gaithersblog.net

From the New MoCo Progressive:

County Councilman and retired CASA De Maryland board member George Leventhal’s comment that “At some point, they [the Gaithersburg city council] need to make a decision and understand that 100 percent of people are never going to be satisfied” has motivated Gaithersburg residents to unleash a firestorm of letters to Leventhal.

MoCo goes on to quote several of the letters.

I wrote of my reaction to Leventhal’s comments in an earlier post.

My intent with this post is to offer a bit of an apology to visitors who have followed a link from the Washington Post only to find nothing related to the story they had been reading.

Recently, I added sidebar boxes to my blog with RSS feeds from various sources. One of these sources is the Washington Post. By including these sidebars, my intent is to give readers (and myself) another opportunity to see what’s being reported in the news websites; I can’t blog about everything.

Now, the Washington Post’s website has this cool feature, called “who’s blogging”, where they use the Technorati search engine to find blogs linking to their stories, and they include links back to those blogs in the “who’s blogging” box on the orginal story’s website. Chances are good that you’ve followed one of these links to my site today (welcome!). In the past, I have had a number of my blog posts — which intentionally referenced a Post story — linked back in that way, and those links have brought in a bunch of visitors, for which I’m grateful.

Unfortunately, there seems to be one weakness in this system: The Post does not appear to be able to tell if a blogger is intentionally linking to a story or even if the context of the link is relevant to the story. More importantly, the Post does not appear to be able to tell if a link was hand-enterered by a blogger, or if the link was generated automatically, as would be the case with the links in my RSS boxes. As a result, there are now a large number of Post stories linking to my blog as a result of the links which are automatically published in the Post’s RSS feed. You are welcome to be confused at this point.

Anyway, please know that I honestly am not carrying those Post links as a way to lure unsuspecting visitors to my blog. I carry no advertising and would have no way to profit from such a ruse. I also carry RSS feeds from two other newspapers, neither of which do this. I thought about removing the Post RSS sidebars, but in the end decided that they were too useful to regular readers of this blog. If by chance you happen to have an interest in Gaithersburg, please do take this opportunity to read through some of my archives and consider coming back again in the future. If not, please accept my apologies, and have a good day.

Don Libes reports,

Comcast was hit with a fine in the 2nd quarter and for the 3rd quarter has not submitted sufficient data to even know if it is in compliance. But partial figures show some decreases in customer service performance.

Complaints to the Cable Office are up 31% from 2nd quarter with 76% for service. (Complaints for RCN are down 40% for the same period.) CTC reported 2450 violations, up 11% from the 2nd quarter and 53% from a year ago. While many have now been corrected, CTC reports 1830 violations outstanding.

Picture freezing is mentioned as a notable problem which the county is receiving complaints about. Hasn’t this problem been going on ever since Comcast rolled out its digital service? Another problem mentioned is the issue of standard installations. This was supposed to have been settled but evidentally customers are still being overcharged.

Comcast is also well behind on its obligation to provide cable service to public facilities. Jane’s report shows 33 outstanding requests.

C. Benjamin Ford writes in the Gazette,

Montgomery County’s cable office received complaints about Comcast from 1,156 people, including from 506 in the past three months.

Comcast’s own records showed the company failed to meet customer service standards under the Montgomery County franchise agreement in six of the first eight months of this year. Data for the ninth month was not provided to the county.

‘‘I’m getting more and more complaints about this when I go to the grocery store,” said County Councilwoman Marilyn J. Praisner (D-Dist. 4) of Calverton, chairwoman of the Management and Fiscal Policy Committee which reviewed the cable office’s quarterly report on Monday.

Gaithersburg has its own cable franchise, but has the same franchisees, Comcast and RCN. I will try to obtain equvalent data for this contract. Notwithstanding this,

Janice Cadel, 48, of Gaithersburg recently found herself one of those who experienced Comcast’s customer service problems first hand, she told The Gazette.

When she called Comcast to change her billing because she added Comcast’s telephone service to her television and Internet service, ‘‘they literally closed out my Internet account,” Cadel said. ‘‘When I called the customer service line, I got hung up on several times.”

She managed to get through the next day and was told her Internet service would be restored in 24 to 48 hours. When it was not restored, Cadel said she called again and was told there was no record of her previous call. Her Internet connection was restored the next day, but Cadel said the e-mails the family received during the outage were lost.

Statistics for second quarter 2006 now released. The New MoCo Progressive has the details.

Melissa Harris writes in the Baltimore Sun,

Experts on voting say Maryland is one of the states most at risk for Election Day failures as it tries to recover from a glitch-filled primary amid one of the fiercest political seasons in decades.

Maryland’s problems - like those facing several other states and many counties nationwide - stem from a reliance on among the most sophisticated election systems in the country, manufactured by Diebold Election Systems Inc., one of two leading companies in the industry.

“The analogy I like to use is retrofitting an old car - right now the country is putting 2006 parts on a 1950 Chevy,” said Gracia M. Hillman, a member of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the agency created by Congress to help execute the Help America Vote Act of 2002. “You have to have a very detailed manual, step by step, to work these machines. And the last time I put together something with a manual, I had a glass of wine and wasn’t in a hurry. I didn’t have several hundred people waiting in line.”

Tova Wang, who studies elections for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, said that states have learned from Florida to avoid punch-cards and hanging chads, but also have moved away from electronic voting machines that don’t allow recounts - such as Maryland’s.

After taking office in 2002, Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. repeatedly expressed support for Diebold, while also criticizing elections chief Linda H. Lamone, a holdover from the previous Democratic administration. At the time, Diebold had links to the Republican Party - the then-CEO of its parent company had declared in a fundraising letter that he would deliver the state of Ohio to President Bush in 2004.

Over the past year, Ehrlich has increasingly become a Diebold critic as he faces a tough re-election challenge, arguing that the company’s equipment was susceptible to hacking. Members of the governor’s staff have said that updated research by computer scientists demonstrating vulnerabilities in the systems drove the switch.

Update: The City has released revised versions of the two proposed affordable housing policies: Alternative 1, Alternative 2.

The City has released the final agenda for the Wednesday, November 1, 2006 meeting of the Planning Commission. (I’ve updated my previous post on this here.)

Included in this agenda are discussions of the Affordable Housing Policy and the Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance. The background materials for these two topics have been posted, and now comprise the complete records, including commentary from staff and copies of all the email and letters submitted by the public. The Affordable Housing document is an 85 page pdf, while the APFO record is 120 pages long.

One of the big questions regarding the APFO is whether the ordinance should be sensitive to the six-year planning horizon that MCPS uses, or only to the two-year funding horizon. MCPS would prefer the former, while most of the public would appear to prefer the latter.

In the Affordable Housing debate, the major question is whether Olde Towne should have special treatment under the ordinance.

If you are interested in these topics, I suggest reading through these documents and possibly attending this Wednesday’s session.

Land of opportunity, indeed.

Dennis O’Brien writes in the Baltimore Sun:

In a country where rags-to-riches stories are commonplace, Quiñones’ rise from the fields to the operating room, from illegal immigrant to citizen, is an unusually compelling tale of perseverance and talent.

Living in a run-down trailer in those early days, toiling in the fields as a migrant worker, a stranger in a land whose language he couldn’t speak, Quiñones said he often wondered why he had left family, friends and a job in Mexico.

“There were times I would sit in that trailer and say to myself, ‘What am I doing here?’” he recalled.

“There are a lot of Mexicans who come in illegally and end up succeeding, owning their own businesses or something along those lines,” said Ben Johnson, director of the Immigration Policy Center, a research and education organization in Washington. “But I have to say, this is the first I’ve ever heard of anyone becoming a brain surgeon.”

“I came with the idea of making a lot of money and going back, but I abandoned that idea after I saw the opportunities here for being able to achieve what you set out to achieve - and helping people at the same time,” [Quiñones] said.

In particular, Quiñones benefited from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. It granted temporary and permanent residency status - or green cards - to roughly 2.7 million illegal immigrants, many of them farmworkers in California.

Quiñones at first received temporary residency status, allowing him to work legally in the U.S. A few years later - while he was at Berkeley - he got his green card. By the time he applied for citizenship in 1997, he was in his second year at Harvard Medical School, spoke fluent English and had letters of recommendation from two members of the Harvard faculty.

In June, Quiñones won a $150,000 grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, most of which he plans spend on an optical microscope capable of time-lapse images that can track the migration patterns of neural and brain cancer stem cells.

Last month, he was inducted into an alumni hall of fame organized by the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, a group that gathers private donations to provide financial aid to college-bound Latinos.

Twenty Latinos in the U.S. have been so honored. They include U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzalez and Antonio Oscar Garza Jr. the U.S. ambassador to Mexico.

The Washington Post and Washington Times both now have stories on this.

Nancy Trejos writes in the Post:

“Most of our tenants are not national chains,” Levitt said. “They’re people who have one business and it’s located at the Festival, and their livelihood is dependent on that business. That’s how they put food on their table and pay for things they want to provide for their families, and we’re very cognizant of that.”

Humpton said city representatives will meet with the county to explore other options. “Unfortunately, we’re in some ways back to square one,” he said.

The county has agreed to fund the center but has asked the city to find a location for it. County leaders yesterday urged the city to step up its efforts.

“At some point, they need to make a decision and understand that 100 percent of people are never going to be satisfied,” said County Council President George L. Leventhal (D-At Large).

I think that Mr. Leventhal needs to get a grip here. Perhaps the County operates by bullying property owners, but in Gaithersburg it seems that when a property owner says “no”, the City takes it as a “no”. Mr. Leventhal’s comment might make sense if the City Council had rejected the site based on public concern. But the City approved it, and it was the owner of the property who said no. In exactly what sort of coercion does the County think that the City should be engaging? Moreover, it was the County that was negotiating a lease with Nellis, not the City. The County failed to make this site work; perhaps Mr Leventhal could explain that.

Personally, I don’t think that, in the current climate of intense scrutiny, either the City or the County will ever find a witting property owner in the City of Gaithersburg to lease for this purpose unless one of these governments, or some advocacy group, ponies up property of their own, just like the County did for CASA’s site at 734 E University Blvd. If the County can give a 1.45 acre lot and a house to CASA (CASA uses it rent free; the fair rent value is estimated to be $140,000 according to the final report of the Day Laborer Task Force), they ought to be able to do something similar for Gaithersburg.

The Post again:

For years, workers have congregated each morning at a parking lot next to a church on North Frederick Avenue. Last year, the county leased a building a few blocks away, but residents said that was an unsuitable spot for a center. Since then, city officials have considered 30 other sites, only to have the owners turn them down in many cases.

I’ll take that as a correction.

Keyonna Summers writes in the Times:

“They felt this would be harmful to their businesses, to their sales,” Mr. Levitt said after the meeting. “We have a responsibility to the investors.”

City officials yesterday said they respect the company’s decision. Officials have tried to find a site for the center for more than a year.

Earlier this month, the Gaithersburg City Council voted 3-1 to endorse the Festival site, allowing Montgomery County officials to seek a lease with the company.

“Nellis Corp. did a great job researching whether it could get done but couldn’t overcome tenant resistance,” Assistant City Manager Tony Tomasello said.

Officials said they would discuss the next step at the Nov. 6 city council meeting.

“It’s certainly been frustrating for everyone, but it’s not an issue we can just walk away from,” Mr. Tomasello said.
County officials said they remain committed to funding a center.

Darryl Fears writes in the Washington Post:

The proposals being drafted by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a division of the Department of Homeland Security, could nearly double application fees, toughen the required English and history exams, and ask probing questions about an applicant’s past, such as “Who is your current wife’s ex-husband?”

Changes in the citizenship application process are being contemplated amid a contentious debate over whether the federal government should undertake a comprehensive reform of immigration policy that includes establishing a guest worker program, or just build a barrier along the Mexican border and adopt a get-tough policy toward illegal immigrants and companies that employ them. Throughout the debate, however, opponents of illegal immigration have said their quarrel is not against immigrants who are in the country legally.

Update: The Gazette now has an article on this:

The city has pursued 30 sites in the last year, but landlords have shied from leasing their properties for a day-laborer center. Residents and business owners have also objected to several proposed locations.

A day-laborer center would serve an estimated 75 workers who gather in Gaithersburg each morning to find work — most of them are Latino and many of them are illegal immigrants.

About half the 50 tenants at the Festival attended a meeting this morning with Nellis President Randall Levitt who said he provided city and county responses to concerns raised by the tenants earlier this month.

After an hour and a half, Levitt said, the message was clear.

‘‘We’ve said from the beginning that the most important voice we ought to listen to … would be our tenants,” he said in an interview. ‘‘In the end, with one exception — a person who was neither strongly for nor against — everyone who spoke urged us not to go forward.”

As posted on the CIty’s website:

Lease Will Not be Executed for Employment Center at Festival Shopping Center
Posted 10/27/2006

Owners of the Festival at Muddy Branch Shopping Center informed the City of Gaithersburg that after receiving unanimous strong disapproval from tenants at a meeting this morning, the Nellis Corporation will not be executing a lease with Montgomery County government for the operation of an employment center at the shopping center. The site was initially endorsed by a majority of the Mayor and City Council at a special work session on October 12, at which time the Nellis Corporation and Montgomery County government began lease negotiations.

“While we are disappointed that this potential location is no longer available to us, I respect Nellis Corporation’s concern for their tenants and understand that this is a business decision,” said City Manager David Humpton. “I would like to thank the Nellis Corporation for thoroughly investigating the opportunity and going this far to attempt a resolution.”

City staff will be communicating with Montgomery County government and will be re-evaluating options. Possible next steps will be proposed to the Mayor and Council at an upcoming meeting.

For more information please contact the Gaithersburg City Manager’s Office at 301-258-6310 or cityhall@gaithersburgmd.gov