GAZETTE COLUMN: CLARKE AND HIGGINS – WHAT A DIFFERENCE AN ELECTION MAKES by John P. Flannery

Janet Clarke, the newly minted Supervisor from Blue Ridge, has apparently dropped her campaign pose of being democratically responsive.  Fresh into her new job, she’s telling us what she’s going to do without asking us folk in Lovettsville what we think about it at a hearing or public meeting. 

She’s dictating to us folk who live in and near Lovettsville, in the Catoctin District, a magisterial district that she does not represent, where she insists that the County build a new middle school and a new high school. 

In fact and in truth, we don’t have the students in Lovettsville to justify these schools, we are at the County’s edge, close to the Potomac and thus not “centrally located,” and for these and other reasons, many parents are of the firm view that we don’t need and don’t want these schools here.

It is fascinating how people come to Western Loudoun from elsewhere and want to change what we have.  They come from Fairfax, as Ms. Clarke did, saying that they love our open country and then, shortly thereafter, they set themselves to marginalizing working farms, paving dirt roads, straightening the smooth turns of a country road so they can better speed on it, cutting down trees, driving out wild life, and squandering the resources including our challenged waterways that made this rolling land in Loudoun a natural treasure.

Those of us who have been here for a while who have helped Johnny (and Mary Jo) learn to read, sent our children on a school bus or drove them ourselves and neither our children nor any of us parents were the worse for wear.  When I was a kid in New York, I traveled by bus and subway across a fair distance in the Bronx to get to high school.  My daughter’s travel was shorter and faster than my own – not that I ever complained about my own daily odyssey. 

So this declaration of intent by Ms. Clarke is not really about helping Johnny to read.  It’s about building schools that we don’t need in places that don’t make sense in order to spur residential development that would not otherwise occur without the infrastructure that a school requires. 

It’s the field of schemes – build it and we shall pay -- our taxpayer dollars spent widening roads, providing water, sewer and electrical infrastructure so that the developer won’t have to spend those funds himself – Loudoun’s down home version of corporate welfare.

Supervisor Clark insists it would be “shameful” if these schools weren’t built in Lovettsville.  What is truly “shameful” is Ms. Clarke telling us what to do, deciding our fate, calling us all names, without a single public hearing on the matter.

Incidentally, Lovettsville’s actual representative for the Catoctin District, Geary Higgins, told us during the recent campaign how he restored homes, loved the environment, and proposed to listen carefully to what the voters wanted.  Now that he’s elected, however, he has made his position clear on these schools – he’ll do what Ms. Clarke, the Board’s new Vice Chair, wants, also without first hearing what the citizens want.  So we are on notice that we have an echo, not a voice in Mr. Higgins’s notion of “stewardship” for our district – and that he is as undemocratic as Ms. Clarke.

An election is a transforming experience because only then do we find out what we got.  Sorry to say, early indications are that what we got is highly indifferent to democratic – small d – principles by which elected officials invite the public to say what they want, and to object to what they don’t want, rather than being told by the political class what they’re going to get.

SP PROFILE: GEARY HIGGINS (R) - FOR CATOCTIN SUPERVISOR by John P. Flannery

Gail and Geary Higgins

http://www.shenandoahpress.org/2011/08/geary-higgins-the-republican-candidate-for-catoctin-supervisor/

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 6^th 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.”

SP PROFILE: MALCOLM BALDWIN (D) - CATOCTIN SUPERVISOR by John P. Flannery

Malcolm and Pamela Baldwin

http://www.shenandoahpress.org/2011/08/malcolm-baldwin-democratic-candidate-for-catoctin-supervisor/

I caught Malcolm Baldwin pruning his grape vines.  Earlier in the day, he had to bury his ram Aeneas.  Malcolm and his wife Pamela founded the Weatherlea Farm near Lovettsville in 1992 and they grow grapes for vintners and shear sheep for the wool.

Malcolm is active in the Loudoun Wine Growers Association and the Loudoun Valley Sheep Producers Association. 

But this year he wants to grow enough votes so that he can represent the Catoctin District on the Board of Supervisors. He seeks to succeed Sally Kurtz who is retiring from the Board.  His opponent is the Republican candidate, Geary Higgins from nearby Waterford.

Malcolm has always been interested in public affairs but he said he first got really concerned about Loudoun County when Scott York won election as the Chairman of the Board of Supervisors in 2004 and the Board then “took York’s County-wide mandate and made a shambles of it.”  The Board gave the Chairman’s authority to the Vice-Chair instead.  “This was totally contrary to what the voters expected,” Malcolm said, “it was a real disservice to the community.” 

In response, Malcolm started appearing and testifying before the Board of Supervisors with some regularity.  He joined the Board of the Piedmont Environmental Council (“PEC”), because the Board of Supervisors had “rejected a host of smart growth management strategies.”  The Community was “endangered,” Malcolm said, by the Board’s “one-dimensional development approach, too many houses in the transition zone, requiring public services that the County couldn’t pay for, and the Board’s attitude was that the public be damned.”  

“The problem then and now is we’ve forgotten how to talk with one another,” Malcolm said.  “There is a polarization at the national and county level, although,” Malcolm said, “I believe it’s less here.”

Malcolm had a chance to work for community harmony when, with others in the community, he led the charge to stop the dirty coal power transmission line that PATH proposed to run through West Virginia, Loudoun County and Maryland so that PATH could sell this energy in the Northeast, and not even in this region.

This was going to be “destructive over the properties it passed, have a degrading effect on appearance and value,” said Malcolm, but, more than that, “we didn’t need the power line.  PATH needed the line to make a profit, but the people didn’t.” 

Malcolm is proud how “the community worked together, from diverse jurisdictions and various groups including the PEC, the Sierra Club, and Friends of the Earth; there was also the County government, and not just Loudoun; also landowners even those not directly affected got involved, they all pitched in,” said Malcolm.  “I still run into some who don’t know that we stopped this power line,” Malcolm said.  “We got an outcome we can all be proud of.”

Malcolm was tireless in that campaign, holding meetings in churches, the library, and at his Wetherlea Farm to teach, confer and discuss how to meet this offensive intrusion by PATH.

It’s ironic that Malcolm’s Dad was a public utility executive in upstate New York. 

“My Dad believed, however,” said Malcolm, “that a public utility was intended to serve the public, not the other way around.”

“I remember,” Malcolm said, “when someone couldn’t pay their power bill and the power was cut off.  They’d call my Dad at home.  He’d ask them to come down to the office with a small deposit and turn their power back on.”

“It’s funny,” Malcolm said, “when my Dad retired from the public utility company, he joined the Town Planning Board.  He did it as another form of public service.  He didn’t get paid.  Now here I am, retired, standing for office, doing the same thing.”

“When I was young,” Malcolm said, “I read a biography of John Adams and it had a profound influence on me; ever since I’ve been interested in politics, inspired by Adams’ selflessness, and by his noble pursuit.”

“What I learned from the PATH encounter,” Malcolm said, “was that you get the facts right, put emotions to the side, hold off your pre-conceptions, work together with differing views in good faith, and conduct an analysis of your alternatives and the best possible outcomes.”

“In PATH,” Malcolm said, “if the facts had been against us, as to whether or not a power line was needed, then those facts would have dictated a different outcome; but we got it right.”

Asked about his farming, Malcolm said he had always liked the country. 

As a kid, he lived in western New York, in Rochester, in a house built by his great grand-father; it was “a modest farm house.”

After Haverford College, he went to law school.  Malcolm planned to be a country lawyer in Vermont.  “I liked the small town atmosphere,” Malcolm said.  “I thought I’d enjoy that.”

He went to Chicago Law School, an especially prestigious school of law, well regarded for its influence on the economic analysis of the law. 

“You got a good education there; it had the advantage of being a small class,” Malcolm said.  “There weren’t any classes on the environment then, but I did attend a class in urban planning.”

Malcolm didn’t become a country lawyer in Vermont, he got detoured to Washington, DC instead, where he interned at the Pentagon in the General Counsel’s Office.

He walked into Brentano’s book store in the Pentagon one day, and saw a book titled, “Outdoor America.”  Malcolm thought, “I want to do that.”   He bought the book but never read it.  He lived it instead, focused on the environment for many years afterwards.

He first got hired at the Conservation Foundation, and thus began a 38 year career in environmental law that took him from the Environmental Law Institute that he helped found to the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), a division of the Executive Office of the President. 

The agency was created in 1969 during President Nixon’s Administration, as a part of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and its purpose was to coordinate federal environmental efforts with agencies and other White House offices and to develop environmental and energy policies and initiatives. It was a simple principle, i.e., virtually every action by the government can have some effect on the environment. 

Malcolm was CEQ’s Acting Chairman during the Reagan Administration.

NEPA and CEQ arose out of necessity.  Malcolm said, “Very few lawyers knew how to deal with Love Canal and the CEQ and companion legislation was a creative answer to a most difficult set of questions.”

During the recent flap over the health of our streams in Loudoun County, Malcolm reverted to form, seeking how to harmonize the poor condition of our streams with a solution that was fair and just to the community.  In a recent debate with Geary Higgins, Malcolm said he wasn’t in favor of the original proposal but thought that the final version of the ordinance that the Board of Supervisors considered did resolve his concerns about cost and inconvenience to the landowners while helping to ameliorate water quality issues.

Malcolm repeatedly emphasized that finding the facts and putting ideology aside were the first steps in making public policy.  For example, he questioned the sense of a corridor of state significance through Loudoun West of Dulles airport if Maryland opposed any crossing into Maryland.  As for schools, Malcolm said we can’t have $100 million schools if we’re going to have even more students in the next generation.  From what he’s learned from his own farm, Malcolm feels he knows what other food and wine farmers need, and it’s keeping the land open and productive to generate revenue.

Malcolm said he hopes to be elected so he can say four years later, at the end of his first term, that “we had a strongly cooperative board where we reached decisions based on good analysis and understanding and avoided the ideological polarization that has plagued this country and we worked cooperatively with the school board with the same spirit.”

Asked if that was possible, he said, “I think that is possible and the results will be some good wise decisions.”