At the Talbot County Council’s June 23rd meeting, President Cory Pack introduced a resolution to draft a diversity statement that he hoped would be adopted by the council and added to the county’s employee handbook. Council member Laura Price was the only member to offer a statement in opposition. “We have a lot of other problems here,” she said, “I don’t think this is one of them… I don’t think we need to create a problem that doesn’t exist in Talbot County.” 

At the same meeting, Council member Frank Divilio, in his support for the resolution, offered an amendment that would include county board, commission, and committee members along with county employees. Although his amendment to the resolution was approved, the full resolution, after discussion, was rejected. Afterwards, President Pack said he was “dumbfounded” that the council did not support the addition of such a statement to the county employee handbook.

A month later, the council had a change of heart. It revisited the issue and voted unanimously in favor of developing the diversity statement and, at their September 22nd meeting, adopted one that had been drafted by County Human Resources Director Kim Ferullo. Council members called the action “historic” and a “turning point” for the county. Council Member Laura Price also offered praise, saying Ferullo “nailed it” with her effort. 

The statement reads, in part: “The foundation of our diversity, equity and inclusion philosophies are to clearly articulate to both our employees and the general public our intention to create a work culture that embraces our ability to hire, retain, develop, manage and promote a diverse and engaged workforce…Talbot County expects employees to treat others with dignity and respect at all times. All employees are expected to exhibit conduct that reflects inclusion during work, at work functions – on or off the work site – and all county-sponsored events.”

Council President Pack congratulated the council on passing the resolution but warned after the vote that the hard part is to come. “Now comes the tough part of whether we can live up to what you’ve drafted for us,” Pack said to Ferullo. “You’ve done your part, now this council, and councils to come, will have to do their part to live up to it.”

As it turned out, we didn’t have long to wait. Only a month later, at their October 27 meeting, three council members – Frank Divilio, Chuck Callahan and Laura Price – would find themselves in conflict with the diversity and inclusion statement that they had supported and praised only a month earlier. After Assistant County Manager Jessica Morris read a letter to the council from the President of the Talbot County Chapter of the NAACP, Richard Potter, they conveniently forgot their commitment. In the letter, Potter requested that he, along with four other community leaders, be granted a meeting with the council to discuss the removal of the “Talbot Boys” monument, the last Confederate monument still remaining on public land in Maryland. Divilio, who voted twice against the removal of the statue, took issue with the meeting request, saying it was unclear in Potter’s letter who would be coming to the meeting with the NAACP leader, despite the fact that he had been provided with their names. “We don’t know where this is, how big, or what time,” Divilio said. “We haven’t coordinated with anybody else…I do not like this.” He, Callahan and Price  refused in the end to meet with any group at any time that included Richard Potter. 

To me, their refusal to respect a local Black leader’s legitimate request to meet with them does not follow their own guidelines as outlined in their diversity statement, wherein they pledged “to treat others with dignity and respect at all times.” Their actions clearly illustrate President Pack’s earlier concern that the hard part is “to live up to it.”  

Council members need not only to live up to the words they promised to adhere to, but need to remind themselves that an important part of their job is listening to their constituents. Anyone who runs for public office should realize that there are times when difficult and sensitive issues arise, and that ignoring those who want to voice their concerns is both irresponsible and cowardly. It is the hard decisions that we, as citizens, expect our leaders to confront with dignity, reason and compassion. Simply put, they need to remember the diversity statement they just approved and “to live up to it.” 

James Richardson
Claiborne

The Biden/Harris sign on Oxford Road was covered this Friday night, by a red hammer and sickle flag, the symbol of Russian Communism.  I can’t be certain it was sheer stupidity, but I lean toward a desperate, misinformed Trump thug who has no clue about communism or totalitarianism but is a glassy-eyed, right-wing radio zombie.

He feels that liberals are socialists and thus, communists and the Democratic Party wants to move America to communism. Despite the fact that Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders’ views of government are widely disparate, people like this Trump supporter likely have no clue that Social Security, Medicare, which many Trump supporters rely upon, are socialistic institutions.  The fact that liberal Democrats had to fight conservatives for these two American institutions appears to be a mystery to them.  That FDR’s socialistic work programs of the 1930’s were essential to this country’s emergence from the Great Depression.

When the Trump Administration doled out millions of dollars to farmers and billions to small businesses, that out-and-out socialism is OK. When Obama “bailed out” the auto industry with loans, not so good, despite the fact that US auto giants also paid back those loans.  When states provide free public education from K-12, that is a form of socialism that Trump supporters fail to grasp is socialistic – and how it helps them.

The lie that socialistic programs lead us down the slippery slope socialism which lead to communism is almost obscenely stupid, but it works to frighten folks who don’t grasp the nuances. Yet it does serve as a convenient smokescreen for ultra conservatives to mask their strong tendencies toward fascism and national socialism.  Trump announced he is a “nationalist”. He is more likely a “national socialist”, in that some of his most ardent supporters use the swastika, or versions of the swastikas, flown interchangeably with the confederate flag in their demonstrations.

Having myself been referred to as “Comrade” Terrone here on the Talbot Spy, I’ve abstained from responding in-kind to that type of political reference from someone who should know better when debating issues of the Talbot Boys.  This is a cheapshot but commonly used by people desperate to tell a false narrative.  In the very recent case of the hammer and sickle photo is a desperate and overt act in defiance of the truth.  When was the last time you saw a Democrat flying the hammer and sickle at a rally? Yet right wing fanatics regularly fly swastikas and confederate flags.  Those are the facts.

Mickey Terrone
Oxford

Something that has bothered me for many years is that there are few, if any, battery recycling locations in Talbot Co.  Yesterday I reached Stacey at Public Works who said that the landfill or Lowe’s may have battery drop offs.  I called Lowe’s and the operator said that she “thought” they did recycle both car and household batteries. I have yet to check on this. But I would have thought that both of these women should have know with certainty.

I used to take my batteries to auto repair shops and they put them with car batteries for recycling. I couldn’t find one yesterday who would take them.
       
I don’t think that many people think about this, so instead, millions of batteries end up in the landfill with horrendous effects on our land, water and people.
       
There is an excellent article about the polluting effects of batteries in this link

Our landfill is relatively new compared to older ones which have been around for many, many decades. I don’t have the statistics on that. But batteries break down as you can see when yours are corroded. The process continues in our landfills and releases cadmium, lead, zinc, manganese, nickel, silver, mercury, and lithium, as well as acids. These chemicals are extremely toxic and will surface on land areas and in our water. This photo shows chemicals that have surfaced from a landfill.

As concerned residents, users of our streams and rivers, and consumers of local farm products, we should be alarmed that we don’t have battery recycling drop boxes throughout the county at convenient locations such as shopping areas where people go anyway. Not located in a remote location like the landfill. How many of us will drive that far out of town to get rid of a few batteries?

Please call or write Talbot Co. Public Works 410-822-2525 and the Talbot County Council to request that the county start a program of battery recycling. Write letters to the editor, tell you friends and family, this is serious stuff folks, in 20 years or less we will begin to see the effects of poisonous chemicals leeching onto our land and into our water. This IS poison, and should not be taken lightly. It can kill our fish and lead and other poisons can harm our children as well as adults. If we start now we can reduce this problem dramatically.

Drop off locations and the reasons why they are so important should be freely advertised in The Talbot Spy, The Star Dem and other area papers.

Catherine Alspach
Talbot County

Talbot County citizens are fortunate to live in the lowest-tax jurisdiction in Maryland. Property tax rates in Talbot are the lowest in the state, and the local income tax rate is second-lowest, above only oceanfront Worcester County. The low property tax rate can attract buyers and businesses to our county, and the tax cap, written into our county charter, has been so effective that we are now facing unintended consequences—threats to public safety and emergency services.

This year, the County Council, concerned over the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, opted to leave property tax rates unchanged and held all departments except the Sheriff’s office funded at last year’s levels.

The exception for the Sheriff’s office was to increase deputies pay by $5,000 per year to keep pace with the lowest funded police departments in the region. The move was insufficient, however. Despite the increase, the Sheriff was unable to recruit any new deputies this year to fill open positions. Having the least attractive retirement program in the region also hurts.

Advanced Life Support (ALS) ambulances and crews are stationed around the county, but the county needs another unit. Average response time is now 7 minutes and 41 seconds—within the critical 8-minute standard. But there are times every unit is responding to a call, and what happens when the next call comes in? And if you are in the northern parts of the county, the average response time is between 10 and 11 minutes—critical minutes that can affect health outcomes. The county needs to add a unit, likely in Cordova, but that requires a capital investment and operational funding for personnel—and there just isn’t room now to raise the revenues to cover this essential emergency service.

With property tax rates held flat, and the modest increase in spending, the difference is budgeted to come out of the county’s reserve funds. This is appropriate. When the economy was favorable, the county built up modest reserves; as the economy goes into recession, we spend those reserves to maintain basic services until the economy recovers. But the county cannot indefinitely outspend its current revenues.

Maryland mandates what we spend on our court system and the minimum that we spend on public schools. The state allows the county to exceed its tax cap to fund the schools. But there is no state mandate to fund the Sheriff’s department, or ambulance services, or road repairs. And so it is those services that suffer when the current cap forces cuts.

Ballot questions on Charter Amendments B, C, and D address these shortfalls.

Question B is merely a technical fix so that there is a practical way to calculate the cap on the property tax.

Question C eliminates the consumer price index-urban (CPI-U) as an alternative cap and fixes the cap at a simple 2%. Currently, if CPI-U is lower that 2%, the inflation rate serves as the cap. In 2020, CPI-U was 1.9%, so that set the maximum property tax could be raised. However, the County Council, exercising prudence and judgement, looking at the economic outlook for the year, did not raise the rate at all, leaving property tax at 2019 rates.

If the Council had raised the property tax rate as much as the CPI-U allowed, the owner of a home assessed at the median home price ($326,216) would have owed an extra $17. If the higher 2% cap had been in effect, the property tax bill would have been less than $2 more. Just $2. Amendment C’s impact, if it passes, will be quite small.

Question D would temporarily, for 5 years only, allow the Council to add a penny to the property tax rate above the current cap. For the same owner of a home assessed at the median home price of $326, 238, the increase would be just $32.

If Charter Amendments B, C, and D all pass, and the Council opts to levy the maximum increases under the reformed cap, Talbot County will still have the lowest property tax rates in the State of Maryland. But instead of an understaffed Sheriff’s department and ambulance services stretched thin, the county will be able to support these vital public safety and emergency services functions.

If you support public safety and emergency services, vote FOR the Charter Amendments B, C, and D. Do it for your family’s safety. Do it for your neighbors. Do it for your own good. Vote FOR B, C, and D.

TALBOT COUNTY COUNCIL

Corey Pack, President
Chuck Callahan, Vice President
Frank Divilio, Council Member
Pete Lesher, Council Member
Laura Price, Council Member

The purpose of this letter is threefold: to urge voters to vote FOR local Questions B, C, and D pertaining to our local revenue cap; to explain why it is important we do so; and most especially to throw brickbats at the Council members for their utterly pathetic personal efforts to get these questions passed.

Taken together, these three ballot questions would provide some very modest (and temporary) financial relief from the overly restrictive shackles that have bound the County for twenty-five years. At present the County’s total revenue from real estate taxes cannot increase in any year by more than the lesser of 2% or the increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban areas, subject to a State mandated exception for school funding.

(Question B is a technical clean-up needed to bring the Charter language into accord with actual practice as to how taxed properties are identified. Question C removes the CPI constraint, leaving a permanent cap at 2%. And Question D enables the Council, for the next 5-years only, to exceed the cap by one-cent per hundred dollars of valuation, an exceedingly modest increase–for example, $30 on a $300,000 home.)

Why this change? We need the money, little as it is. We, meaning you and me. Your family and mine. And our neighbors too. The County budget is “our” budget, and its expenditures are what “we” spend on our own very real needs. If one has the least notion that we’re all in this together, then you get the idea. The Spy’s recent interview with Sheriff Joe Gamble and Clay Stamp provides concrete examples in areas we all understand (ambulances, cops), but the same concept pertains across every aspect of civic life. Would you cut your grocery bill to $200 a month and think you’re really smart if it’s your own kids that would go hungry?

After 25 years, the matter has gotten critical. Assume just for argument’s sake that the irrational Talbot County Council circa 1995 (elected by the voters) was genuinely profligate, spending like madmen, and the populace was rightly up in arms. So, in spite of the fact that “revenue caps” were almost unknown in Maryland or most other jurisdictions, let’s say it was justified at that moment. But the cap is analogous to putting an overweight man on an 800-calorie diet. Healthier for a while perhaps, and certainly gets the weight down! But year after year? For twenty-five years? We are long past the point when a healthy belt-tightening turned into malnutrition, when the cumulative effects harm operation of the civic body…not just public safety, but every function of government.

Here’s a relevant point to think about: You know that crazy County Council over in Caroline, and also the one up in Kent County? Infamous wasters of money, thriftless, spend like drunken sailors. The citizens up there must be stupid and let ‘em get away with burning money! We are all proud that Talbot County has the lowest property tax rate in Maryland. But did you know it’s not lowest by 2%, or 5%, or 15%? It’s HUGELY the lowest. Caroline County’s spendthrift Commissioners enacted a rate 54% higher than ours. Kent County 60% higher! (The cheapest rate other than Talbot is in Queen Anne’s, where it’s 33% higher.) Forget about Charles County (79%); I don’t even want to mention those city-slickers.

Do you honestly believe we are so much smarter than everyone else, that our County Council can provide all of the public services that we actually need—emergency services, public safety, and the most quotidian that we take for granted—at a fraction of what everyone else expends, year after year after year? Are we really the smart ones?

I also want to call to account the spineless Council Members who, for the three months since proposing this modest Amendment, as to this question seem to have disappeared. They all put forward this proposal—unanimously. But, as taxes are poison, they then seem to have left Dodge. Where are the personal Commentaries from Divilio and Callahan and Pack, the interviews, the Letters to the Editor from Lesher and Price? With one exception, I have not yet seen any member out in public personally beating the drum for this tax increase they know is essential. And voting has been underway for weeks! (At the demonstration supporting the police I did see Pete Lesher handing out flyers in support, and I was told he did an MCTV video also.)

Where is the leadership? These are the five you elected to direct our body politic. It is they—not Sheriff Gamble or Director Stamp or the Finance Director…and surely not private citizens—who should be explaining and actively promoting these Charter Amendments. (Such inaction contributed to the defeat of similar legislation in 2018, and in 2016 the Council was on the brink of proposing an increase, but chickened out at the last possible moment.)

Cowardice in my opinion. No one wants a tax increase and it is never convenient. But if it is needed even in these dire times—as the Council unanimously concluded back in July—then it’s the duty of the five members of the Council to get out front and get it enacted. Should this Question fail yet again, you know where the responsibility lies.

Dan Watson
Easton

Did anyone else watch to the end of the Talbot County Council meeting on Oct 13, 2020? After experiencing severe audio difficulties early in the meeting, perhaps interest waned when Mr. Pack, Council President, announced upon the Council’s return from a brief recess to fix the problem, that due to ongoing technical issues he was cancelling the public comments portions of the meeting.  Mr. Callahan, Council Vice President was not in attendance.

At the end of his County Manager report, 2 hours and 40 minutes into the meeting, the Assistant County Manager turned to the clerk and asked her to introduce the next topic, which seemed strange. The clerk asked the Council for guidance on how to handle an emailed letter to the Council.  Acting against Council protocol, Mr. Pack had a letter from Richard Potter of the Talbot NAACP read aloud. Mr. Potter requested a meeting with the Council and other unnamed parties regarding the Talbot Boys memorial.  Clearly surprised at this unusual proceeding, Mr. Divilio questioned this item being discussed since it was not an agenda item. It was not listed on the Manager’s Agenda nor an announcement. When Mr. Pack inappropriately continued, Mr. Divilio questioned who were the other interested groups or individuals; Mr. Pack replied he did not know. Remotely, Ms. Price expressed the same concerns and reasonably suggested this be handled per usual practice.

When Mr. Pack attempted to draw Mr. Lesher into the debate, it was clear he was as surprised at Mr. Pack’s behavior as the others. When he found no support for his unprofessional behavior, Mr. Pack no longer attempted to schedule a meeting. Mr. Stamp was substituting for Mr. Hollis, the county manager, who would likely have been more versed in Council protocol, perhaps averting Mr. Pack’s unseemly behavior towards his fellow council members. As a remote observer I was appalled by Mr. Pack’s special treatment afforded one person since public comments had been cancelled by Mr. Pack.

There seems to be a pattern of ill-treatment of his fellow council members and questionable behavior by Mr. Pack as evidenced by an open meetings act complaint, inordinate pressure on council members to agree with him, apparently directing county staff to act outside of normal procedures, and unilateral decision-making. Instead of building consensus, Mr. Pack is not only promoting controversy and division, but also seems determined to discredit his fellow council members.

Althea Dulin
Talbot County

Who Lives where?

I read with interest that the upcoming ballot vote may change the current requirement that the Talbot County Department Head of Planning and Zoning, Public Works and the County Attorney will longer need to be a Talbot County citizens. Mr. Pack said in a news article he did not know why the County required the heads of these departments must be Talbot citizens? Really, it should be very clear why; these positions are charged with the interpretation and enforcement of Talbot County’s laws. Why would County residents want Department Heads not to be a part of our County. In researching I found the present law allows a time frame for new hires to relocate, this was the case with four P&Z Department heads prior to the current one.

We all know Talbot is a special place to live, who wouldn’t want to live here. Maybe the cost of living in Talbot County has climbed so high affordable housing can not be found, if this is the case the Council should consider increasing the salary offered.

I think what is needed is district representation by the County Council, presently all our Council Members live in the Town of Easton which has its own government including Zoning, Public Works and a Police Force, areas like Bay Hundred, Cordova, and Trappe deserve the type of representation that can be given when one lives in the community. Same can be said for Department Heads.

Robert Haase
St. Michaels

I was raised in Bethesda and went to college in D.C. When I graduated in 1973 I “moved” to the Eastern Shore of Virginia to live with friends on a farm in Accomack County. I didn’t stay long as I was unable to find work to establish a career. Fast forwarding many years, I retired to the Maryland’s Eastern Shore five years ago and live in the home my wife and I bought 25 years ago.

During the time I’ve been associated with the Eastern Shore I’ve known long-time residents to be strong willed. I’ve also known many of them to be quiet. If you don’t take the time to care – or if you’re not a family member, close neighbor or family friend you might not know the opinions of many in your own community. This dynamic impacts community discussions such as Talbot Boys statue. There are many local voices, black and white, not being heard because it’s not their way to openly engage in a public dialogue, particularly a contentious one. Nevertheless, these neighbors have opinions and beliefs, often deeply held.

There is a diehard group for the cause of removing the statue. You’ve read about them in The Spy and you may have seen or heard them in the Court Yard in Easton. There seems to be less of a vocal group speaking out for the monument to stay, but there are certainly letters to the editor and other avenues where these feelings have been expressed. If any member of the Talbot County Board is considering how to cast his or her vote on this debate by counting heads they are missing a strong quiet undercurrent — an undertow, even — that might sweep them out of office come election time.

As much as to any individual, I hope this message reaches the three-fifths of the Talbot County Board having regularly voted to let the statue stay. This is not a liberal vs. conservative argument, though it may be tempting. It’s a right vs. wrong argument about an issue whose time has come to be resolved… voices raised or quiet, the majority opinion is: Move the statue.

John C. Scott
Claiborne