Montgomery County Civic Federation
June 17, 2009
President Phil Andrews
Montgomery County Council
100 Maryland Avenue
Rockville MD 20850
Re: Applicants for Planning Board
Dear President Andrews and Members of the Montgomery County Council:
The purpose of this letter is to provide you with our recommendations and rationale for appointing a specific candidate to serve as a commissioner on the MNC/PPC Planning Board.
Five MCCF leaders (Peggy Dennis, Sharon Dooley, Chuck Lapinski, Virginia Sheard and myself) met over several evenings and interviewed six of the seven candidates (the seventh being unavailable) that the Council is considering. We also represent individual civic organizations from different parts of the County who share your commitment to selecting the best possible candidate to serve in this important position.
We had no favorite candidate when we started the evaluation process. We were looking above all for an individual who is intelligent; thoughtful; curious and probing; able to express him/herself well; has a broad knowledge of the County and its development over the decades; and with a strong desire to serve the public. We felt that all the candidates we are recommending fulfill these criteria.
Our interview questions focused on knowledge and experience each candidate has about the responsibilities and tasks of the Planning Board. That Board’s work can be divided into regulatory actions and policy formulation. The regulatory actions deal with site plans, subdivision plans, special exceptions, etc., where decisions are based upon applying established standards to a specific situation. Policy work typically results in recommendations to the Council and covers topics such as revising master and sector plans to determine how a given area will develop or redevelop and formulating the Annual Growth Policy. We were more interested with each candidate’s knowledge and experience in the policy area than in the regulatory area. Answers to our interview questions on the policy area revealed a wide range of experience between the candidates. We did not expect candidates to have thought about and been involved in every topic covered by our questions, but the more substantive a candidate’s response, the more highly qualified we rated them. If they had thought little about a wide variety of issues, a longer learning time will be needed before they can effectively participate in Board debates, discussions, and recommendations.
Our assessment of the best qualified candidates in the order we ranked them follows:
1. Alan Bowser: This is Mr. Bowser’s fourth application to serve on the Planning Board. In addition to a warm and winning personality, he obviously has the “fire in the belly” and persistence that evidence his strong desire to serve the public. Since his first application, he has been involved with a number of civic groups and issues. We feel confident that he now knows the difficult issues and diverse points of view. We think his intellectual curiosity, broad knowledge base and drive to excel will cause him to ask the tough, probing questions of the Planning Staff that will help the Board make better decisions. We also think that his executive experience would be valuable to both the Board and the Council.
2. Marye Wells-Harley: Ms. Wells-Harley’s 42 years of experience working for Prince Georges County, where she became head of Parks and Recreation, give her special insight into a variety of policy areas, but particularly the issue of the interrelationship between parks and recreation and the applicable master plans. We were very impressed by her determination (based on experience) that she should actively seek out the views of ordinary residents, rather than base her decisions solely on the views of the civic activists who come before the Board. She was a president of her HOA and, through that experience, learned first hand about problems inherent to the MPDU program. We believe that her executive experience would be valuable to the Board and Council.
3. Cynthia Rubenstein: Ms. Rubenstein has a long history of active participant on a variety of housing, code enforcement, housing, and related community issues as President of Allied Civic and her local civic association. While she has been less involved with civic matters over the last six years, she nevertheless still has been following major policy issues the Board is addressing as part of the Long Branch Advisory Committee. In response to our questions, she had some knowledge about most policy issues but also has not developed a position on most of them, in part because staff is still developing position papers on many of them
Each of the remaining candidates, Roberto Pinero, Ilaya Hopkins and Patricia Lee, has a more limited exposure with the issues facing the Board. We were not convinced that any of them is fully up to the demanding and fast-paced work of the Planning Board at this time. We do strongly encourage each of these candidates to expand their range of knowledge and experience, so that they become qualified candidates for future openings.
We hope our interview of the candidates and this letter will help you reach a decision of which candidate to select.
Sincerely,
Dan Wilhelm, Group Chair, MCCF Past President, & Greater Colesville Citizens Assn VP.
Peggy Dennis, MCCF President, Delegate from West Montgomery County Citizens Assn.
Sharon Dooley, MCCF Delegate and President of the Greater Olney Citizens Coalition
Chuck Lapinski, MCCF Chairman for Public Utilities and MCCF Past President
Virginia Sheard, Member-at-Large, Delegate from Kensington View Citizens Assn.
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