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.

Photo by Jon Renaut

Well here we go again. Apparently without any open bid process, the City has selected a “professional facilitator” for the mayor’s market house “charette.” Apparently it will be the firm that specializes in “nurturing restaurant franchisors” that was hired as an expert witness for the litigation. See http://franpointpartners.com/ If so, maybe they’ll be great at it, but how would anyone know?

Although 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 (the mayor’s position on, well, just about everything). 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.

UPDATE: According to Annapolis Capital Punishment, the City has now hired someone else to facilitate the charette: http://annapoliscapitalpunishment.blogspot.com/2009/05/phillip-favero-hired-to-facilitate.html

I urge residents to watch this process closely and get involved. We are all stakeholders.

The charette is scheduled for May 30th from 10 until 2 in Council Chambers at City Hall. If you want to participate, you must be there at 9:30 to sign up. N.B. The Capital says 9 am, but the City’s web site says 9:30. See http://www.ci.annapolis.md.us/display_ann.asp?ID=14035

There are too many variables and moving targets to say exactly what should happen next. The litigation with tenants is still scheduled for trial, and its outcome may have an impact on the Market House’s future. Additionally, there are people working on plans who should be allowed a full and fair hearing. For that reason I don’t want to be overly specific about what I want to happen. I recognize that there may well be better ideas out there than mine, and I do not want to discourage anyone from teaching me something. In general, I think the following is safe to say, however.

A new business plan for the market house will be prepared and published in the fall by the new city management team. The business plan should prepare for full occupancy of the market house and new tenants for successful and strong relationships with the city and finally acknowledge the learning curve necessary for building new businesses “from scratch.” It should include a strategic plan of 5, 10 and 20 year intervals.

A new solicitation will be issued to open up competition for new (and old) vendor owners. The new process will outline in great detail fair and open competition with explicit written criteria and time lines for occupancy, Above all, new merchants must be able to demonstrate their experience and commitment to excellent customer service and quality products.

Some years ago, the City attempted to turn McNasby’s into a watermen’s co-op. Regrettably it failed. But the landscape has changed since then. The buy-local and eat-local (“eat your view”) movements have achieved a much more widespread following. See http://www.buylocalannapolis.com/ To the extent possible, moderated by season and availability, all products sold in the market house should be sourced locally and identified as such for both local and tourist customers. They should represent the best products and quality available from our hard-working local farmers, watermen, and ranchers, and from our local farmland, rivers, and Bay.

A marketing plan should be drawn up and approved at multiple levels to include government and market house vendors on a regular basis.

To the extent possible, given the proprietary nature of the solicitation process, the business plan at every stage of development and implementation will be given its due treatment of transparency to the citizens of Annapolis through the internet, newspapers and other print media.

In March of 1997, I wrote a column about civic polarization, and I reproduce it here, with minor editing.

The City comprehensive planning committee has about seventy members, and I am one of them. At our meetings, we usually split up into four discussion groups, and the last time I went to one, my group spent most of its time talking about racial and ethnic polarization. There was surprisingly general agreement that we have moved farther from, not nearer to, the “dream of one America.” A moving column by Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post of Monday, February 24th, titled “A Lesson in Excess,” made a similar point in the different context of educating children in Baltimore. When I went to high school in Baltimore, students were not allowed to bring cars. Now, according to Yardley, the private school student parking lots are full of cars — usually complete with cellular telephones — which cost more than the State’s average annual per capita income, while, in contrast, a full third of the city’s children are in poverty.

The city of Baltimore, says Yardley, “like so many others, is more divided than ever before between the fortunate and the deprived, between those with bright hopes beyond anything they have earned and those with no hope at all.” “It is no longer fashionable to worry about such matters. Never mind that we are rearing two classes of teenagers that have nothing in common except the potential for estrangement and conflict that their separate worlds entail. Just put the kid in the Cherokee, ship him off to Harvard, and pat yourself on the back.”

What, you may well wonder, can comprehensive planning have to do with that? Well, we wondered too. At least anecdotally, Annapolis is polarized in other ways, and they may have something to do with planning. Repeatedly we have seen citizens, at least some of whom are plainly sincere and well-intentioned, testify on opposite sides of economic development issues. With regard to the conference center proposed for the Menke site, from one perspective, it is viewed enthusiastically as a likely source of new jobs. Indeed, that argument was made even in support of extending all the bar closings to two a.m. — more work for waiters and bartenders. From our perspective, further damage to the quality of downtown life for the sake of a few extra bar and restaurant jobs seems disproportionate, but to the unemployed we may seem just selfish. Yet we wonder, is the job market here polarized too, between low-paying dead-end jobs and relatively high-paying ones, with very little in between? For intelligent City planning we need to know the answer and, if there is such a gap, economic planning must work on bridging it, with entry-level jobs to be sure, but entry level jobs with some potential for advancement to higher levels.

We often hear that there is a shortage of affordable housing in the City, yet also that the number of owner-occupied single family residences is declining. When I was a student at St. John’s in the Sixties, nearly all the faculty lived within walking distance of the campus, but hardly any can afford to do so now. Is there a housing gap between the well-off and the badly-off, with little in between and no hope of moving up from the latter without leaving the downtown and even the City? City planners need to know the answer to that, too, and target development to bridge the housing gap, if there is one.

In our meetings, our single-mindedness must be baffling to the professional staff and planning consultants who service us, and about all that has come of it is the “vision statement” element called “inclusive diversity.” No doubt that is a worthy vision, but without more knowledge and more focus, it will never be any more than a pose.

I ask you, have things changed in twelve years?

I had a letter to the Capital arguing in the opposite direction some time ago, and I repeat its primary points here. The label “administrator,” “manager,” “chief executive officer,” or, following some corporate usage, “chief operating officer,” matters little. The goal is to ensure both competent management and to insulate that management from political interference by any one person.

Mayors are elected for leadership, vision, charisma, things like that, and it’s only blind luck electing one with any management ability. What makes us think we will be so lucky in the next election or any other election? If a mayor proves managerially incompetent, the recall mechanism is burdensome and expensive, including signatures of 30 percent of eligible voters (which may sound easy, but total turnout for the last City election was less than 34 percent) followed by a referendum and selection of a replacement.

Photo by Jon Renaut

Do professional management training, qualifications, and experience guarantee competence? No, nothing guarantees competence; they merely improve the odds. If we get a city manager who turns out not to be managerially competent, he or she can be fired at will — not by one politician in reprisal for something said or done, but by a majority of the whole city council. It might still be “political,” but it’s less likely, and it will not be personal.

I have announced that, without getting into the argument over what a mayor deserves to be paid, in this economy I could not accept the proposed raise and that I would hire a professionally qualified city manager despite the City Council’s negative vote. Rather than an admission of incompetence, it’s a recognition that nothing about the electoral process will inform the voters whether any candidate, including me, is managerially competent or not.

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?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

CONTACT: Gilbert Renaut

TELEPHONE: (410) 269-1768

GILBERT RENAUT ANNOUNCES MAYORAL CANDIDACY

Annapolis, Maryland

February 23, 2009

Thirty-four-year Annapolis resident and civic activist Gilbert Renaut today announced that he will run for Mayor of Annapolis in the Democratic primary election in September. He is forming a committee in support of his candidacy and will announce his campaign officers in the next few weeks.

“With Alderman Richard Israel’s withdrawal from the mayoral race, I can only see four more years of the same sort of polarizing City politics we have had for the last eight, and I can’t sit still for that”, Renaut said.

Renaut stands for

1. Bringing Annapolis together to achieve active and cooperative participation of all our citizens, ethnic groups, neighborhoods, and interest groups to find and make the most of what we can agree on.
2. Hiring qualified professional management for the City, despite the City Council’s recent vote against it, with particular focus on the Market House, the recreation center, and police headquarters.
3. Fiscal responsibility, with transparent and candid City budgeting, financing, hiring, and an end to the practice of claiming that property taxes have been “lowered” when in fact they have been raised dramatically because of rising assessments.
4. New emphasis on recreational and educational youth opportunity for all our residents.
5. Continuing emphasis on community policing and on-the-street police presence to keep our communities safe for the people who live in them.
6. A transportation system that all our residents can enjoy using.
7. An economic development program that puts local businesses first and stops putting up obstacles to their success.
8. A tourism and events program that encourages visitors who come to Annapolis for what’s special about it.

Renaut also said, “Whatever the Mayor’s job is worth, in the current economic climate I could not in good conscience accept the salary increase recently proposed. I will give any such increase to charity or back to the City.”