Gail and Geary Higgins
Geary Higgins called me back about 9 pm after a hard day’s work at his NECA office in Bethesda , Maryland and a long and hard commute to join his wife, Gail, at his home on Old Waterford Road.
NECA is the National Electrical Contractors Association and Geary is its Vice President for Labor Relations, and responsible, among other matters, for negotiating contracts for management with the union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (“IBEW”). Geary is following in the footsteps of his father and grand-father at NECA; all three generations have worked for the electrical contractors’ association.
But Geary wants another job, perhaps a job that is more demanding than his “real” job at NECA. He wants to be elected to the Board of Supervisors from the Catoctin District in Loudoun County. This is not a recent idea. He ran twice before as the Republican challenger to Supervisor Sally Kurtz and he lost both times but he’s hoping this third time will be the charm because Sally is retiring from office, and, he believes, the Republican tide is running his way. Malcolm Baldwin, the Democratic nominee from Lovettsville in this same race, has another idea about how this is going to turn out in November.
“Growing up in Montgomery County, Maryland,” Geary said, “across the river [from Virginia], every time it snowed, I would hear the school closings on the radio, and invariably Loudoun County Schools were closed, and I thought, I don’t know where that is but I’d sure like to live there.”
Geary moved to Virginia with his young wife, Gail, with his business degree from Clarion State College, for a sales job, selling building materials, for Georgia Pacific in Manassas.
After drawing a 30 mile radius circle around Manassas, Geary and Gail decided in 1977 to live in Bluemont, Virginia.
“We got interested in antiques,” Geary said, “because that’s all that we could afford; we couldn’t afford anything new.”
Their house was an antique, dating back to 1825. “We didn’t know what we were doing, when it came to restoring,” Geary said, “but we got it done.”
As for Bluemont itself, Geary thought it was “a neat village” and set out to make it an historic district, gathered all the deeds and paper work, and convinced his neighbors to opt in.
Gary’s motivation was that he didn’t want Bluemont “gone” like “what happened to old town Rockville,” Maryland; Rockville’s quaint town square, court house and historic statue were “scraped” away, Geary said, and replaced by an unprofitable shopping mall.
When Geary’s grandfather, a reader of history, took him on a road trip to historic Williamsburg, at 12 years of age, Geary said, “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”
As for his favorite historical figure, he said, “Lincoln was an amazing guy.”
“Eisenhower was one of my father’s heroes,” Geary said. “One of my early memories was at the beach, wearing an ‘I like Ike’ t-shirt.”
Geary first had an insight into his personal connection to politics, his first “political experience,” when he was 11, in the 6th grade: “My father says to me what did you guys do in school today,” Geary said, “we were talking about this issue, and decided that it was the government’s job. My father looked at me, whatever he had in his hand, he dropped on the table. He said, ‘Who do you think the government is, the government is you.’ That has stuck with me since…. If we are the government, then it’s our responsibility in participating, shaping, and forming what the government does.”
After Geary and Gail moved to Waterford, Geary ran for the School Board, serving from 2000 to 2004. David Wilkinson, the founder of “Citizens for Affordable Schools,” said Geary’s “finest hour” on the School Board “was his stand opposing the building of two new high schools …” Geary said he contributed to policies that gave the teacher’s association “more input and consistency in the application of personnel policy to the teachers” and was told by the teachers’ representatives that he was “the only person on the board who understood personnel policy.”
Asked what he learned from wrestling at the Citadel, and then again when he transferred to Clarion State College, he said, “You learn more in defeat most of the time, than you do in victories.”
Asked what he learned then from running unsuccessfully against Supervisor Kurtz to succeed her, he said, “anytime you run against an incumbent is tough; I’ve learned that for sure”
His second loss to Ms. Kurtz was not so close but, he said, there was an “anti-Republican wind blowing in 2007.”
This race with Malcolm Baldwin, he said, will “put us on more of an even keel.”
Having said that, Geary was not pleased with how the district lines were drawn for this race after the census.
Re-districting is the process by which the Board of Supervisors establishes district boundaries, voting precincts and polling places for eight election districts including the Catoctin District.
Geary complained that there was “not a lot of interest in public input” and he charged that “the plan that gained the most traction came out of no place.” He also said, “I don’t know whether one plan was right or wrong.” He added, “I don’t sit here and profess to be the smartest guy in the world and know everything. You can learn from people every day. Assuming I get elected, I’m going to have a very open policy towards constituents and listen to what they have to say, what their interests are, what their desires are, what they’d like to have done as well.”
Another example that plainly bothered him, Geary said, was “this Chesapeake Bay Preservation Ordnance that came out of nowhere.” In 2009, there was an assessment of the streams in Loudoun - http://www.loudoun.gov/Default.aspx?tabid=3390 , and they were found wanting; 78% of the stream miles in Loudoun and Fairfax did not meet aquatic life use standards. The County considered a proposal to require 100 foot buffers adjacent to Loudoun’s streams to retard the runoff spoiling them. It was estimated that these buffers could reduce sediments by 70% and reduce nutrients by 40%. There’s an interactive County map that identifies the condition of streams across the County - http://www.loudounwatershedwatch.org/maps/index.htm . Higgins, however, reportedly insists that there’s little evidence that Loudoun streams require any protection at all.
A self-styled “fiscal conservative,” Geary thinks we can save more on what we spend on schools, the largest component of the County Budget (at 70%), and he hopes to cut taxes.
Geary wrote the Board of Supervisors an e-mail stating, “you should not raise property taxes this year and in fact, I would propose that you should reduce the amount of taxes that we are currently paying.”
He wrote that the $20 a month proposed tax increase that the Board estimated was “unthinkable” in the current economy; he said his office staff had been reduced by 25%, they had no raises for three years, and suffered a 12% wage cut the year before; and, all the while, heating oil and gas were more expensive, and “food prices are soaring.”
Geary hopes to grow the commercial tax base instead and believes that Dulles airport is the engine that makes that growth possible, although new business have been preferring Fairfax over Loudoun.
As we don’t live in a kinder and gentler time when it comes to public dialogue, we talked about how we could “all get along” including the members of the Board of Supervisors with each other, and the Board of Supervisors with the School Board.
We concluded our discussion, in a sense, where we began. In his negotiations with labor, he said, “Disagreeing doesn’t mean being disagreeable. That’s what I hope to bring to the table as a Supervisor.”
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