, Joy Austin-Lane repeated her request for a public forum in March and expressed concern that the council was about to again let the funding drive the project.

The Mayor took that for a no vote, and Austin-Lane took umbrage, saying icily “do not mischaracterize my position!” She clarified that while she is in favor of a gym and the bond funding, she is uncomfortable proceeding with the funding before the plan.

The Mayor, stiffly polite, said she disagreed with Austin-Lane’s funding-before-the-plan characterization of the previous community center process.

Clay said she had no objection to the bond bill, but added that she is aware of a lot of “buzz” on the issue. She has seen discussion on e-mail lists and has received personal e-mails and calls expressing the same doubts Austin-Lane had voiced She also said she was concerned that the council was putting the cart before the horse - or at least had the appearance of doing so.

The Mayor again explained her take on the matter, that citizens are awaiting data on the gym: the site, the configuration, the contents, the cost, and that gathering that information is her priority to fulfill the exceptions of the public. She did say, however, that she will put back on the agenda a discussion of what the next steps should be.

The city manager Barbara Matthews threw a little bit of cold water on the Mayor’s look-at-a-wide-range-of -options-and-chose-the-best-deal scenario, saying that the council has to have a pretty solid idea of what will be in gym before they hire an architect to come up with conceptual designs and feasibility studies. Too many options to consider would drive up the cost of the studies.

Mayor Porter corrected the record on the history of the community center. She said there were focus groups, a public survey that was published in the city newsletter, three committees: one to find a site, one to discuss content, and a third to find alternatives, and later a committee to plan the whole facility. There were three site proposals, and a series of hearings, and presentations. There wasn’t money committed prior to the decision to move forward, she asserted.

Barry also decried the “historical revisionism,” saying that if anything there was too much public input, so much so that the project was unbuildable and had to be winnowed down. He added however that he was not against full community involvement, cautioning that they didn’t do it during the first phase of the community center and they must do it this time.

So, that seemed to put him in the middle between Porter/Wiliams/Elrich and Austin-Lane/Clay/Seamens

"I see an affordable housing crisis!"

That's what an appalled Colleen Clay, Ward 2 council member, said after reading the number of apartments converted to condos in the last two years. 262 were converted, which Clay calculated to be ten times the number of rental units the city lost in a previous 10 year period, when the average was 16 per year.

Under discussion at the Feb. 6th council work session was rent stabilization, "Exemptions and Other Regulations / Current Trends and Rent Increase Upon Vacancy of Rental Unit." This is part of the council's continuing scrutiny of the city's rent stabilization code in preparation for revisions to that code

This discussion was haunted, as were previous ones, by the evil Ghost of Condominium Conversions. Apartments are being sold as condominiums, taking them off the rental market, at an alarming rate. The mayor and council are quick to point out that this is happening throughout the area, not just in the city, lest this be taken as an unintended consequence of rent control. Conversion is the most urgent affordable housing issue to deal with, say several of the council. It seems likely there soon will be legislation proposed regulating the practice.

Compared to the issue of rapidly disappearing rents to control, other rent control issues seem almost beside the point. Yet, they are contentious as always. Arguments about the effects and usefulness of rent control are now raging on local e-mail discussion lists. Landlords hate rent control, of course, but so do others: conservatives (a relative term in Takoma Park), libertarians, and many of the Pro-Cons.

Pro-Cons, if you remember , are the citizen faction which, while generally supporting progressive, liberal principles, also embraces fiscal conservatism, especially in matters of taxation. Their take on rent control is that it is a taxpayer subsidy to all renters. This galls them because renters are not needs-tested, and they assert that people who could afford higher rents are taking advantage of the situation.

Further, they feel that placing a cap on rents lowers landlord profits and denies them the funds and incentive to improve their properties. As a result, their properties are assessed at lower values than they could be, meaning that landlord taxes are lower than they could be, meaning that residents taxes are higher than they should be.

The council can be contentious on the subject, too. Council Member Marc Elrich, whose ward has a large percentage of renters and who has long been a fierce advocate of rent control, suspected at one point that Colleen Clay was blaming the conversion of rental units on the city rent policy. He asserted that condominium conversion was happening throughout the area in places with no rent control as well.

Clay quickly assured him that he misunderstood her, that though she thinks rent control contributes slightly to local conversions, she understands that the city's rent stabilization code is what gives the city affordable housing, and that providing affordable housing was her goal as well.

Perhaps Elrich was on guard with Clay because she allied in last fall's election with the Pro-Con mayoral candidate whose position on rent control was that he supported affordable housing principles, but was open to reviewing the law. Supporters of the law see terms such as "review the law" as code for "dismantle the law," I suspect this is why he has been so jumpy in these discussions - questioning at the last session on rent stabilization why the subject had even come up.

All the council members are careful to at least give lip service to rent stabilization, though it seems as though the term "affordable housing" is heard more and more often in place of "rent control" or "rent stabilization." To the discerning (or paranoid) listener, support for "affordable housing" is not necessarily support for rent control, It sounds suspiciously like a code phrase meaning the speaker favors replacing rent stabilization with some sort of subsidy for low income renters. "Affordable housing" also means affordable home ownership, as the mayor has pointed out on more than one occasion.

However, little of this was directly confronted at this meeting, which Mayor Porter said was intended to be informational. The mayor said that in coming meetings there would be discussions about how and why to change the law, and opportunity for residents to comment. She would like to take a "two prong strategy," she said. First , do something about condo conversions. Second, update the city's policy in a way that takes into account the conversions. She said she is open to other creative strategies, that maintain both affordable rental and affordable ownership, which she admits opens up other problems such as owner equity. The term "rent stabilization" did not cross her lips in this speech.

The information was provided by the Housing and Community Development department staff. Their report compared Takoma Park's rent stabilization code with those of several other jurisdictions, including: Washington, DC, College Park, MD, Berkley, CA and New Brunswick, NJ.

They also reported on various statistics, including the aforementioned condominium conversion numbers. Other interesting factoids:

• The percentage of renters being charged less than the maximum allowable rate is 48%. This is due to a number of factors. Some landlords want to keep good tenants, so they keep the rent down. Other landlords don't want to upgrade their properties and the low rent is what the market will bear for lower-standard units. Some tenants organizations have negotiated rent increase agreements with their landlords.

• The discrepancy in rents paid for comparable units in the same building is $78. In non-rent-controlled Silver Spring the discrepancy is $16.

• In 40% of rent-controlled units one or more utilities are covered in the rent.

• Building insurance rates have increased 40% over the last 4 years, driving up operating costs for landlords. They cited one landlord whose insurance cost in 2000 was $3,400 with a $500 deductible, but is now $9000 with a $5000 deductible.

• Utility costs are up over 100% as well.

The staff said it was difficult to get consistent information from landlords about their expenses, but they had an anecdote about one landlord who had re-mortgaged at a variable interest rate and was losing $20,000 annually. Furthermore they said this landlord's budget was "scary" as it held no provision for management or maintenance other than plumbing services.

They also noted that many new landlords buy city rental properties without knowing they are rent-controlled! This led to proposals that the city find a way to alert potential buyers of this important fact.

The trash collector is spying on you!

This was revealed at the Feb. 1 city council meeting. Marc Elrich, frugal as always, suggested that a cost-efficient way to find housing code violations would be ask the city police and refuse collectors to keep an eye out as they went about their regular tasks. City Manager Barbara Matthews answered, “That is already occurring,” saying they are currently expected to keep an eye out for things.

So, if the recycling truck guys take an inordinate interest in that junker you’ve got sitting in your front yard, you may be in for a visit from city code enforcement, Readers!

Speaking of the city manager, allow Gilbert to speculate, based merely on what he’s seen in this year’s council meetings. Ms Matthews is faultlessly polite, considerate, professional, and diplomatic. Though she is top staff member she nevertheless works for the exalted elected ones she shares the council podium with. The mayor and council give her orders, and she enacts those orders herself or via the staff.

There is, understandably, a certain formality between the city administrator and the council. Ms Matthew has not, at least not while I’ve been observing, said “God, what a STUPID idea!” to a council member. In other words, it is not easy to tell what she thinks of the directives she is handed during council session.

So, I’m going out on a purely speculative, possibly imaginary limb when I say that I suspect that our city manager goes home and pours herself a stiff one every Monday night after council meeting. If she’s not a drinking woman, she may choose to stand in the middle of her living room and scream “THOSE IDIOTS!”. Instead, she may wait until Tuesday morning, walk into the city office and yell to the commiserating staff, “Guess what they want us to do NOW?”

Here’s the evidence I have to support this theory. Every council meeting the mayor or some other council member directs the city administrator to do this and that - get some names for a citizens committee, look into such and such, find certain facts, and so forth - and it seems that often the response is to diplomatically remind the elected officials that “staff resources” are limited.

For example, a number of council members, notably Terry Seamens, frequently state that they would prefer the city to be proactive rather than reactive to development issues. They would like the city to be prepared with a plan for potential development sites - over and above the Master Plan. Each time this comes up, however Ms Matthews reminds the council that there are only 2.5 development staff members and they are already over loaded.

I can’t help thinking that the staff, fed up with this sort of thing, decided to drive the point home with a sledge hammer, actually a thick pad’s-worth of newsprint pages, writ heavy with lists. Someone will probably point out that the planning session had long been scheduled and rubbing the councils' faces in the facts was never a motive. Sorry, but my theory makes a better story.

At the council’s Feb. 1 meeting the city manager presented the staff’s two-year Priorities and Management Plan.

She took the list of all the issues that the council has been discussing in session and in e-mails, picked out the ones that were areas of consensus, and with these she made a list of new directions or change-of-directions, and what it would take over the next two years to enact them. These lists did not include ongoing priority items.

Ms Matthews said her intent was to show the council “how your staff will be spending their time over the next 2 years.” She stressed that each priority represented staff resources and sometimes an additional budgetary commitment (for more staff), and that additional priorities can’t be taken up without revising the list because the existing staff can only do so much.

In other words, “Don’t bring home any more pet projects, we can’t afford to feed them”

Matthews and the staff put up lists of priorities under such headings as “Affordable Housing,” “Community Center,” “Development,” “Development of the New Hampshire Corridor,” “Tax Duplication,” and “Other Priorities.”

The lists on newsprint sheets, which were taped to the wall, showed the progression of each priority under that heading in 6- month increments over the next 2 years.

Just a few of the priorities tracked in this manner included, under Affordable Housing, tracking condominium conversion and crafting legislation limiting such conversions.

The Community Center list included a cost estimate for a gym and related needs, finding a funding source for building and staffing the gym.

Development included: educating the public about the Master Plan, identifying and prioritizing development projects, continuing to press for moderate development of the Metro site, and forming committees to monitor the Washington Adventist Hospital site.

Included in the Development of the New Hampshire Corridor list were: conducting public workshops, lobbying for funds and improvements, and initiate development of a local business association.

Under Tax Duplication were listed: monitoring the county budget process, discussing the issue with candidates for county executive, and continue discussing the possible transfer of CID and police communications with the county.

The list of Other Priorities, some of them added by council members included: environment, public safety, codify standards re non english language city publications, pedestrian safety, traffic flow in Takoma Junction, sidewalks around schools, parking at the community center and Old Town, a skate park, safety near Metro, and youth development - assessing recreational needs and giving support to youth civic groups.

Indicating the wall of lists, Ms. Matthews said her intent was to visually show the sheer volume of work associated with some of these initiatives. This, she cautioned, may limit other areas, especially other ideas that might come up “around the table” at council meetings.