North Gate Park Volunteer Activity

We've been working for about six years to clean up and improve North Gate Park, and take it back from the neglect and abuse it had suffered over the years.



From left to right, this is myself and three neighborhood activists. I forgot to ask if they minded me publishing their names, so they're not named. If you're a neighborhood activist, a commercial property manager, or community-services police officer in the Aspen Hill area (King Sector, Fourth District), you already know who they are.

We are discussing our plans for yet-another volunteer clean-and-trim session.

Here's the playground the Parks people were nice enough to add after we (and others) at the Mid-County Neighborhood Initiative Community Policing Workgroup agitated. It's pretty nice, and it has no graffiti! We have to pause and thank all of the neighbors to the park, and also Kathy Paunil from the Graffiti Abatement Partners. Thanks to other volunteers, including myself -- we all come out and tackle things as a fairly large team effort -- when the summer leaves come out, you'll still be able to see all through the woods around the playground's immediate area; we trimmed everything so that nothing could use the cover of leaves to sneak up on unsuspecting parents or children.



The last time we had a huge group of volunteers come out from Marriott Corporation, they did a fantastic job of cleaning out scrub, low-hanging branches, etc. Here's a look at a part of that, even a year later, it looks great.



This is to give you an example of how we have been leveraging volunteer activity with community activism that works where it lives, identifying problems that can legitimately be dealt with by a wide variety of low-cost/no-cost approaches.

See this weed-clogged tree, below?



Once we remove the invasive vines, you'll be able to see from one side of the park to the other. Behind the screening vines is the playground. If you were a parent, you could feel comfortable walking around the park and getting some exercise, and still keep an eye on your kids in the playground.

Do you have any suggestions on how to improve this park? Do you want to improve the park in your own neighborhood? We're happy to share lessons learned, and to put you in touch with all of the same people we've been so please to work with over the years to get such constant improvements.

Due to budgetary restrictions, we have always worked the low-cost/no-cost angle as much as possible. You'd be surprised at how much you can do, if only you are patient and never stop working at it. It can take a decade, and very little cash investment, to produce completely satisfactory results. We are six years into this, and expect it to be a showcase in four more years. After that, rather small amounts of completely constant and consistent maintenance will keep everything in good order, a place for kids of all ages, with a soccer field and basketball court for teens and young adults, walking for the older adults and elders, and a lot of natural native Maryland vegetation and a recovering ecosystem to help bring a touch of nature into an aging core suburb.

Neighborhood Initiatives, Citizen Activists, Government Assistance

This is Ms Barbara Latta, one of my fellow neighborhood activists from the Aspen Hill neighborhood. She lived for a long time in the Fairways Community, where there has been an ongoing set of problems, problems she has worked to resolve for many long years. I feel privileged to be working with her for the betterment of the community.

In the image above, she's addressing a little get-together back in 2006, when then-governor Bob Ehrlich was rolling out the new and improved SOCEM program which tracks convicted sexual offenders. Ms Latta's presentation was, among other things, thanking the Governor for the many contributions to the so-called "Mid-County Neighborhood Initiative/CSAFE" program.

"CSAFE" originated under the auspices of former Lt Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend as the "Hot Spots" program. They identified areas which had not merely high levels of street crime, but also high levels of such crimes as spouse abuse, school truancies, and a high dropout rate from school. The idea was, if you can apply a wide range of programs from increased funding for law-enforcement -- especially "community based policing" -- along with gang-prevention and drug-prevention efforts in the schools and youth community, with a focus on prevention rather than dealing with existing problems, several years down the road you would see disproportional improvements in community well-being and crime reduction as well.

Under Governor Ehrlich, the focus shifted more to law-enforcement, hiring and training more officers, but particularly the Governor's Office of Crime Control and Prevention dedicated extra funding to "collaborative supervision and focused enforcement" ("CSAFE") to prevent recidivism, funding overtime hours for parole and probation officers, especially tasked with supervision of at-rick offenders. Under Governor O'Malley, and faced with immense budgetary shortfalls, we are bit unsure about how the program may be funded in the future.

We in Aspen Hill and the surrounding communities benefited not only from this program, but from comparable funding from Montgomery County's programs for Children, Youth and Families. All of this was coordinated through the "Collaboration Council", an unfortunately named organization which coordinates grants from State and County to make sure there's no "double-dipping" or failure to fund needed programs. I have to extend my compliments to, among others, Rob Musser and Gabi Liquorie for their exceptional efforts, deep diligence, and year-after-year perseverance in getting us ongoing, if scant, funding.

The fact is, all of the above combined with a concerted effort of what you might call "in-kind contributions of good-will". Someone somewhere gave us the green-light, and MNCPPC worked with us. Parks Police worked with us. Recreation sort of worked with us. The County Schools provided meeting space, and we try to promote their after-school and summertime programs. Graffiti Abatement Partners (GRAB) works with us. Lots more people including too many very decent and concerned citizens work with us and above and beyond it all, we work with them, we work with each other.

We cleaned up -- and will continue to clean up -- North Gate Park. We got them a new basketball court, and volunteers from the Pre-Release Center, various students looking for community-service hours, exceptionally hard working and kind volunteers from Marriott Corporation, and many others as well, have contributed a great many hours to clean up trash and clear out underbrush. People now use the soccer field, and mothers feel safe enough to bring their tiny babies and toddlers to use the new playground equipment. But we CAN do better... and we SHALL do better.

Communities coming together to combat their common problems can indeed engage local government to work with and work for each other, singly and as groups.

We've been doing it for years. And we'll keep doing it.



This is part of what your Community Services programs of the Montgomery County Department of Police are doing, along with a lot of other agencies.

This is a worthy project that leverages minimal cash investment -- all 12 Community Services Division units altogether cost a mere $675,000 for the year, and that includes much much more than just helping provide safety at one local park and the immediate surrounding neighborhood.

Community Services, as an evolving outreach program that quickly adapts to bring the community and the local-government agencies together to speedily solve problems, is something that (if elected) I would not cut.

It has benefited me, it has benefited Aspen Hill, it's probably benefiting your community.

Please support it!

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You might also want to take a look at the AspenHillNet archive of Mid-County Neighborhood Initiative/CSAFE activities and publications.

Legal Immigrants: Backbone of Economy?

I'll be back as soon as I have done some research.

I think that there's a case to be made that Legal Immigrants -- those who become citizens, those who only ever become Permanent Resident Aliens, and various work-visa and researcher-visa types -- are the Backbone of Montgomery's Economy.

As soon as I find the supporting statistics, I'll post them.

I know for a fact that there are a lot of persons of foreign origin who are doctors and scientists, not to mention information technology workers.

Illegal Aliens? I Don't Support Them.

My name is Thomas Hardman, and I ran in the last elections for MD District 19 Delegate. I lost. A major part of my platform was "no driver's licenses for illegal aliens". I am running again, this time for Montgomery County Council District 4's seat, vacated by the recent untimely demise of Marilyn Praisner, a lifelong and dedicated civil servant who was the longest-serving council member ever.

There's a lot of competition for her seat, but I believe that I am the only person who will come right out and say "I will not vote a cent for CASA of Maryland".

I have been traveling to Annapolis to testify on this and related issues since 2002. The attacks of September 11 2001 made it absolutely clear that documentation security is an essential prerequisite of national security. Yet Maryland continues to give driver's permits and state ID to persons who are illegally present in the US. Furthermore, the county policies in places like Montgomery blatantly put out the welcome mat for illegal aliens, and embolden the unscrupulous employers who intentionally pass over legitimate potential employees so that they can pad their own pockets with ill-gotten gains while foisting the social costs of onto the taxpayer and society.

I live in Aspen Hill. I have attended a variety of CEO "Ike" Leggett's Town Hall Meetings and have asked him directly about these day-laborer centers, especially after he slapped one into place in Gaithersburg under slipshod and questionable process which skirted the law.

When we questioned him about what he would do about the crowd of a hundred or so day-laborers pestering people in the parking lot of Aspen Hill's Home Depot, he said (I paraphrase) "that's the best argument for CASA's centers, it provides orderliness and regularity". But it took a full year, and repeated complaints from both Home Depot and their customers -- victims of aggressive panhandling etc -- before Mr Leggett evidently comprehended his own words enough to order the County's finest to start acceding to public (and Home Depot's) opinion and enforcing the law against criminal violations by day-laborers such as public urination and public intoxication, aggressive panhandling, and criminal trespass on Home Depot's property.

In the course of this sustained police action -- for which I have agitated many years in the course of my involvement in the civic and community affairs of Aspen Hill -- actual progress has been made. The crowd of a hundred morning meanderers has at last been dispersed.

Part of the progress is that the police themselves have come to understand the nature of the problem.

I have been informed off of the record that when the police started checking the credentials of various persons driving vehicles seeking to pick up day-laborers, a very significant percentage of those drivers did not have valid permits. I was not informed about the percentage of such persons whose names were run against the NCIC wants-and-warrants database and came out positive as fugitives, but I also suspect that it was also high.

At long last, from having to deal with this as a syndrome, rather than dealing with it as individual criminal violations scattered across their districts, the police seem to have actually understood the problem. At Home Depot, at least, over the course of 18 months, they watched an actual invasion, one that took over the parking lots of a 7-11 and then a Home Depot across the street from the 7-11.

This is already a dangerous intersection and traffic is restricted from turning, and often in the morning you would see a line of police officers ticketing people who had made illegal turns to enter the parking lot to pick up "day laborers" who were likely illegal aliens. And so the police officers were there to watch the numbers grow and grow and grow, because the word had gone out that the police would do nothing because their orders from the top down were to do nothing to interfere with the day-laborers, so long as they didn't personally witness gross violations of non-immigration law.

Here are photos from the very early days of "the migration":





Astute observers and quick wits will note that my long involvement with and interest in this area included agitating for that fence and keeping it clear. Illegal aliens, thanks to my efforts and those of PEPCO and some elements of the County, will not be sleeping in those woods. Mostly I think they rent rooms in the houses nearby... in my neighborhood.

One officer mentioned ("off the record") that one illegal said "run us off, we will just rob people". And there is a robbery problem here in Aspen Hill. It was here before the gathering at Home Depot and perhaps it will remain. Worrisomely, last summer there was a string of muggings in the area, which weren't widely publicized. Yet in a mere 25 days there were some 70 robberies, mostly of Latin-American men believed to have just cashed checks. This was the so-called "amigo shopping" string of robberies. I do not in any way support violence against anyone, and think that there are much better ways to deal with the fact that for every foreign "day laborer", there's a poor black local citizen who won't be getting that work. Unemployment is practically pandemic in certain local sub-communities and that both contributes to temptations to crime and violence, and outrages me... and many others, as well.

If Elected, I will always vote for order, against crime, and will have only the bare humanitarian tolerance of illegal aliens, and will vigorously oppose those who profit from them.

Gangs In Schools Survey

While researching local issues, I followed a link to the National Gang Crime Research Center's Gangs and Schools Survey (2006).

This was an eye opener. It's a pretty broad survey covering 46 of 50 states, one of which is Maryland.


-- Two-fifths of schools report gang fights near schools.
-- Two-fifths of schools expect an increase in gang problems.
-- One third of schools report gang recruiting near schools.
-- One fourth of schools report a gang shooting near school.
-- One fourth of schools report a drug-related shooting near school.
-- One fourth of schools report "white racist" "extremist" organizations are active near school.
-- One half of all schools report gang graffiti near schools, and this graffiti isn't going away.
-- Three fourths of schools want a gang prevention program.

The finding that worries me the most?

-- Gang disturbances are more common in public schools than they are in state prisons.

The question asked in the survey that seems to me to be most openly weird?

"[H]ave there been any reports of occult-type activities among students in your school during the last year (e.g., dabbling in satanism, witchcraft, odinism, etc)"

You might as well ask "have there been any reports of religious recruitement activities among students in your school during the last year". Or, "have you identified the unbelievers and heretics".

Just say "no" to gangs, just say "no" to racial extremism and hatred, and also just say "no" to intolerance of religion.

Environmental Policy?

I like the environment. It provides me with air to breathe, and food to eat, and it used to provide me with drug-free drinking water, but recent tests by the Associated Press found that most major cities have trace amounts of drugs in their water supplies.

I don't just like to drink water, I like to fish for trout in healthy small streams. Let's for the moment not digress into the matter of whether or not the trout have all been eaten by Invasive Snakehead Fish. Let's talk about the sort of streams that trout need.

Trout need scrupulously clean streams that run at a constant cool temperature. Clearly, hot summer parking lots collecting and then discharging into streams, without stormwater catchbasins suitable to fully cool the water isn't going to promote trout. Therefor, I promote starting a long slow process of retrofitting all of our stormwater drain systems with cooldown facilities, at a rate that won't bankrupt the taxpayers. Let's also think about getting most of this done with volunteer labor, or ideally with student community-service hours. Also, we want to promote Riparian Forest Buffers to help our streams be good for trout.

I have some other thoughts on the environment, and also on the future in general -- dealing with issues such as over-harvesting the oceans, global warming, and overpopulation --
located on another site. It's something I wrote a few years ago for a college course.

In general, my ideas about the environment are "let's not Pave the Bay", and in fact, let's be pretty aggressive with anyone who wants to Pave the Bay. The State of Maryland and Montgomery County already have excellent environmental policies, let's keep what works and refine what needs refinement.

Let's tend to our smallest streams and our largest rivers may take care of themselves. Let's increase the county's promotion of "green" lifestyles, and let us carve into stone a responsible population growth policy.

I'm Not Just Blogging, Ya Know

I am of course not going to restrict my campaigning to the blogosphere. As much as our well-educated Montgomery voters are likely to use the InterNet to research their candidates, they're not likely to be impressed by a mere blog.

Thus, I am starting to also work the website of the Washington Post, specifically the "comments" section. Seriously, go to the Post website, pick an article about Montgomery in particular, Maryland in general as it affects Montgomery, and anything in general that affects Montgomery. Everything from the mortgage mess to the financial meltdown to our overly permeable borders, and I am all over it like a swarm of flies on fresh fertilizer. There you can see the flow of dialog and the give and take, and quite frankly, you will see that I'm good at it. That's a quality that will be needed when, if elected, I am seated on the County Council.

I suppose I will also be doing the Examiner as well. What, that rag? Give the free Press some respect, okay? It's widely read locally, and a lot of local activists read it and also post on the website. At least one other candidate for Council and myself will be likely debating there, or maybe just sniping at each other's positions.

C'mon! This is one of the best ways to get not just campaign speeches and stump messages from the candidates, this is where you interact with the candidates, albeit online.

See you all in the papers!

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.

First Candidate's Forum -- Yay. This was Productive as Well as Instructive

We had all of the candidates for Montgomery County Council, District 4, all under one roof and in front of the microphones for perhaps 75 or so people. The meeting was sponsored by the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc,. as well as the Republican Club of Leisure World, Men's Republican Club, Young Democrats, etc. As this meeting was held in the downstairs meeting room of the Aspen Hill Library, the room was pretty well packed with standing room only.

The various candidates held forth on their views, and I must admit that despite most of the people having rather different focuses and coming from different places, everyone had at least one or two points with which I could agree. Not too many had any points with which I totally disagreed, and I don't think that too many could have had significant disagreements with my own points. Of course, convincing the other candidates to vote for you isn't the real point. You have to convince the voters that it is you who will best represent them, and that it is you -- and not the other candidates -- who will have not only the best intentions but the greatest capacity to deliver the goods. In the case of Montgomery voters, "the goods" consists of a dizzying array of taxpayer funded programs and initiatives. I personally intend to focus mostly on "core competencies" such as delivery of effective public safety (law-enforcement and fire-rescue) and efficient and effective public education.

Aside from Nancy Navarro, a common thread from almost all of the candidates was how to make do with declining tax revenues. My fellow Republicans and myself all took the tack that efficiency was good and that increasing taxes was not good, and even the Democrat candidates -- most of them -- were well aware of the financial crisis unfolding around us, and how that was likely to impact County revenues.

All in all, this was a productive meeting, and informative as we all got a fairly good idea of what were each others' positions on a variety of matters.

Coming as soon as possible, a better summary of what we heard -- if I can manage to sort out my notes and maintain my recollections -- and some links to the websites of my fellow candidates.

It's Official!

This morning, with the able assistance of the fine people at the Twinbrook Parkway Board of Elections, I filed as a candidate for the office of County Council for District 4 of Montgomery County, Maryland.

Let's see how this campaign develops! I'm a long shot, at best, as I am running as a Republican in one of the most Democrat dominated counties in one of the most Democrat-dominated States in the Union. However, I have seen in some sectors a growing dissatisfaction with the way things are going, and I am especially hearing the grumblings in parts of District 4. Most of those grumblings seem to take the tone that "over in Rockville and points west, they just don't care about the east side of the County".

Well, I care, I live here.

I live in Aspen Hill, in a neighborhood zoned as "single family detached residential housing". During my tenure as a board member of the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc., we on the board heard constant complaints about such seemingly minor quality of life issues as excessive traffic, too many cars, parking issues, overcrowded housing, people running businesses out of their houses and parking their fleet of work vehicles on their paved-over yards.

Now, I cannot personally attest to any such happenings that I haven't seen, and in any case, I prefer to take pictures, as they are both worth a thousand words and also not subject to being dismissed as imagination or exaggeration.

click here for more images

Evidence is good, and it's a fact that the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc. -- among many other such groups, no doubt -- have assembled stacks of evidence. (And other County officials didn't want to pay attention to that evidence... but I certainly shall!)

We should mention that for the whole Aspen Hill area, there was only one dedicated traffic issues specialist officer, and at one time in perhaps 2005 or so, if he had written a hundred tickets a day for parking against traffic on the wrong side of the street, he might have been able to ticket violators on only perhaps a dozen streets. There are a lot more than a dozen streets in Aspen Hill, I should add. That officer is working alone at an immense task, when what he needs is a task force to deal with that problem. And once people learn that particular lesson about how to park right, that force can move on to deal with the next problem threatening to overrun and overwhelm the system.

There's a whole litany of comparable complaints. For example, the Code Enforcement agency is very understaffed for the magnitude of the job they face. They're practically overrun, deluged with requests for service, and of course everyone who calls in a complaint is someone who wants crash priority and instant action. Further, a lot of these complaints aren't solely the responsibility of the Code Enforcement people, sometimes you have a situation which calls for representatives of Code Enforcement, Fire and Safety, and the Department of Police, all acting as a coordinated unit. If there is such coordination, I suspect it's overworked and understaffed, and with very limited enforcement or response capacity, the system can be overwhelmed to the point of incapacitation, and eventually this could end up with essential safety and law-enforcement rules and regulations and processes all becoming a sort of joke. Safety is not a joke, folks, and if we are going to have these regulations and rules, we need the means to enforce it. Improving the coordination of these responses will be one of my priorities. Finding a way to fund all of this will be another priority, and perhaps that could be answered through the approach of creating a special court that deals only with Code Enforcement and Fire/Safety regulation compliance, which meets often enough to handle the caseload, and which has the power to impose and collect fines in the most egregious cases.

I look forward to hearing more from potential constituents, to let me know what they think works and works well, and also what they think is broken, breaking, or needs some propping up to prevent breakage, in their County government. I'll try to distill those all down to core issues that I can make my own, with the promise that if elected, I'll be working on those core issues.

That's one of the things I can bring to any position to which I am elected: I am not a rich man, I am not a leading intellectual, I am not the most gifted political player, but I will not forget where I came from, and I will not forget the people such as myself who struggle to keep afloat in the expensive and demanding county of Montgomery. If you live here, you deserve to have your tax dollar work for you no less if you are not rich. I will get onto some issue that concerns you, and I will stick to it until it can be resolved, if that's at all possible within the constraints of budget realities.

People want certain things, like streetlights that work and actually light up the streets, they want to have a level playing field that benefits people who play by the rules, and they don't want to see themselves inconvenienced or even harmed by people who won't play by the rules. I think I can bring a sense of fairness to the office, and a willingness to consider the needs of the regular folks more than I consider the needs of well-connected players to make a fast buck and leave the taxpayers holding a bag of broken promises while the players run down the road to the scene of their next questionable operation. I think that fairness is good, and keeping promises is good, and I don't ever want to get into the position where I have to explain questionable practices or shady deals by resorting to double-speak and ridiculous rationalizations. I will always strive to say what I think, and speak truth as I understand it. If it is my opinion that (as the saying goes) the emperor has no clothes, I will say exactly that.

In the next few days, I will try to familiarize myself with other areas of District 4 outside of Aspen Hill and its near neighbor communities. That's a lot of reading, but I'm a quick study. I'll try to have an opinion in print here in the next few days.