Ok, Dorchester voters including those in Cambridge, Hurlock, and all of the other towns in Dorchester County, you now have the opportunity, and I think the obligation, to speak out on a very important topic. You need to let your voices be heard now and in November with regard to the Dorchester County Charter Commission’s recommendations for changes to the current County Charter.

You can do this now by coming to the County Council meeting on March 19, 2024, at 6:00 p.m. in the County Office Building or you can email, call, or speak in person to your County Council representative. What the Charter Commission was able to do is complete and improve on the efforts of the Dorchester Citizens for Better Government that seeking to collect enough signatures from registered voters throughout the county to have a vote on possible changes to the county charter as part of the last election cycle. We fell short. The Dorchester Charter Commission has done what we were not able to do and added other proposals.

They developed a list of eight recommendations with explanations that were part of a presentation to the County Council earlier this month, and the council is asking the public to provide their thoughts on which of the proposed changes should go on the ballot in November 2024. Hearing from the citizens is always important, so you need to speak out in support of what your fellow citizens have suggested after months of work.

In November, whatever issues are placed on the ballot, fifty percent plus one voter has to approve the proposed changes that the County Council will have approved for consideration and vote. While we do not know how much public input from the voters is required for the County Council to act, the more people that tell them to place all of the proposals on the ballot, the more likely those proposals will be on the ballot.

That will allow for a formal up or down vote on each proposal in November after you, the voters, have had the chance to learn more about all of them and the pros and cons for each. I am confident that as part of the upcoming elections there will be people who are for or against a proposal. I know that the Dorchester Citizens for Better Government will be urging passage of whatever is on the ballot, as these proposal make for good sense and help create better government. During our efforts to obtain signatures, we obtained over 1300 signatures in support of two of the proposals having to do with the county manager and transparency.

I would suspect that most of you who reside in Dorchester County, including its towns and cities, may not know what the proposals are. That is understandable. It is also understandable that all of them should be on the ballot so that you can give your voice to which ones you want and which ones you do not want.

The county charter has not been changed, I am told, since it was originally passed many years ago. Much in our world has changed since then, and one of the most important changes is that most larger cities, like Cambridge, and counties have gone to a form of government called council-manager where there is a paid experienced and full time manager for the day-to-day running of the government that includes the hiring and firing of staff, while a county or city council creates the vision, policy, and direction for the county or city for the manager to run.

The Charter Commission provided both an explanation for each proposed change along with a suggestion of the appropriate language. While those explanations and the proposed language are too long for this report, the proposed changes are these:

• Add language that would solidify the difference between the responsibilities of the County Council and the County Manager.  We would like to emphasize:
  • County Manager is the only one allowed to direct employees
  • When position is vacant, search must start immediately
  • If position is not filled timely, alternative search measures must be employed.
  • County Manager must be available full time.
  • County Manager can not take direction from individual council members
  • Only the County Manager can hire and fire county employees

• Change the requirements of the County Manager to remove the residency requirement

• Change the Administrative Review to require it be done in the first fiscal year of each new Council

• Change the requirements of the County Director of Finance to remove the residency requirement

• Change the due date for the proposed County budget

• Change the adoption date for the County budget.

• Add language to section 606 to increase transparency and to ensure that the most effective means are used to disseminate meeting information.

• Add language to the County Charter to limit a County Council member to 3 four year terms (for a total of 12 years).

I hope to be able to provide more information regarding the above-proposed changes, but the important thing for you to do now is to contact your county council member (not the city council) and let him know that you want to have a vote on all of these proposals in November.

Thanks for reading.

Steve Rideout is the mayor of Cambridge,  Maryland.

Judge Rideout is the former Chief Judge of the Alexandria, VA Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court (1989-2004). From 2004 until the present, he has consulted in different states to support their efforts to improve their child welfare systems. From 2016 to early 2021, he was the Ward 1 Commissioner on the Cambridge City Council. Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for improving the lives of children in his and other communities.

You may recall the petition initiative for changing the County Charter that was started last spring by the Dorchester Citizens for Better Government and wonder what happened to it. I hope that what follows will help you understand what we were able to do and not do and what I understand will be happening in the near future. 

With the Petition effort, we sought to gather over 5,000 signatures prior to the 2022 November elections in order to have two changes to the County Charter placed on that ballot that we felt were important. They involved sections 405-406 of the County Charter related to the County Manager position and a new section 606 that addressed government transparency.

We had started this effort in the fall of 2021 by gathering a group of people that supported the idea of making some changes to the County Charter, meeting to discuss possible changes, and finally hiring a lawyer to help draft the changes that the group agreed upon. The changes we proposed are attached. With the help of many people at church events, farmers’ markets, and fire houses we collected signatures of registered voters. 

During our research of the County Charter, we learned that the County Council should have appointed a Charter Commission in 2021 but did not finally approve all of the members of that body until May of 2022. The intention of the majority of County Council was to have a report and recommendations by the Commission by July 2022. That gave the Commission members two-three months to do their research and make their recommendations. Under the law, the Commission should have had at least a year to do their work.

During the Spring of 2022 and time that the Charter Commission did their work, the Citizens for Better Government made presentations to community groups about our effort, collected signatures on the petitions, and attended the Charter Commission meetings where we were able to suggest ideas for consideration. In the end, after meeting and making recommendations to the County Council, the County Council declined to adopt any of the Commission’s recommendations for placement 0f Charter revisions on the ballot for the November 2022 vote.

Despite our efforts to collect the required number of signatures, we were on able to collect about 1,300 signatures for each petition, but that was not enough; so, we felt that our next best option was to support the efforts of the Charter Commission, which we did, for the most part. When the Commission failed to receive the vote of County Council, we realized that our hope to place any issues on the 2022 ballot was not going to be successful. We then decided to wait for the November election to see what those results would be in order to have a new council that might support some of our ideas.

We were successful in one respect, which was the former council agreeing to place the council meetings for viewing by the public on town hall streams. In addition, the new County Council has hired Jeff Powell as the Acting County Manager, which is already paying dividends toward making the progress we anticipated. As some members of the former council and candidates for election had signed our petitions, we knew that with a new County Council there was the possibility that it would restart the Charter Commission to allow it to reconsider past recommendations and offer any new ideas that might be brought forward.

That is now happening. The County Council is in the process of appointing a new Charter Commission that may have some of its former members reappointed. When they start meeting, the Dorchester Citizens for Better Government will be present supporting their efforts to help improve how our county government can run and to give to the citizens of Dorchester County the opportunity to vote in the November 2024 election on proposed changes to the County Charter that will, hopefully, provide for a better and more efficient and effective government.

Thanks for reading.

Steve Rideout is the current mayor of Cambridge

Following reports in the Washington Post today of the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposal to cut Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funding in support of the Chesapeake Bay Clean Water Blueprint, Chesapeake Bay Foundation President William C. Baker issued the following statement.

The OMB proposal reduces funding for the Chesapeake Bay Program from about $73 million annually to $5 million in the next fiscal year. EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program coordinates science, research, and modeling to implement the Blueprint, as well as grants to state and local governments and others to help reduce pollution.

“Reducing funding for the successful Chesapeake Bay clean-up, begun by Ronald Reagan, seems inconsistent with the President’s remarks about clean water.

“The proposed reduction in federal investment in Chesapeake Bay would reverse restoration successes. The EPA role in the cleanup of the Chesapeake is nothing less than fundamental. It’s not just important, it’s critical.

“Restoration efforts are working. There is measurable progress in restoring local rivers, streams, and the Chesapeake Bay. Crabs and oysters are rebounding, the dead zone is getting smaller, and Bay grasses are at their highest levels in decades. The progress is the result of the federal and state partnership implementing the Clean Water Blueprint, as well as the work of citizens, business, farmers, and local governments all doing their share to reduce pollution.

“The Blueprint has bipartisan support, as was recently demonstrated in a letter led by Chesapeake Bay Task Force co-chairs Congressmen Bobby Scott, Rob Wittman, Andy Harris, and John Sarbanes from seventeen members of Congress to President Trump, calling on his administration to continue full funding of Bay restoration efforts.

“We urge all local partners—residents, businesses, watershed groups, universities, and state and local governments—to let their voices be heard.

“The OMB proposal is only the first step in developing EPA’s budget, and we hope that Administrator Pruitt will want to take advantage of a program that’s successful, bi-partisan, and non-controversial. It works.”