Speaking of the Market House, I accept the sincerest form of flattery from the mayor’s office: compare my “vision” video (http://www.gilbertrenaut.org/2009/08/07/video-gilbert-discusses-his-vision-for-the-market-house/s) with the mayor’s latest press release:

Market House is a 220-year-old landmark in the center of historic downtown Annapolis’ business district whose prime mission is to provide a gathering and shopping destination for those visiting the center city. Today, Market House is in the midst of an ongoing transformation to better meet the needs of those who shop, work, and visit Annapolis offering a variety of goods and services from locally-owned businesses. For more information about Market House, please visit www.markethouseannapolis.com.

I am going door to door every day now to meet as many potential voters as possible. I have been extremely well received and found that so many of our residents share my visions for a unified Annapolis . . . even in 93-degree heat.

Quite a few people have asked me whether there are candidates forums — the word does not seem to be getting out as well as we would like. Please spread the word. The next one is:

Next Thursday, August 20, 7 to 8:30 p.m. in the auditorium at Annapolis High School. Mayoral Candidates Forum sponsored by the Annapolis High Parent Teacher Student Association. The focus will be how each candidate’s vision for the city of Annapolis will affect the schools in the Annapolis cluster. Each will be allowed to speak briefly and then it will be Q&A from the audience followed by brief closing remarks. There will be translators or some sort of technology for translating for the Spanish-speaking members of the audience. Please note this is sponsored by the PTSA, not Annapolis High School.

Tuesday, I traded some door-knocking time to attend an important “town meeting” regarding the health of the Chesapeake Bay and the president’s order for EPA to produce new plans by Sept 9 for restoring the Bay. The meeting was run by Brad Heavner of Environment Maryland (http://www.environmentmaryland.org/). About 400 people were in attendance and dozens lined up to speak. Chuck Fox, EPA Senior Advisor on the Chesapeake Bay was on the panel. (profiled at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/30/AR2009033003066.html). This is clearly an issue of serious concern that we must address. A farmer in his eighties stated: “You talk about the canary in the coal mine, but this is more like the buzzard on the back fence.” We must make our elected officials accountable! As mayor of Annapolis, I would be pressing this issue hard.

Capital article on the town meeting at http://www.hometownannapolis.com/news/top/2009/08/12-22/Crowd-speaks-out-on-bay-cleanup.html

On a separate page, I make the point in the environmental context that there’s a big difference between conducting a policy and striking a pose. Unfortunately our city government rarely gets beyond striking a pose, if that far.

Let’s take another look at the city manager issue. The mayor and mayoral candidates who oppose the proposal so strongly misunderstand the mayor’s role, and therefore see the city manager as eliminating that role. It might help to stop calling a city manager a “CEO,” which is potentially misleading, and instead thinking, in modern corporate parlance, of a “COO,” or chief operating officer.  Do you remember when it hit the news that President Carter personally scheduled the White House tennis courts, and how silly it made him look?

The president’s job, and the mayor’s, is leadership, not tennis court scheduling or pothole triage. If a mayor sees his or her job as pothole triage, then yes, he or she will fear that the city manager proposal marginalizes the mayor’s job.  But a mayor who understands that leadership is about policy will be pleased to be able to devote full time to that higher calling.

Leadership includes reaching out to our citizens, listening to all of them, not just the ones we agree with, building consensus, developing policy, explaining the policy, and following it fairly and evenly. Leadership includes walking all our streets, including the rough ones, and talking to residents and business people about what we should be doing together to make our city the best it can be. Leadership includes reaching out to our sometimes adversaries, such as the county executive and the superintendent of schools, whomever we need to talk to to get the job done. Leadership includes marketing our policy choices, explaining why we chose them, not burying them in a budget without explanation. Leadership includes candor about our finances: no more will we say “we have held the line on property taxes, ” when the reality is that “we didn’t need to raise the tax rate because assessments have gone up more than 80% in the past eight years.”

It’s simple.  It’s all about transparency, outreach, and policy.

Polaroid transfer print by Libby Cullen

On April 17th, the City posted green household suggestions and a certification survey. It encourages non-polluting mowers, but doesn’t mention leaf blowers. Still, it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

On May 17th, I posted a piece on the Market House where I pointed out that the City had chosen their expert trial witnesses to facilitate the planned Market House charette (to be held on Saturday May 30th) and that using their expert trial witnesses wasn’t a good way for the City to learn anything. As I said, “[a]lthough their report is being described by the City as ‘lessons learned,’ that’s very misleading. Expert witnesses in trial have exactly one function — to show that everything bad that happened was somebody else’s fault * * *. Until the litigation is over I can guarantee that they will voice no lessons for the City itself, which would come back to haunt them at trial.”

On or about May 22d, the City ’s public information officer announced that someone else, apparently unconnected with the litigation, had been selected to facilitate the charette. Annapolis Capital Punishment broke the story. http://annapoliscapitalpunishment.blogspot.com/2009/05/phillip-favero-hired-to-facilitate.html

I continue to urge maximum citizen involvement.

The above “comic strip” was Walt Kelly’s tribute to Earth Day 1971. Two years earlier, the New York Times had reported that “Rising concern about the environmental crisis is sweeping the nation’s campuses with an intensity that may be on its way to eclipsing student discontent over the war in Vietnam * * *.” Kelly died in 1973, probably confident that environmentalism would soon change our world for the better. Sadly, almost thirty-eight years later the enemy is still us. We have lots of environmentalists, volunteer and professional, and lots of aggressive environmental arguments and poses, but not much to point to as “success.”  According to Snopes, shockingly, George W. Bush’s house near Crawford, Texas, is vastly more energy-efficient than Al Gore’s near Nashville.  See http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/house.asp

As a candidate for mayor of Annapolis, I am particularly interested in what the City can do. Well, lighting City buildings is a good place to start. Compact fluorescent bulbs last about ten times as long as incandescent bulbs, use about one-third the energy, and give off about three-tenths of the heat. Better yet, LED bulbs last over one hundred times as long, use about one-tenth the energy, and give off about one twenty-fifth the heat. The queen of England, who so far as I know has never claimed to be an environmentalist, started converting Buckingham Palace to LEDs over two years ago.

Development is another area where the City has a lot of influence, but unfortunately it’s hard for any mayor to resist because it enlarges the property tax base, providing more money without raising taxes. Developers tend to blame chicken farmers for polluting the Bay, but development is more damaging nowadays. Pollutants from septic systems are increasing throughout the watershed as development spreads farther beyond the reach of sewer systems. Likewise, storm water runoff from urban and suburban areas is increasing as more land is developed. On the other hand, runoff from farms is generally declining as farmers adopt nutrient management and runoff control techniques, and also because the overall amount of farmland is declining due to development.

What about yard care? I am not proposing that the City regulate it, but only that it pay a little attention and encourage the public in the direction of reasonable practices. Much lawn fertilizer becomes part of runoff and pollutes the Bay. Did you know that the two-cycle lawnmower your lawn-proud neighbor uses once a week in the summer generates much more pollution than a sports utility vehicle? Two-cycle mowers do seem to be on the wane, but even worse, a typical two-cycle leaf blower emits as much pollution as 80 new cars. That pollution, to the extent it isn’t breathed into plants and animals, settles on the ground and becomes part of the run-off too.

UPDATE: On April 17th, to its credit, the City posted green household suggestions and a certification survey. It mentions LEDs and encourages non-polluting mowers, but doesn’t mention leaf blowers.

Finally, what about “single stream” recycling, apparently the wave of the future for curbside collection? The idea seems to be that if we don’t have to sort things, we are more likely to participate. That seems fair enough, so long as we have a contractor who can sort it all out later. The only thing that baffles me is that we seem to have it already in Annapolis. Although we citizens are still separating paper from metals and plastics, the City’s current recycling contractor throws it all into a regular garbage truck. Is this single-stream recycling, or are we just pretending?