Marc Elrich

Interview with Howard Kohn

Photo: Julie Wiatt

Marc Elrich's election last fall to the Montgomery County Council in Rockville was something of a surprise. He is, after all, a former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) radical whose previous political tenure was on the left wing of the Takoma Park City Council.

Now comes another surprise. Has Marc become the most unlikely conservative on the new County Council?

Three months into his first term Marc answered this and other questions in an interview with the Voice.

A new County executive often launches new programs with the first budget, but Ike Leggett is proposing a conservative budget, just the basics. And you're supporting it?

I'm very much supporting a very conservative budget. The four of us who are newbies on the Council want an analytical look at what the County does now before we endorse anything new.

Holding up current programs to scrutiny will be the radical step. The tradition has been that 90 percent of the budget is off-limits to discussion.

You continue to appropriate money for old programs and only discuss new ones. The County is always adding and adding without ever asking: Do we need this? Can this be done better?

For example, is the merger at Health and Human Services working or do we still have these stovepipes where one side isn't talking to the other? And how much is the Rec Department duplicating programs that the schools are doing or could do better?

Bottom-line, if we continue to load up the budget with all the programs anybody can imagin,e we're going to reach a level of spending that's unsustainable, perhaps even unachievable.

Your own agenda for the Council is also conservative. You want to put limits on the building boom. But won't slower growth mean less revenue?

Part of the mirage is that revenue simply comes in and there's no cost to growth, that somehow it's all free. No, it isn't free - we just didn't pay for it, and now the bills are coming due.

It's not just kids attending classes in trailers or gridlock on the roads, but the County is short at least 200 police officers and 360 fire fighters. The County pretended that growth had no expense and added zero police officers during the huge growth spurt. Now the County police chief has told us: "We have a real crime problem in Germantown, but I can't provide adequate police service because I would have to pull officers from Silver Spring or elsewhere and create a real problem there."

It's the same with the fire department. Since 1980 no new fire stations were built, until now. Now the County is adding five stations, and we need at least five more - with 36 fire fighters in each station.

That's the hidden cost of uncontrolled growth.

It sounds like a Catch-22. How do you solve it?

The key is a new policy that ties infrastructure to growth. For every big development we need to look carefully and broadly at what infrastructure we'll need, not just roads and schools, but police, fire service, recreation services, all the things that go to make up a community. And you don't go forward until you're sure all those things will be in place.

The other key is that the people making the profit, the developers, must bear more of the costs. We need to assess more realistic fees so the County isn't left holding the bag.

I get told that we can't make developers pay for the county deficit. That's not my intention, even though they helped create it and even though it's outrageously expensive. But what I'm trying to avoid is digging the hole deeper.

How soon can a new policy go into effect?

The Council has asked for an early report from Parks & Planning, summer rather than fall. So our summer vacations may be rather short this year. Meanwhile, we've already agreed that all developments submitted after January 1 are subject to the new rules. There will be no stampede to get in ahead of the new policy.

I understand that the County fire department has an opinion about Washington Adventist Hospital leaving Takoma Park.

This is a question I asked the County fire chief last week. We're at a point where the fire department has actually become an emergency medical service - 90 percent of the calls aren't for fires but for medical emergencies. I asked the fire chief what the impact would be of losing the Adventist hospital on its current site, and he said it would be a disaster. Either Holy Cross will be overburdened with emergency patients, or it would mean a much longer transport to Bethesda.

His view is that if the hospital is to move they should at least keep the emergency room open in Takoma Park, similar to what the Adventists did at Shady Grove. They built a new Shady Grove hospital but because of the demand for emergency services they built an emergency room in another nearby location.

I would like to see them follow the same model down here.

The ICC, is that a done deal?

It's a rotten deal, but I hope it's not a done deal. There are court cases that could at least delay it.

I've asked Governor O'Malley to give the County a straight answer about money. The real issue for me, other than environmental issues, is the limited amount of money.

We're not going to get the Corridor Cities Transitway, the Purple Line, $500 million a year for Metro, the Georgia Avenue Busway and a host of other projects, plus the ICC.

I would like somebody at the state level to be honest with the County and say this is your likely funding for transportation over the next 10 years. Because then the Council could make a decision - do we want to build the Purple Line and the other transit projects or do we want to build the ICC?

What about Ike? Is he willing to take a position?

Ike's position is he will support whatever is in the Master Plan, which you can read two ways. The ICC currently is in the Master Plan so he supports it.

But if the Council took the ICC out of the Master Plan he would be obligated to support that as well.

My position is to take the ICC out. However, I believe there is a need for a connection from Georgia Avenue to the I-270 corridor.

If you weren't building the ICC, you could find a better and cheaper connection. You could avoid some of the environmental problems between Route 29 and Georgia Avenue. That's the part that should never be built. I'm not saying no roads should be built, but let's not build a whole highway with a huge cost.

With Ike's conservative budget, which has less money than the school system wanted, will the Takoma Park Elementary renovation go forward?

This project is already in the pipeline, so yes. The question is when. I would like to prioritize our capital spending and put schools, recreation centers, sidewalk repairs and road repairs ahead of some of the bigger road projects. I'm not even talking about the ICC but several other road projects. I think some of them can be deferred while we deal with more pressing concerns like the schools.

As bad as the overcrowding is now, it will get worse if the school population takes off again as is projected. In the part of the county we're in there isn't any open land left to build schools. When you hear that 50,000 more people could fit in Silver Spring or Bethesda, okay, sure, if they are all singles. But what happens when they get married and have kids?

We have absolutely zero space in our local schools. Our only options here are additions like at Takoma Park Elementary or somehow we must recapture used space for school sites.

You've dealt with the County a lot during your years as a teacher and local politician. Did anything take you by surprise when you started working in Rockville?

I guess I expected that administratively the County would be a better oiled machine. You always hear that the County government is bigger and therefore more efficient than Takoma Park. To discover that its size hasn't necessarily made the County more efficient, that surprised me.

How else would you compare Rockville to Takoma Park?

In the 19 years I spent on the Takoma Park City Coouncil, I never felt the influence of money and powerful people. That just doesn't exist in Takoma Park. You don't stand in a room and watch as people walk in with significant weight or walk in carrying a special panache.

But in Rockville money has a lot more influence. The people there are lobbying for projects that are worth millions and millions of dollars. The amount of money at stake, that's the real difference.

Of course, not very many of the money people are lobbying me!

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