The O'Malley roadshow - Part II: ICC
After his budget presentation on Wednesday night, Governor O'Malley took questions; while some were about the budget crisis, most concerned two contentious development issues in Montgomery County: the looming ICC (Intercounty Connector*) and the Takoma Metro "EYA" development plans. In this post, I'll just focus on the ICC.

If built, the ICC will bulldoze a toll road highway 18 miles from I-270 near Rockville and Gaithersburg to I-95 near Laurel. First appearing as "Outer Circumferential #4" on a master plan in 1955(!!), efforts to actually build something like it began in earnest in the 1970s -- as did vehement, decades long local opposition to it. Citing a negative Maryland highway system evaluation and environmental concerns, then-Governor (and prior ICC supporter) Parris Glendening (D) pronounced it "dead" in 1998. But his successor, Bob Ehrlich (R), succeeded in resuscitating it by 2006 using a "fast track" Bush Federal Highway Administration approval process. Opponents including the Audubon Society, Environmental Defense Fund, and Sierra Club are in litigation about the project, alleging inadequate environmental impact statements and Clean Air Act violations.

ICC proponents claim the road will relieve traffic congestion; opposition groups such as MICC claim upgrades to existing roads would work better, and note projections indicating the ICC will serve mainly for short hop traffic rather than moving longer-distance traffic off local streets. The Coalition for Smarter Growth found that the ICC is the worst alternative in relieving congestion, reducing traffic, and creating pollution -- it's barely an improvement on doing nothing at all, and it's significantly less effective than "transit oriented land use and investment": a combination of Purple Line, express bus routes, and funneling development to near those and other existing mass transit lines. The Sierra Club says the ICC will cost too much, promote sprawl, and increase toxic runoff to Maryland watersheds including the threatened crown jewel, the Chesapeake Bay.

None of which seems to matter to Governor O'Malley.

Several town hall meeting goers spoke to him about the issue. The first, Bob Guldin, pointed out that the entire Prince George's County Council and a majority of the Montgomery County Council was against it -- and that foregoing a massive construction project could save the state money. As the video shows, Governor O'Malley seemed to take issue with the "savings" idea -- hiding behind the notion that state funding allocated for the project would revert to the Transportation Trust Fund rather than the state budget, rather than acknowledging that it would then be available for better projects. But O'Malley soon left no doubt where he stood: "One of the big problems with the ICC is that it's arrived very late, and it should have been built sooner."

A woman reminded him of his own reported reaction to a helicopter's-eye view of Maryland sprawl ("I almost became ill, because I looked down and saw mile after mile after mile of development") and asked him how he could now support the ICC. But O'Malley wouldn't answer directly, preferring to reiterate opposition to sprawl in the abstract -- while continuing to support road building enabling that sprawl when it comes to pouring concrete.

Anti-ICC activist Greg Smith reminded O'Malley of his campaign pledges to "take a step back" and reconsider the ICC. Smith also appealed to his ambition, saying O'Malley was on the verge of "blowing a national opportunity" to lead the fight against sprawl and global warming. O'Malley claimed, with seeming sincerity, that he indeed had taken that step back -- but had come to a different conclusion, adding "sorry that we disagree." Again, O'Malley failed to offer a factual defense of the project.

While opponents sported "ICC--a bad deal, not a done deal" badges, O'Malley seems to insist the opposite: a good deal, and a done deal. At the end of his response to Mr. Guldin, O'Malley tried to have it both ways: "But we also need to make investments in public transportation as well. But unfortunately, in a climate of scarcity, mass transit has been kicked to the curb." Indeed it has.


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* Like any road, it has its own web site!
SEE ALSO: Roadshow Part I: budget (below), and Part III: Takoma Metro development

UPDATE, 10/27: See also "The True Cost of Building the ICC" by Greg Smith and Community Research. Smith writes with some dates to note:
10/28: Montgomery Town Hall meeting, 2pm, Casey Community Center, 810 S. Frederick Ave., Gaithersburg
10/29: Federal Court hearing in Greenbelt regarding ICC violations of the Clean Air Act, 10am, 500 Cherrywood Lane.
10/29: Maryland General Assembly opens special session to address the budget deficit. 9am, Joint Hearing Room, House Ways and Means Committee, House Appropriations Committee, Senate Budget and Taxation Committee. Track the Special Session schedule here.
To help with anti-ICC efforts, write stoptheicc@igc.org.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:23:00 AM -- |    

 
The O'Malley roadshow - Part I: budget
Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley came to Takoma Park Middle School last night to explain his budget proposals -- and face Takoma Park and Montgomery County residents angry about major development proposals in our back yards: the Inter County Connector (ICC) and the "EYA" developer proposal for a townhouse project at the Takoma Metro station.

O'Malley presented a kind of "budget stump speech" in a town hall meeting setting, relying on posters and a slideshow (.PDF) to explain how he hopes to fix a projected $1.7 billion shortfall by 2012. His presentation conveyed a number of messages:

• A combination of built-in higher expenses (the Thornton plan mandating higher expenditures on education) and lower revenues (a 1997 income tax cut) have finally hit home in a way that will no longer be masked by tuition hikes and raids on trust funds.
• Over 80% of the budget -- education, health care, public safety -- can't really be touched, so to eliminate a projected $1727M deficit by 2012, O'Malley proposes [projected net effect* by 2012 in brackets]...
  
• [+$840M by 2012]... (1) raising the sales tax rate from 5% to 6%,
  
• [+$573M by 2012]... (2) budget cuts,
  
• [+$550M by 2012]... (3) slot machine gambling -- excuse me, "recapturing lost slots revenue",**
  
• [+$190M by 2012]... (4) moving to a progressive tax structure -- but one in which a 2 income, 2 child family making under $250,000 would join over 80% of Marylanders in actually paying less taxes than before --
  
• [+$146M by 2012]... (5) increasing the corporate tax rate by 1% and closing loopholes, and
  
• [+$140M by 2012]... (6) a tobacco tax increase.
  

There are other features to the plan, but these six items seem to be the biggest ones. Their effect exceeds the $1.727 billion needed because O'Malley also wants to invest in education, transportation, and affordable health insurance, as well as in property tax relief. The governor was at pains to compare Maryland to neighboring states, arguing that Maryland would remain competitive with Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, etc. in its sales, income, and corporate income taxes.

O'Malley got hisses for the slots proposal, and scattered applause for the tobacco and corporate tax increases. Not surprisingly, he emphasized the progressive tax structure to the largely liberal/progressive audience, but as can be seen, it plays at best a supporting role in closing the deficit, compared to slots, budget cuts, or the sales tax increase -- all rather regressive in effect. The overall effect is one of a "grand bargain," e.g., liberals accept slots while conservatives accept progressive income taxation and higher corporate and "sin" (tobacco) taxation.

I'll move on to the rest of the evening in a second post, because of length and because of the very different subject matter -- principally the ICC and the Metro development issues -- that came up during questions from the audience.

Instead I'll close this post with my impressions of O'Malley. This was my first time seeing him, and I was impressed with him right up through the end of his presentation. O'Malley deserves credit for trying to deal with the mess that his predecessor left him, and for educating the public about the budget, his proposals, and the politics involved. I might have preferred to avoid slots in favor of a steeper progressive tax structure and/or imposition of a net tax increase at lower incomes than O'Malley did. On the other hand, I'm at the bottom of a learning curve on the budget and realistic alternatives for fixing it -- one that O'Malley is near the top of.

And I have to admit O'Malley made his support for "limited slots" part of his campaign pitch last year. He argued, later in the evening, that people he represented from near Pimlico were far more concerned about the effects of crime and joblessness than about those of limited gambling. Maybe he's right, I guess I don't know.

The governor can make a good impression -- energetic, open, even charismatic. I haven't decided quite how to weight this, but he also has the "I'm sorry I disappointed you" thing down pretty well when he needs it. Calculatedly disarming? Probably -- but he needed it more often than he must have liked in the next phase of the evening: questions and challenges from the audience.


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* See slide 19 of the slideshow.
** This refers to the finding that Marylanders are playing slots in neighboring states, which tax that activity; see slide 17.

UPDATE, 10/29: For an alternative view of the budget, see the excellent "Progressive Solutions to the State Budget Deficit" report, by Takoma Park/Silver Spring Progressive Neighbors (PN), about a community budget seminar and exercise held on Sept. 28th. The page features statements by Maryland legislators from District 20 and beyond, as well as a link to "10 reasons to oppose slots," by Mike Tabor. PN opposes the sales tax and slots proposals as regressive, and(/but) favors raising alcohol and cigarette taxes, and favors beginning League of Conservation Voters "green taxes." posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:32:00 PM -- |    

 
Because I just can't let it go
I'll turn to other subjects sometime, I promise. But comments about the Armenian Genocide Resolution by people I think highly of have been among the sharpest disappointments of the past week. Two cases in point:

In his Atlantic Monthly blog, James Fallows ("Just curious (re the Armenian Genocide vote)") asks whether American leadership is "insane," calls the resolution "self-righteous," and constructs a variety of straw men followups to this alleged political malpractice, e.g., condemning China's Great Leap Forward. He finally gets around to stating his premises at the end of the piece:

The Armenian genocide was real; many Turks pretend it wasn’t. They are wrong, and we should stand for what's right. But it’s hard to think of a more willfully self-indulgent step than lecturing Turkey's current government and people 90 years late.

It's not just "many Turks" who pretend it wasn't a genocide -- it's the Turkish state, one that has more in common with its genocidal forebear than was convenient to admit, either then or now. I think if Fallows walked even a couple of yards in Armenian American shoes, he'd find it more difficult to dismiss their decades-long quest for some acknowledgment of what happened to them -- and what therefore continues to happen to them. Instead it's more or less 'get over it, you bunch of dangers to the republic.' (That said, he shouldn't have been misquoted, that was of course deeply wrong, and clearly much worse than denigrating a genocide resolution.)

Elsewhere, Jimmy Carter, interviewed on CNN, said he wouldn't vote for the bill were he in Congress. His reason:

I think the world generally recognizes that many of the Armenians were killed because they were Armenians by leaders of Turkey at that time. But to resurrect that issue and brand now Turkey and the Turkish people as perpetrators of genocide, I think, exacerbates a wound that may very well hurt the relationship with Turkey which is very valuable.

This is a fairly smooth combination of "diplomatese" -- "generally," "many ... were killed because they were Armenians" -- and "healing talk": "exacerbates a wound." The latter always drives me up a wall, but here it isn't merely empty, pointless jabber, it's actively deceptive jabber. For when there is a victim and a perpetrator who denies what he's done, exactly which one is the wounded party?

The basics came at the end: the relationship with Turkey is very valuable. Well, so are lots of relationships with countries Carter is more willing to criticize, generally from atop a very high horse. I'm with him then, despite the high horse; but he shouldn't come with "valuable" all of a sudden when that's the best he can do. I wonder what he really thinks the difference is. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:00:00 PM -- |    

 
The week that was
Well, I'm back. Weeks like the last one make me appreciate the value and maybe even wisdom of not following the news so closely or at all.

The Post kept up its full court press about and generally against H.R.106, the Armenian Genocide Resolution, with op-eds by Charles Krauthammer (naturally) and Richard Cohen. The latter started off well -- the title was "Turkey's War on the Truth" -- and ends well: "but there is only one thing to call Turkey's insistence that it and its power will determine the truth: unacceptable." But Cohen both buys into the idea that now is not the right time -- when is it ever? -- and undercuts his own "truth" premise by finding ways to doubt that the genocide was in fact a genocide:

Of even that, I have some doubt. The congressional resolution repeatedly employs the word "genocide," a term used by many scholars. But Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish emigre who coined the term in 1943, clearly had in mind what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. If that is the standard -- and it need not be -- then what happened in the collapsing Ottoman Empire was something short of genocide. It was plenty bad -- maybe as many as 1.5 million Armenians perished, many of them outright murdered -- but not all Armenians everywhere in what was then Turkey were as calamitously affected. The substantial Armenian communities in Constantinople, Smyrna, and Aleppo were largely spared.*

The fact that some communities were spared is (a) immaterial and (b) doesn't mean what Cohen thinks it means. Those cities were where major Western consulates were; the Turkish leadership wanted to minimize and blunt criticism by having a few unharmed Armenians to point to. It's still working.

Cohen uses "and it need not be" as a rhetorical fire escape while essentially arguing otherwise. To complete the thought he doesn't, the concept of "genocide"is a genus, not a species -- an overarching concept capturing a variety of crimes against humanity, not just one (monstrous) example of it. What happened in Rwanda was not precisely like the Holocaust, what happened in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s was not precisely like either one, or what like what happened in Turkey beginning in 1915. But they all have something in common: large scale, centrally directed killings of noncombatants because of their race or ethnicity. They are all examples of genocide. Efforts to establish some kind of "Holocaust threshold" (let alone essentially elevate the Holocaust to the only possible example of genocide) are arguably even more dangerous than this administration's tortured parsing of the word "torture."**

Krauthammer's article -- "Pelosi's Armenian Gambit" -- is more straightforwardly predatory. Unlike Cohen, Krauthammer concedes on the one hand that what happened was "unambiguously" a genocide, but that Turkey's arm-twisting bothers him not a bit -- it's also "unambiguously" the wrong time to raise the issue. As was the case with John Murtha last week, the main issue for Krauthammer is the inconvenience of the issue for our all-important war in Iraq. But (as may be the case for Murtha as well?) the real issue for Krauthammer is a chance to get a dig in at Pelosi, with the most withering words available to the Washington not-so-intelligentsia: "she is deeply unserious about foreign policy."

But who's really "unserious" about foreign policy here? If we can't call a spade a nonbinding spade in our own House of Representatives because of the effect it may have on a war Americans clearly don't want, does that make the proponents of the nonbinding resolution unserious -- or those of the war? More on that another time.


Meanwhile, the Democratic Party continues to find interesting new ways to sell out its electorate, by drafting a FISA revision bill that lets telephone companies off the hook for supporting Bush's illegal warrantless domestic spying activities. The October Quisling Of the Month award goes to Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), previously famous for locking away his tepid qualms about the "program" in a safe until the New York Times -- belatedly -- broke the underlying story and made it safe for him to reveal them.

Thus, the latest definition of "Congressional oversight" is apparently to retroactively condone lawbreaking in return for the right to establish that laws were broken.

I join those saluting Senator Chris Dodd for fighting this, and may join those contributing to his campaign as well.


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* Constantinople? Cohen's right: the official name change to Istanbul happened in 1923, though the name was already in use. Official Turkey referred to Konstantiniyye before then.
** As most recently demonstrated in Saint Mukasey's confirmation hearings. Department of I told you so: The Gonzales resignation: a strategic retreat.

POSTSCRIPT: Oh, I remember what else I was bummed about -- a perfectly sensible health care measure benefiting children of uninsured families couldn't get past a Bush veto and a Republican minority. Many lies were told, perhaps the liars will eventually be punished for them. Thanks to those like eRobin ("fact-esque") who fought and continue to fight the good fight on this.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:33:00 AM -- |