Campaign Website Starting to Come Online...

The campaign website is starting to come together, which is to say, "I'm working on it".

Here's the front-page blurb so far:

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After the dual tragedy of the loss of Donald Praisner a year after the passing of his wife and longtime Council member Marilyn Praisner, the voters of District 4 once again must exercise their right to vote for representation on the County Council.

I can make no claims to longstanding friendship with the Praisners, though I certainly wish their family well. Yet there are some elements of the "Praisner Legacy" of Fiscal Prudence and Slow Growth and concern for the Environment that I shared with them.

Nobody can take the place of the Praisners in the history of Montgomery County or in the hearts of their family and friends. Yet someone must carry on the work they started and carried on for so many years.

I don't simply desire Fiscal Prudence, these harsh economic conditions absolutely demand it.

In these harsh economic times that demand Fiscal Prudence, we must cut back on even the appearance of spending money we don't have towards projects that seem to be setting up excessive Growth and Over-Development.

Even as people are losing their jobs in record numbers at record rates, taxation in Montgomery County is at an all-time high. We must reduce the burden on taxpayers by cutting back on programs that cannot demonstrate quantifiable results that show a clear trend of solving the problems for which they were created.

We must economize where we can, especially with recurrent and predicatable expenses in upgrading our information systems. To this end, I propose that insofar as it is possible, we will replace proprietary non-free software with Open Source software. Already, the Montgomery County Public Schools are seeing very significant savings from using the "Open Office" suite of office productivity tools. Yet they are still paying significant costs just for an operating system for their computers. Well-developed and user-friendly Open Source operating systems abound, and are preferred by server and network technicians because of their exceptional stability and capability as well as their license costs. We should be able to save at least $100 per computer across almost the entire County office enterprise, at a bare minimum. This is my field of expertise and I can guide this transformation, and as a Council Member I will always keep in mind that the taxpayer is overburdened, and needs to see savings in the County enterprise.

We must create new jobs and even create new industries. I have been on record for a long time as promoting solar energy and an industry based on solar and other renewable energy sources.

As we create new industries and populate them with jobs that have growth potential, we must continue -- and accelerate -- our reclamation of damaged ecologies and we must preserve the environment as much as possible.

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