Over the past two years, the Town Commission has made some major mistakes:
Town Manager Hiring
The Commission failed in every regard in its initial attempt to hire a new Town Manager, from their decision (over the objection of Commissioner Greer) to use an online hiring platform (rather than a professional search firm) to identify candidates, to their failure to take even the most basic steps to conduct a background check.
This resulted in public embarrassment to the Town when citizens brought forward easily-obtainable facts about the candidate the Commission had already hired, to say nothing of the hassle and possible expense to terminate the contract of the initial candidate.
Despite that debacle, two Commissioners still dragged their feet on changing course to retain a professional recruiter to identify a new candidate.
The Strand
The Commission, led by the prior Town Manager, pursued and accepted an ill-considered multi-million dollar grant to “rebuild” the Strand and then failed to oversee its construction and approved its completion, and payment of the contractor, even though the project was neither actually finished nor built according to plan.
Public Comment
Last October, two Commissioners hastily adopted needless restrictions on the opportunity for public comment at Commission meetings in violation of the Town Charter.
After pushing the restrictions through – ironically without any opportunity for public comment before the vote – objections were strong enough to force both a work session and then another Commission meeting to discuss the changes, after which the two Commissioners were forced to agree to amendments to the resolution to enable the public to have a genuine opportunity to be heard on important matters before the Commissioners voted on them.
Adding to the irony was that a principal purpose offered for the original resolution (which occupied the better part of two Commission meetings and the entirety of a workshop) was to save time at Commission meetings.
Changing Voter Criteria
Most recently, two Commissioners attempted to force through a poorly-drafted and entirely counter productive change to our Town Charter that would have prevented the Town from maintaining a supplemental voter registration list (as permitted by Maryland law) and gutted the ability of the Commission and the Board of Supervisors of Elections to oversee the Town’s compliance with state elections law with respect to absentee voting.
The attempt only failed because those two Commissioners changed their positions in successive Commission meetings, preventing them from obtaining the needed two votes.
In Summary
My opponent was on the wrong side of each of these issues. With a three-member Commission, the vote of a single member is often the difference between adoption and rejection of matters that come before it.
Errors like these breed mistrust, amplify divisions and distract us from bigger long-term issues that need to be addressed. I believe that with the right leadership, errors like these can be minimized, if not avoided altogether.
