Notice of Hearing

This Notice of Hearing from Planning and Zoning’s Annapolis Board of Appeals is to all property owners surrounding the AYC’s proposed expansion project.

A meeting of the Annapolis Board of Appeals will be held at 7:00 PM on Tuesday 7 June 2016 in the City Council Chamber at 160 Duke of Gloucester Street in Annapolis.  A Special Exception request by the Annapolis Yacht Club will be considered to allow proposed parking and access to be located in the R2-NC zoning district to serve uses located in the adjacent nonresidential (WME) zoning district, on property located at 321 Burnside Street:  SE2016-004.

My Guest Column appeared in the Capital this past Saturday (May 21) with all the questions still unanswered concerning the AYC expansion project.  If you need a refresher on the entire situation you will find it my March 22 post (Questions and More Questions) of my submission to P&Z when they asked for comments on the AYC’s proposal.

Announcement from Alderman Arnett

Ward 8 Residents and Friends

 The Annapolis City Council will meet Monday 23 May at 7 p.m. in the Council Chambers. Public hearings will be followed by a legislative session. Although your attendance is preferred, all Council meetings are broadcast on Comcast channel 100 and on Verizon channel 34.

Please note the public hearing on the property tax rate. There will be a final vote on the Ordinance to change City Code to conform to Charter revisions that reorganize the City government structure.

Another Year, Another Class

Our children of every age are ending their school year, some more successfully than others.  We keep hearing about failures of the education system which are rooted in too many kids per teacher, lack of 21^st century insights, and unimaginative curriculums.

We need to transform our education system into one that connects fact dots into useful skill sets.   It is essential that current and future generations become critical thinkers and problem solvers.  Toward that end I have proposed, and will continue to propose a Network of Education/Innovation Incubators.  These incubators will link the classroom to the real world.  They will bridge fact and application and reinforce both to define our future as a community, as a nation and as a world.  The hierarchy of need has food, clothing and shelter and must be brought into the new millennium by including education, in order to recognize the complex and ever-changing demands of the modern age.

Incubators.  So, how do they work?

Entrepreneurial Innovators from every discipline and walk of life will be invited to use the incubator sites for problem solving and/or development of their projects.  The Innovators will benefit by their participation in the site and in turn, benefit the site through the problems they are trying to solve or the product they are trying to develop. The innovators will also be asked to be mentors for the students in the Education component of the incubator.  They will be a vital resource assisting in student projects.  Make no mistake, the projects the students will initiate, and in which the innovators will assist, will require a serious level of science and technology, mechanical and design and other skills.  They will not just be watching a Chia Pet sprout.

These initiatives will be funded through public/private partnerships.

The first incubator site will be here, in Annapolis, and will benefit from our unique location, having access to the Naval Academy, Chesapeake Bay, mid-Atlantic State colleges and universities, government and business.

The incubator will provide a wide range of educational opportunities.  Example?  A student may establish and participate in his/her own research, goal setting, understanding of financial issues, personnel/staffing considerations, the business of operating facilities, and so much more.

The proposed incubators will have regional themes.  What might that mean for Annapolis, which is surrounded by water?  The Annapolis site may be working on a water theme:  How do we measure and maintain water quality; how do we deal with rising water levels; how can we communicate effectively through water; how do we ensure our water resources are able to support sustainable food resources?

The Annapolis incubator will have the capability of linking to other incubators, let’s say to an incubator in Los Angeles, which may attack the water theme by addressing the problem of too little fresh water and the use of sea water to fill in the gaps.  There are many themes for the incubators, wherever they are located.  Among these themes may be health care, air quality, sustainable food production and preservation, and climate change.  All these themes have the potential to be linked among incubator sites.

The hundreds of students throughout each region taking part in this program will not be required to be ‘A’ students.  All students, A,B,C  and yes, even those who may currently be poor performers due, in part, to lack of interest, will benefit from that spark generated by the incubators.

Isn’t it time to meet the challenges of this millennium, starting with meaningful changes in the education of our children?

Important Update on Finances

This May 2016 email from Alderman Ross Arnett on Annapolis’ Finances summarizes the problems facing our city.  To get the complete detailed Finance Committee report contact the Alderman directly using his contact information shown below.

Ward 8 and Friends

Attached please find the Finance Committee Report to the City Council regarding the Mayor’s proposed Budget for Fiscal 2017. The Committee largely accepted the Mayor’s Budget with the exception of three repairs totaling $1.5 million dollars and an enhancement of $200,000 for Community Grants.

The enhancement for Community Grants is aimed at returning that funding to the past level of $400,000. These are dollars that provide seed money and local match dollars to help organizations that provide services such as counseling, job training, and other similar support services for our residents who cannot otherwise get this aid. These are services that the City has not and cannot provide, but are needed nevertheless.

As you will see in the Report, the Committee offers three repairs to the Budget to correct deviations from good accounting practices to attain the appearance of balance. One action dips into Fund Balance to fund sidewalk repairs, another skips pay-as-you-go (paygo) payments for fleet replacement, and the third underfunds police overtime. Using Fund Balance, the collection of budget surpluses over time, is a red flag to rating agencies that the City is starting to get into financial trouble. Likewise, delaying paygo payments for known annual expenses is also a sign of budget problems. Underfunding police overtime is not only bad budgeting, it’s bad policy in a period of increasing crime.

In the view of the Committee, these accounting issues must be corrected at a cost of $1.5 million. The additional $.2 million dollars for community support is desirable, but more discretionary. In any event, the Finance Committee has not made a recommendation on how to fund these increases, leaving that to the Mayor and the rest of the Council.

As always, there are funding options: raise property taxes, in this case by 2.8 cents per hundred of assessed value or 4.3%; or cut services, meaning staff and other expenses by $1.7, about 15 jobs. And of course, there can be combinations of tax increases and spending cuts. But somehow the shortfall must be addressed.

In this regard, I stand with the Mayor in opposing a tax increase. That’s what we always do instead of making the tough decisions. My interpretation of the Mayor’s “clean sweep” campaign promise was that he proposed to change the way the City does business. No new taxes and reductions in spending were to be part of that sweep as I heard the message.

In my view the Mayor and Council must get to the business of right sizing the City government and the services it provides. We need to use the new programmatic budget process to review lower priority services and make cuts there.

It is essential that we do this now. If you look at Appendix B of the Committee Report, you will find my analysis of the 10 Year Projections for the City finances. That analysis shows a sobering picture of our future as a financially sustainable operation. We are already late in getting started and our finances will only get the longer we wait. And it will be harder to regain control of the budget the longer we wait.

As always, you can contact me at EastportRoss@aol.com or call me at (443) 745-2901.

Ross Arnett, Alderman, Ward 8

 

 

With or Without You

Pick up almost any copy of the Capital, for example the 10 May edition.  Front page has an article about schools, the Opinion page has editorials on downtown businesses and Crystal Spring.  These are displayed as discreet items which, at ground level, appears to be the case.

But step back, think through the linkages that exist between Crystal Spring and traffic and the environment; between downtown business and economic development and traffic; between schools and economic development and the need for innovation to protect the environment.

Our community is a system of integrated systems.  Impact one and you see the second and third order effect throughout all the others.  We may be limited in the size and wealth of our local jurisdictions.  We are limited in the extent of our roads and availability of land on which to build and tax.  The limitations are on one side of our community ledger.  What about the opportunity side of the ledger?

That’s the exciting side.  The one that is barely tapped.  The one that is virtually unlimited.  This is a clear call to action.  Let the community work with willing, risk-taking elected officials to develop the framework for  the opportunity side of the ledger and scope out what we want our future to be.  Timid elected officials?  Let’s push them aside.  We can’t allow ourselves to think in four-year blocks of time.  We need to think about the next 20+ years.

Can we realistically achieve all that we can conceive?  Who knows.  But if we don’t try, we will never know.

Unless you are willing to muddle into the future and let it just happen to you, you need to take your fair share of responsibility for forging a future built on limitless, thoughtful imagination.

Share this:

Please see SHARE: COMMUNITY ANNOUNCEMENTS for this Monday’s City Council Meeting Agenda.

Ducks

As we continue to define Eastport, we have added a new feature. Remember to send your photo additions to our Eastport Photo Gallery and to caption your photos.

All photos of Eastport are welcome.  What can they include?  Could be a tree canopy on a particular street, a building of interest, a picture of traffic when the drawbridge is up, or a mood captured in your photo, a sunset, clouds…  use your imagination.

This week’s photo is of City Dock and the Ducks taken prior to the work there this winter and spring.

We all know it’s fun to take aim with that omnipresent cell phone most of us carry around with us, and snap photos to share with others.  And so easy to share them on eastportdefined, as a comment.  The photo archive will only be as good as the observations of each of you.  So let us see what you see, and feel what you feel.

Thank you for giving us permission to use your photos to further the community purposes of this site.

If Not Now, When?

We have been “assured” by our elected officials and project proponents that the projects proposed for Eastport deserve approval if they lend themselves to economic development.  The knee-jerk reaction and the cloak they wrap themselves in:  Economic Development.

Do we have any independent confirmation that, at best, these proposed projects will result in a zero sum economic benefit?  Will the benefits of these projects that result from property tax and/or other fees do nothing more than offset the costs of providing city services?  We should be looking at life cycle costs and, more importantly, the sustainability of returns on investment.  When you consider the impact on the environment, the loss of open space and the destruction of forest areas, the calculation quickly changes.  The costs outweigh the benefits by a substantial factor.

The proposed projects not only do not pay for themselves, they are a net loss to our community.  That cost is not recoverable once the environment is scarred.

So what’s a person to do?  First, realize that the net impact of such projects affects us all.  Traffic congestion on Forest Drive affects Eastport; air quality at Crystal Spring affects everyone; loss of open space where development is running wild impacts nuisance flooding and thereby impacts us all.

We need to harness the valuable and hard-won experiences of groups like the Crystal Spring advocates who should not just be Crystal Spring-centric.  They, and we, need to be part of  the fabric of an ongoing and enduring community support system to counter the influence of the project proponents of the world.

Another troublesome point involves the proposals discussed by the County Executive to change the planning and zoning process.  These possible changes, or disproportionate support by certain government officials, may have positive results, but here’s the rub.  How will we, the community, know what’s positive from what’s negative if we are not actively involved in the process?   We can only help assure ourselves that our interests are being represented if we are engaged, and speak out, as citizens, and ensure that our elected officials are fully accountable to us.

We are still troubled by the catch-all Economic Development rationale for just about everything.  Sure, we need annual budgets to ensure that we can pay our bills, now.  But some serious attention must be paid to the strategic (long-term) realities we may face 5 years or 10 years and beyond.

We have to think systematically, and integrate the strengths of our community. We have to step back from the obvious and move out of our linear thinking.

I don’t want to promote a ‘hair on fire’ urgency, but the fact is, the clock is ticking.  Is there a better or more critical time to involve yourself?  It is not someone else’s responsibility.  If we do not care enough to be actively involved in defining the future of our community, someone else will define that future for us.

So to get down to it, what’s my point?  My point is that we cannot just pick and choose the projects we can see from the front door of our homes, or that we drive by every day.  We need to commit to being involved in every project proposal.  Their impacts will be irreversible and, over time, will coalesce to negatively touch each and every corner of the community.

We’re all busy.  No one feels they really have time for one more commitment.  But ask yourself, is the need to determine the future of the community, where we raise our children and live our lives, a great enough incentive and motivation to do something?  Is it?

And when, if not now?