v1.0 My Platform and Positions

Every candidate needs to make it easy for the voters to understand what the candidate stands for, and I should not try to be an exception. So, short and sweet as possible:

Prosperity through Austerity.

Efficiency is good, and a laudable goal all by itself. Let's do what we can to improve process, speed workflow, simplify where possible, and in all possible places let's consolidate functions. Where positions partially overlap and duplicate effort, or where functions are divided across positions or agencies which could be better centralized and thus be more efficient, let's consolidate. We'll save money and need less taxation.

Refinement is Better than Growth.

Montgomery's population is actually declining slightly, according to the Census. Do we need more roads to enable more development, when people are moving out more than they're moving into Montgomery? I say we need to fix the chokepoints and deal with bottlenecks instead. Let's improve the "walkability" of our communities. Let's also look into more interconnectivity of our communities, especially in terms of adding light-traffic bridges across small streams. Why should someone have to drive three miles out of their way to get to a shopping center that's just a stone's throw away on the other side of a brook?

Efficiency in the County Vehicle Fleet

Small Is Good: Does a social worker making their rounds really need a small police car to go check on someone's housing situation or to deliver some emergency aid? I propose that as current vehicle leases expire, unless there's a real and recurrent need to drive large inefficient vehicles such as snow-rescue jeeps, we should lease small efficient cars such as the "Smart" or "Yaris". We don't want anything but the finest high-powered gas-guzzlers for our police interceptors, but if the meter-maid (or meter-man, let's not be sexist) actually needs 800 horsepower for stop-and-go writing tickets in downtown Wheaton, that comes as news to me.

Size-to-Fit Is Good: Are you as mad as I am about seeing a giant diesel Ride-On bus go past your house twice an hour with only two passengers for most of the day, and at rush hour it's packed full beyond standing-room-only? Short periods of loads beyond capacity can't rightly justify the expense of running for the rest of the time at far undercapacity. Let's save fuel by running minivans during the off-peak hours, and assign the bigger busses to the peak service hours and routes.

Just-In-Time Is Good: Got a mid-afternoon ballgame across town, and too many people to take the Ride-On? See "size-to-fit", above. Enough people making a scheduling request a day in advance on a helpful county website could schedule a Ride-On for you, that otherwise would be parked for the off-peak hours. Otherwise, you'll have a hard time fitting all of you into the off-peak minivans cruising the route.

Save Save Save!

Lighting: Does the County office have a nice southern exposure with all-day sunlight? Even as efficient as florescent lights may be, LEDs are even more efficient and rather powerful ones are coming down in price. Would your eyes, and the county budget, be served as well (or better) by having LED lights aimed right at your work from a mount on your desk, as they would be by an overhead bank of flickering humming florescent lights?

Commuting: Some jobs need people to be on-site, and some don't as much. Telecommuting can be very secure and powerful in the modern day.

Software Costs:

Software costs at the average county employee workstation can be almost completely eliminated in probably almost all cases. For people who are used to Windows(tm) machines, the change-over to modern Linux is almost seamless and it's still all point-and-click. Leave the supposed complexities to the technicians, and just go on working. For the average employee who is using their workstation or laptop mostly to access centralized online facilities such as databases or forms, they will notice almost no difference other than improved reliability and speed. For those who already use OpenOffice as a cost-saving substitute for Microsoft(tm) Office(tm), you probably won't notice any real difference at all.

Mac Users will be in the position of being able to teach their formerly-Windows(tm) coworkers. Mac OSX is already a UNIX-like operating system with a nice point-and-click interface, and as any Mac OSX user can tell any Windows(tm) user, "Mac just works". Both OSX and Linux come with compilers and built-in compatibility with all of the sharing and networking features used by Windows(tm). With these compilers, you can build and use literally tens of thousands of software packages from webservers to databases to scientific statistical math packages to CAD to... well, there's a lot of free source code out there, a lot of it written by or for the US government and already paid for with your tax dollar.

School Software Costs can be drastically reduced. School budgets growing? Need to teach the kids how to be ready for the business world? Everything from OpenOffice through industry-standard mail and web applications all run on Linux, or on Mac OSX, for that matter. Most are cost free, and the Linux operating system is entirely cost free, other than staff time for the initial configuration. That's not all that complex, and that would make an ideal short course for students aspiring to a career in information technology.

Well, that does it for part one of my platform, version 1.0.