How Concerned Citizens Expose Inept County Leaders
By Gail Weiss
A group of citizens recently showed up in Rockville for both the illegal immigrants’ press conference on Monday, May 21 as well as the County Council vote on Tuesday, May 22 to allocate $370,000 for illegal immigrants’ woes. Citizens have to take time off from work to attend these kabuki theatre performances where we endeavor to keep the county government from squandering our taxes. While last week’s efforts were unsuccessful, our opposition was clearly heard!
After the County Council cut $120 million to balance this year’s budget, they discovered it wasn’t enough, so they raided another $62 million from retiree health funds to use for general spending. However, Council members thought that using $370,000 of our tax dollars on impoverished (must be 200 percent below the poverty line to ‘qualify’) illegal aliens who get into an immigration scrape was a great idea.
The original resolution was so far reaching that they decided to shorten the list of eligibility exclusions for this largesse. Hopefully, it will at least keep rapists and murderers from using the funds to remain in this country - and county - illegally. Unless it’s a pedophile rapist and the victim’s age (sometimes as young as three, four, five years old) makes it a pyrrhic victory if a conviction was obtained by requiring such a victim to testify. A criminal conviction is required to be disqualified from eligibility. But no matter. The Council is apparently happy with its amended form. If they had reached their arms any further into the air to unanimously vote “yes,” they would have dislocated their shoulders.
Remember that on June 26th, three of the four Council members who are on the Term Limits chopping block – Elrich, Leventhal and Berliner – are on the ballot to be our next County Executive and hope to stick around for another 12 years. This despite Berliner (and frankly all the At-large Council members – such as Elrich and Leventhal) being asleep at the wheel while a large swath of his district became subjected to increased airplane noise and pollution due to FAA’s NextGen flight path change which concentrates airplanes’ paths over some neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, George Leventhal thought it would be a good tactic to criticize members of his own party who are ringing the alarm bells of fiscal malfeasance (as outlined by the same outfit that the county hired to help pitch to Amazon) that his votes helped create over the last 12 years, by stating, among other nonsense, on his Facebook page: “Those who seek to lead the county must be…careful not to spark a panic.” Really? So, ‘shhhh’, we should only whisper that these are the jokers who have run this county into a fiscal ditch for fear of killing off new business start ups – that their polices have already effectively killed off?
The reason that 70 percent of citizens voted for Term Limits a couple of years ago was because of chicanery like this, which necessitated a 9% real estate tax hike, among other tax increases. Let’s make sure the impact of Term Limits sticks and we don’t let any of these jokers back in the door.