September 2007 Archives

Takoma Park progressive Democrat activist/citizen Keith Berner is whipping up a letter-writing campaign, urging people to contact first term county councilmember Valerie Ervin - whom Your Gilbert tagged “Astroturf Val” in last fall’s elections - and ask her to vote against the controversial ICC, the Inter County Connector highway.

Your Gilbert will be sending Keith a “I FAILED TO HEED GILBERT!” t-shirt of shame. Mr. Berner endorsed Ms Erwin in his 2006 voters guide, choosing her over an obviously more progressive candidate, Hans Reimer.

The Takoma Park city council voted themselves a raise last Monday night (Sept. 24, 2007). They had the sense to round off the mysteriously uneven amounts ($9,982.50 for councilmembers, and $13,310 for the mayor) to $10,000 for the councilmembers and #13,000 for the mayor. The salaries rise to that amount over the the next three years. Citizens Rino Aldrighetti and Tom Gagliardo spoke against the raises. They said in the light of budget overruns in the building of the community center, the raises appear unseemly and would likely be criticized in the upcoming elections.

The council defended the raises on the grounds that, though the salaries do not entirely compensate for the time spent on city business, they help with associated costs such as child-care. They pointed out that thought the current members are all well-paid enough in their other jobs to enable them to serve on the council, a larger salary might encourage people to run for office who could not previously afford to.

If that's the case, such people have a week to announce their candidacy. The city's Nominating Caucus, the special public meeting in which candidates for council and mayor are announced, was set for Tuesday, October 2 at 7:30 pm. The order of nominations will be: mayor, ward 1, ward 5, ward 6, ward 3, ward 1, and ward 4. The order of the ward nominations is determined by lottery.

To be nominated, Dear Reader, you must be qualified to vote for the seat you wish to run for. So, if you are a qualified Takoma Park voter, you may run for mayor (please! So far there is only one candidate!). If you are qualified to vote in a particular council seat election, you may run for that seat, yourself (and two will be open t his election).

You will also need at minimum one other person, because the nominating process takes two: one to nominate, another to second the nomination. Usually, a candidate brings a pile of influential or symbolic supporters to do all the nominating, seconding, and long boring statements in support of the candidate. But, it HAS been known to happen that a candidate nominates him or herself, and one other person seconds it. These are not usually the winning candidates.

The fun starts at 7:30pm Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2007 in the city council chambers - or "auditorium" as some prefer to call it these days in anticipation of the possible renovations that would turn that space into a part-time Birchmere concert hall.

Following dozens of citizen comments urging the council to do so, council passed a strongly (that's what it says in the title) worded resolution against the insidious Metro site development, "Resolution Strongly Urging the WMATA Board to Disapprove the Proposed Amendment of the Mass Transit Plan Regarding the Takoma Metro Station So As to Preserve Full and Continued Access to the Station Facilities for Transit Users"

Despite local opposition WMATA staff recommended in a report to proceed with the land sale that would precipitate the development. The WAMTA Planning, Development and Real Estate Committee is set to approve that report on October 11. The WMATA Board could take action on the sale as soon as October 25.

Play the "JAWS" music!

He used to be Your Gilbert’s White Knight, but he’s looking, not tarnished, but a bit too shiny these days. Doug Barry, councilmember for Ward 6, has long been one of the more sensible voices on the council and blessedly the most short winded speaker.

However, in the last few months the White Knight has been crusading for what Gilbert considers a dubious cause At the beginning of each council meetings he has conducted a series of “quizzes” aimed at highlighting code violations that the city is starting to crack down on.

The violators? You, Dear Reader, and your neighbors.

Your house and property are being watched, and if they aren’t looking properly tony, you might find one of the new “courtesy notices” hanging from your front doorknob, That is the job of at least one of our city inspectors, and if the housing code violations checked off on the “courtesy notice” are not fixed, he will follow up with a citation.

The violations are for such things as: high grass, weeds, brush, trash, debris or litter on grounds, trash container lids missing or poorly fitted, excessive storage on unenclosed porch or deck, damaged, or missing fencing, flaking or peeling exterior paint, missing or damaged gutters or down spouts, and cracked, broken, or missing window glass.

Your Gilbert remembers when this city used to be affectionately called “Tacky Park,” in honor of it’s tacky, un-gentrified inner-suburbanscape: asbestos siding, chain-link fences, scruffy lawns, “beater” cars, and a population of mixed class, economics, ethnicity, and religion.

Due to raising property values, the economic and class mix has been changing. The working class folks, and middle class teachers, artisans, low-level government and nonprofit organization staffers, and the other lower-to middle-income people who used to settle here can no longer afford it!

And who are the new people, those who can now afford to buy here? Judging from the way things are going, Your Gilbert suspects they are more concerned with property values than community values, at least the sort of community values that Takoma Park has been known for.

Is this why we’re seeing this new push to abolish tackiness? Is the city council sympathetic to this point of view? Is this why they are installing fancy Chevy-Chase-type city signage at the city’s entrances and in the neighborhoods? Are they so eager to raise the property values in order to attract even more people with fat wallets and twisted values?

If so, it is a contradiction. Even as they pass rent control laws to protect low-income tenants, and even as they decry the conversion of low-income apartment buildings to yuppified condominiums, even as they postulate that the city should have an affordable housing program for homeowners, and even as they worry that current home prices and mortgage payments would be beyond the reach of most of their current owners, they harass low income, working-class, fixed-income elderly homeowners, and long-term residents (you KNOW that’s who will be most effected here), and poke their prim noses into our personal business and our private homes.

So, COULD there be an affordable housing program for home buyers? Could the city tie the profit from home sales to the cost of living index figured from the date of the last purchase) as it did for rent increase rates? Could it deny profits to home buying speculators who sell within a year or two of purchase?

Probably not, but Your Gilbert challenges the city council and mayor - and the candidates for those offices in upcoming elections - to stop harassing the people they claim to value, and to stop wringing their hands and DO something to preserve the tacky, neighborly, affordable community that we (we who do not prize property values above all else) love!

Terry Seamens follows his principles, even when they lead him onto a limb, even when the limb is dead, even when the rest of the city council is trying to saw that limb off.

They were sawing like crazy when councilmember Seamens tried to bring up objections to naming the renovated, multi-use municipal building the “Takoma Park Community Center Sam Abbott Citizens Center” during a discussion of new signage for it. The name, he said, was a mouthful, cumbersome, and is frequently and differently truncated by staff and the public, causing confusion. The “Sam Abbott Citizens Center” part is usually left out, an insult, he said, to former mayor and activist Sam Abbott for whom the old Municipal Building was named a decade or so ago.

The council, mayor, and staff clearly did not want to deal with this issue, talking over one another in their haste to point out that the name had been officially discussed and established last year. Seamens said he was aware of that, but he continues to feel that the name is a problem.

Your Gilbert railed against this long, redundant, awkward name back in January, 2006 to no avail.

As we wrote back then on Jan. 23, 2006 the city council “approved of ‘Takoma Park Community Center Sam Abbott Citizens Center’ as the official name of the commingled building, though they granted that the staff may refer to it as the ‘Takoma Park Community Center’ for short.”

Bruce Williams, so far the only candidate for city mayor in the upcoming election, dismissed Seamens' concerns by breezily saying he personally refers to the building only as “city hall.”

Your Gilbert wrinkles his face in chagrin - not an attractive sight. If the politicians and staff routinely shorten the name, or use a different name because the official name is too unwieldly, why give it the unwieldly name in the first place? We can think of colorful scatological metaphors for the situation, but we'll spare our more delicate Dear Readers. This time.

Seamens found himself on another limb during the second signage discussion that evening. These signs were the Gateway and identification signs the city will be placing around the city. Seamens objected strenuously to the cost to the taxpayers (around $1000 a sign) and to what he called the change in objective. The original intent of the signs, he said, was to direct traffic to local businesses, but that aspect has nearly disappeared. Some signs indicate the city entrances, others identify the city and neighborhood, and some mark the historical district. There are also a few sidewalk kiosks for pedestrians that provide information such as directions to local businesses.

This did not satisfy Seamens expectation of what the signs were meant to do, and he opined that city merchants will be disappointed in the results.

Judging by the starry-eyed comments they made, the whole Takoma Park council favors turning the city council chambers into a hipster hangout. Of the three proposed plans reviewed at their Sept. 10th meeting, they liked "Plan C" ("C" for "Culture?") - the priciest one with an estimated cost of $1,508,639 (not including "soft cost costs such as bonds, financing, construction management, tests and inspections, architecture/engineering fees, or cost escalation beyond July 2008").

The idea is to make use of the chambers, for a rental fee, when it is not in use as a chambers. It would make a nice performance space for community theater or musical acts - except for the fact that it has lousy acoustics, a constantly humming monster HVAC system, no backstage, no stage right or left, no curtain, terrible sight lines, not enough seating, oh and that hideous council desk that is permanently installed smack-dab in the middle of the stage. So, if all that could be changed - why, you can sing, and we can dance, let's put on a show!

Your Gilbert urges the the council to replace the hideous desk with a Mighty Wurlizter organ that rises up out of the dais along with the mayor and council members wearing black capes with purple satin linings and white Goth makeup. With suitable lighting and smoke effects. Yes, we like that image.

There will be no curtain, by the way. That would involve adding a "fly" above the stage, meaning that they'd have to raise the roof above it, at which mention Mayor Porter reached for her axe. Also, adding a fly and a curtain would define it in county code as a "stage" (whereas now it is defined as a "platform"), triggering a different set of code requirements and expenses.

Your Gilbert is horribly concerned about the renovations to the audience seat rows. The plan to have two aisles instead of one up the middle is ok, but the plan to expand the rows to the walls is not! As councilmember Barry observed, this takes away citizens' ability to slip in and out of meetings unobtrusively. The side aisle is used by people exiting after their agenda item has come up, or entering just before. It is used by people who need to usher their children away (they just don't have the patience required for the city council), and it is used by activists, reporters, politicians, and conspirers who slide out to the lobby to buttonhole one another. How many times has Your Gilbert observed the side aisle used in this way? Countless times, Dear Readers, countless! Don't take away our Aisle!

The council is always saying it wants to do things in an efficient, time-conserving manner, yet they gum up the works with their own shenanigans. We refer to their frequent and repetitive "thank yous" and praise that each individual councilmember feels he or she should lavish on any citizen, committee, staff person, visitor, or passerby that wanders into their line of sight. Once is enough. Let the first councilmember thank and praise the glassy-eyed victim on behalf of all of them and get on with the business at hand. Or each one could say "Standard thank you and praise" adding "Plus 1" or "Plus 2" to whatever degree is warranted up to "Plus 10". It would save so much time, get all of us to bed earlier, and keep your Gilbert from throwing empty gin bottles at the television.

The council voted themselves a raise. They did not vote for the Compensation Committee's recommended raise, however. The committee's proposed raise was higher, doubling their current salaries. They were urged not to vote for it by former city mayor Ed Sharp - looking tanned, rested and ready (and the mayoral race is wide open, hmmm).

Sharp lambasted the committee for not showing how it arrived at its figures, and for not following the standards established by city code for calculating council raises. He urged the council not to take the committee recommendation, saying it would look bad. There were a lot of figures flung around and numbers are not Your Gilbert's strong point, but we understand that - should the resolution pass on the next reading - the mayor will earn just over $13,000, and the councilmembers just under $10,000. It will increase in steps, we understand, over the next four years.

The series of votes on this matter were a bit confusing. We understand that what happened is this: first the council voted down the higher salary proposal 3-4. Then they voted on the lower salary proposal, but that too was defeated 3-4! Why? Because Councilmember Reuben Snipper wanted an even lower salary rate. In the confusion, councilmember Williams went over to Snipper, pointed out that they were likely to be there all night at this rate, asked him to reconsider, and suggested he call a "motion to reconsider" his vote. The rarely used or known "motion to reconsider" allows a person on the winning side of a vote (as Snipper had been) to change his vote. The Mayor recognised his motion, explained to everyone this arcane point of Roberts Rules, and the vote was changed in favor of the lower salary resolution.

In the wake of criticism the council voted to support keeping the Piney Branch Elementary School pool open. Apparently a group of children addressed the council last week asking for this and the perception was that the council blew them off. This resolution was meant to correct that perception.

Your Gilbert would love to fill you in on the last city council meeting, but to our annoyance we find that somebody somewhere on the city website or with the video feed provider has "updated" their technology. Instead of being able to view the city council meetings online, we get a box containing the following message, "Get Microsoft Silverlight."

We click, as instructed, and are informed that the necessary update is available only to persons with the latest, greatest operating system. This class of person does not include Your Gilbert.

We are using Macintosh computers with operating system X 3 and have changed nothing in the last month that would cause this. The "Get Microsolft Silverlight" box popping up instead of the video stream is a new phenomenon. It definately says it requires Macintosh operating system X 4.8. So we conclude the changes are at the other end.

A news release (below) on Silverlight's site touts it as a wonderful cross-platform tool. Note that the release date was Sept. 5. Up until this week we had few troubles accessing the pre-Silverlight version on our Macs. Our Mac version of Windows Media Player has been perfectly adequate. The cross-platform hpye is just that as far as Macs are concerned . Each new operating system for Macs has been increasingly accomodating to PC software, so this is not a case of Microsoft making Silverlight more Mac-friendly, they just waited for Mac to be more PC-friendly.

The system requirements http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/system-requirements.aspx are for Mac operating system 4.8. Not many Mac users will have this one. In fact, a quick survy of the Mac site and the Macconnections computer store show that the most recent operating system for home use sale is 4.6! (cost $125). A commercial OS X 4.7 version is available for $500. Microsoft/Silverlight has apparently built a "cross platform" tool for use with a future Mac platform. Meanwhile most Mac users are locked out.

We don't consider that an "improvement", do you?"