The Gazette OUROPINIONS
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Wednesday, December 4, 2013
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Page A-12
The people’s information
Any government body that pledges to expand public access to information instantly has our attention. In this case, it’s Montgomery County, which has an expansive portal called dataMontgomery and is working to make it bigger and better. In mere minutes of surfing the site, you can find mounds of data about food inspections, county spending and election polling places. Naturally, a section on employee salaries has more page views than the next nine data sets combined. What your neighbor gets paid in a government job will never stop being interesting to curious people. But no one should feel guilty or shy about following their tax money. It’s our right to know how government spends our money. Other readily available information at dataMontgomery tells us much more than what the next-door neighbors are earning. For example: A Comcast customer on Leonard Drive in Silver Spring filed a billing complaint against the cable provider in July 2010. It wasn’t resolved until the following February — 218 days later. In Montgomery County’s database of more than 3,400 cable complaints, 218 days isn’t common. Most disputes appear to be resolved in a day or two, and the average is about a week. One sign of growth in the county could be a glance at commercial permits. As of earlier this week, the county had given final approval to 151 permits in Silver Spring and 111 in Clarksburg. The numbers were 88 in Rockville and 73 in Bethesda. This is an excellent website where the public can go for answers without needing a county employee to intervene. What’s infuriating about “public” information is that even if it is collected, maintained, analyzed, interpreted and stored in the public’s name, quite often it’s retrieved at a cost. Sometimes the cost is nominal, but other times it’s excessive. Many police departments, especially, charge several dollars a page for documents when the actual cost is no more than a quarter or two. Often, the cost of accident reports is absorbed by an attorney or an insurance agency, and no one complains. Here, the county’s data.montgomerycountymd. gov project turns the request-research-reprint-charge cycle of government information on its ear. Instead, the county finds data and provides it through a web portal. At the state level, Maryland has a weak and porous law that allows ratcheted charges. Agencies can charge “reasonable fees” for copies, but the law doesn’t set numerical boundaries. Instead, a reasonable fee is defined as one “bearing a reasonable relationship to the recovery of actual costs incurred by a government unit.” If a rapid-copy shop can charge us 8, 10 or maybe 15 cents per copy, our government should, too — but it usually doesn’t. Government bodies have little incentive to comply with a toothless, murky state law. We urge state legislators to tighten this long-ignored weakness, as a commitment to fairness, transparency, accountability and public enlightenment. Last month, the county asked residents what kind of information they’d want to see on the site. Among the suggestions: traffic flow, parking, bus stops, realtime service alerts, weather updates and Intercounty Connector usage. If we get a say, we’d like to see Department of Environmental Protection actions listed by ZIP Code and travel expenses for each county department. We also suggest an equal focus on simpler, individual pieces of information, such as contracts. Sometimes, getting the entire sewing basket is overwhelming and excessive when all we need is a needle and thread. Remember that information about the governed belongs to the people, and should be offered easily and conveniently. There’s no excuse for electronic records, especially, to not be posted online, unless they fit the narrow exceptions to the law in which they may remain secret, for valid reasons. Copying fees should start to fade away thanks to easy techniques for emailing large data files or as residents show up at government offices with thumb drives, for an easy transfer. Any charge should be viewed as a failure of an agency to store records efficiently. The county deserves hearty accolades for dataMontgomery project. The next step is getting other agencies, particularly Montgomery County Public Schools, to provide similar access to their data sets. We’d like to hear from every small and large government in our county or with ties to it: How are you compiling public information, distributing it and presenting it, so the interested people can sift through it, at their convenience? Tell us, and tell your constituents.
The Gazette Karen Acton, President/Publisher
LETTERS TOT HE EDITOR
M-83 isn’t the solution you think it is This letter is in response to the Planning Board approving the M-83 highway option [“Planning Board votes to support highway option,” Nov. 27]. Everyone north of Montgomery Village may think this will solve traffic problems, but in my opinion it will drop you into a traffic congestion and gridlock situation where you will just sit in traffic. It just moves the congestion and gridlock to a new location. Additionally, something the Planning Board may not have considered in their decision is that the Montgomery Village Golf Course is being developed into about 600 residential homes, which will add hundreds if not a thousand or so new drivers to
the mix. Monument Realty (developers of the golf course) is not doing a traffic impact study for this new situation for the master plan. M-83 extended may have been a good idea 20 years ago, but it’s not relevant to the current situation. The Planning Board needs to go back to the drawing board for this situation that is misleading everyone. This is another traffic congestion and gridlock situation, and poor planning by the county, which will cost the taxpayer millions of dollars and will solve nothing, just saying. “The City of Gaithersburg officials weighed in on the county project in a July letter to the Maryland Department of the Envi-
ronment and Army Corps of Engineers. In the letter, Gaithersburg Long-Range Planner Rob Robinson took issue with the study’s claims that the master plan route would improve congestion and decrease commute time.” I concur wholeheartedly with Mr. Robinson’s assessment quoted in The Gazette. What we really need is a new bridge across the Potomac river from Interstate 270 into Virginia toward the Dulles Airport area (i.e. Va. 28 Sulley Road). That would relieve a significant amount of traffic on I-270 and the Beltway and provide a new avenue to shopping areas for both Fairfax and Montgomery County.
Neal M. Zarin, Montgomery Village
Preservation and redevelopment can coexist I am writing to address a misconception that the existing Wheaton Youth Center must be demolished in order for Montgomery County to build a new libraryrecreation center in Wheaton [“Wheaton Recreation Center determined historic,” Nov 18]. The county Planning Board recently reviewed whether the center should be considered historic, and found that preservation and redevelopment can peacefully coexist. The Planning Board found that the Wheaton Youth Center, a 1963 modernist, award-winning structure, could potentially be preserved without compromising plans by the Montgomery County Department of General Services for a new consolidated library/recreation center/Gilchrist Center facility, except perhaps for part of planned playfield outside the new recreation center. In response to the county executive’s call for community input in spring 2013, the county’s Historic Preservation Commission began a review of the Wheaton Youth Center and ultimately recom-
Deer attacks dog
mended that it be designated historic. Convinced of the exceptional merits of this resource, the Planning Board also voted to recommend historic designation of the Wheaton Youth Center with the stipulation that the Historic Preservation Commission should review any proposed changes to the exterior of the building needed to accommodate the new recreation center and its programming with leniency. The County Council is expected to take up the historic review of the Wheaton Youth Center in early 2014. The Planning Board hopes that in the intervening period, additional information will become available about the cost and practicality of reusing the Wheaton Youth Center, to aid the County Council in making this important decision.
The rut is full on in Montgomery County. Our sweet Cali, the most gentle dog on earth, was gored by a huge buck this Saturday. After a costly trip to the emergency room, many, many stitches, and a bunch of drains, she is healing painfully. We won’t even talk about how much it cost before Christmas. The buck was back the next day and went after our neighbors little white pup, who was curious, a dangerous thing indeed. Of course, there is nothing the police can do, but joggers, children, pets and even people in cars are in danger. The deer easily could have killed our dog had his antlers gone in her underside and was so aggressive that he was completely unafraid of us. I find it disappointing that in such a sophisticated city that there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves and our pets. We are tied by laws to protect the very people who are threatened by rogue animals.
Francoise M. Carrier The writer chairs the Montgomery County Planning Board.
Penelope Johnson Wilsker, Rockville
Support for stormwater fees On Nov. 19, we released Potomac Conservancy’s annual State of the Nation’s River Report. The river’s health earned a grade of a C and we declared polluted runoff public enemy No. 1. Polluted runoff from urban areas is the only source of pollution to the Potomac River and its tributaries that is increasing. Runoff carries toxic pollution to our neighborhood streams and the Potomac River, causes flooding that damages our homes, and destroys the natural playground where
our families recreate. We know how to fix this: by capturing and filtering rain water where it falls. Maryland is making a key investment that will be spent locally on proven, commonsense solutions to filter, control and clean polluted runoff through the countylevel stormwater fee. In January of 2012, the Maryland General Assembly deliberately called upon county governments to develop programs and fees that address their locality’s unique water pollution needs and fund necessary safeguards
for local waterways. Potomac Conservancy calls upon the General Assembly and Gov. Martin O’Malley to keep this important framework in place. A polluted Potomac, our region’s drinking water supply, is an important local public health issue. The fact is we all need clean water. Working together, we can stop the pollution of this critical community resource.
Amanda John The writer is the Silver Spring policy manager of the Potomac Conservancy.
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