Mr Elrich,
You may or may not remember me, we've met a time or two at various Civic Association or Town Hall meetings around 2006-2007 or so.
I read with some dismay, and considerable approval, that you are seeking to consolidate Parks and Recreation, seeking to consolidate duplicated efforts and thereby get cost savings. This was one of my major platform planks in last year's Special Elections for District 4, and it will again be one of my major platform planks.
However, I should stress that it is much better to consolidate them under Parks, rather than under Recreation. Why, you might ask?
Simply, Parks understands both parks and recreation. Recreation understands recreation, but does not understand parks.
I've been living here since 1963, and I have had many experiences of both Parks and Recreation over the years. One quick way to tell the difference between them was that Recreation was in the buildings, and that's all that they knew or understood. Parks was not in the buildings; Parks was the great outdoors and if they had buildings, mostly those buildings were there to teach you about the great outdoors and then get you to go out and enjoy your new knowledge and learn more.
Parks runs fantastic little outdoors museums and conserves what's left of our natural heritage and invites us to partake of it. Parks shares with everyone and invites everyone to enjoy the parks in their own way, to be relaxed, to do things at your own pace, to sit around and unwind, or get on
a nice game of anything from soccer to baseball. Recreation turns their jealously guarded buildings into little armed camps, and they do their best to make it difficult to use any outside facilities that may be appended to their buildings.
With Parks, the building is the afterthought, and the main program is to let nature flourish and to let people enjoy it. With Recreation, the program is everything.
There is quite a comments thread that you should probably read, at:
http://www.justupthepike.com/2009/01/whats-up-pike-cheap-food-expensive.html
That should give you some idea about why Parks needs to run recreation, rather than Recreation turning our parks into something that can be barely called a park.
Here's the part that you probably most ought to read:
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"There is a large and evidently nice Recreation Center on Bauer Drive near the intersection with MD-28. I have been in there exactly one time in the last 20 years, and that was to attend a "town hall" type meeting featuring our State Senator (Mike Lennett, a very astute fellow) and someone from Isiah "Ike" Leggett's budget staff, and they were pretty much duking it out in front of the voters over who got which chunk of the tax gouge, and which income strata was going to take the brunt of it.
The place was nice and clean and required people to enter with an access-control ID card, excepting us non-subscribers who were allowed to go in to the meeting room down one hall, but not down the hall the other way. Personally, I am not at all interested in making use of any facility which demands a background and credit check as a prerequisite, and I imagine that the average young-adult isn't much interested in that sort of crap, either. I realize that most of them have got used to this fascist institutionalized crap in schools and they'll probably have to be used to it in the workplace anywhere that pays more than minimum wage, but checking into jail isn't my idea of 'recreation'."
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Sir, let's just say, I've never been "carded" to get into the Parks, and I spend time in the parks each and every day, and every time I get near any facility run by Recreation, all I get from them is vibes of "won't you please go away, you low-rent piece of filth".
I know where agencies paid for with my tax dollar make me, and everyone else, feel welcome. I know where agencies paid for with my tax dollar pointedly exclude me.
Parks understands recreation and it understands parks.
Recreation understands... I'm not sure of what, but I know that what they understand, I do not like.
Please leave Parks in charge.
Regards,
Thomas Hardman
Now, suddenly rumors have come to me that the reason that Parks is intended to be split out of the bailiwick of the Maryland National Capital Park and Planning commission is this: If the Montgomery County Parks are split off from the MNCPPC and are handed to Montgomery County Department of Recreation, suddenly the parks are effectively the property of the MoCo Executive.
And "Ike" Leggett could then say "well, we don't have to run anything past Parks and Planning, they're all ours" and then the Parks in question could be given -- not sold, but given -- to developers, with the understanding that all of those park lands will be converted to "affordable housing".
If this is right, folks, the game's afoot. If this is true, the scheme is to turn Montgomery's cherished parks into low-rent apartments.
2 comments:
I hope those are just scurrilous rumors.
If that’s even remotely true (about claiming and clearing park lands in order to build even more housing), then the County will be declaring war on environmental interests and they will surely have a good fight on their hands.
Look at it this way: Does it look for a moment like "Ike" Leggett gives a rat's ass about the environment, if the alternative to preserving the environment is getting campaign funding and 'in-kind' assistance from developers?
The thing is, it might not even be Mr Leggett who could for even a moment consider converting parklands to voter residences. Anyone who has looked at MoCo politics for any length of time will sensibly come to the conclusion that in most cases the elected officials are just the bowsprit, the "tip of the spear", the figurehead, the tenth of an iceberg that is visible above the surface.
For all we know, Mr Leggett is in the same position as was Mr George W. Bush when he was first running for election to the office of President, and a major national magazine (Time, I think) editorially classified him as "a corporation masquerading as an individual". I'll give Mr Leggett the benefit of the doubt. But I will also attest to the fact that a legal staffer was there to represent for Mr Leggett's "articulation of vision" which left no doubt that if only every last rein of control of parklands were to be handed to Mr Leggett, everything would be hunky-dory, birds would sing, rainbows would be everywhere, and tiny winged magickal beings would come right out of a Disney cartoon and frolic on the mushrooms to the sound of muzak. Or something to that effect.
Personally I think that Parks made a case that was close to irrefutable that they were the outfit to deal with Parks and Recreation all at once. And we here in Montgomery have been exceptionally happy with the stewardship of the Parks under the bi-county quasi-governmental holding organization MNCPPC. That's a known fact. What level of happiness we would enjoy under the administration of an Executive Branch subsidiary of the County remains to be seen. But given the hard sell and the no-expenses-spared blurb coming out of the County legal department, I have to remember the Madison Avenue aphorism to the effect that the more the product stinks, the more of an advertising budget it gets.
The worst of it is this: even if the economy bounces back somewhat, that still doesn't resolve the issues of toxic assets leading to foreclosure and eviction. We may need those Parks as campsites for displaced persons, but I'm pretty sure I'd rather have MNCPPC administer it than to have it done top-down by the County Executive.
It's not easy for me to try to pontificate here, there are too many ambiguities and the future is too uncertain. Concentrating power in the Executive in emergency situations has a definite precedent; the Roman Republic recognized that in emergencies it simply wasn't practical nor wide to leave military executive powers in the hands of the politically-divided Senate, so such powers were invested in a single individual who was plenipotentiary in the prosecution of the war, including the power to commandeer resources and tax revenues in order to place success within the grasp of that one man's organizational abilities.
The title granted such a person translates to "he says and it is done", but the Latin word itself is "dictator".
I just keep remembering how Hitler was democratically elected, in circumstances not too different from those we now see unfolding all around us.
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