During my campaign for County Council in 2006, I offered an initiative to create a zoning ordanance similar to our existing "Right to Farm" to protect the interests of our watermen and, more important to me, to protect long standing traditions, our rural character, quality of life in, perhaps, the very future of the most unique place in all of Maryland if not the entire United States. There is simply no other place like Talbot County, its worth every once of energy to preserve its heritage and our watermen are very much a significant component of our heritage. I recently (Dec 2008) provided our County Council with a draft of an ordanance I believe would "fill the bill". To date, our Council has elected to ignore this draft, essentially relegating it to the dust bin of history. I disagree and have decided to share my draft publically. The text of my draft follows:
129-1 Findings and policy.
A. It is declared policy of Talbot County to preserve, protect and encourage the
development and improvement of its waterways for the harvesting of seafood. It is the
purpose of this chapter to reduce the loss to the County of its commercial seafood and
fishing industry by limiting the circumstances under which commercial seafood and
fishing industry operations may be deemed to constitute a nuisance, trespass, or other
interference with the reasonable practices associated with the preparation and activity of
and to handle, harvest, buy, sell, load, unload, transport and process commercial seafood,
including, but not limited to, boats leaving and returning at all hours, painting crab pots,
chemicals, paints, dust, power tools, maintenance of boats and any and all other
equipment, running and operation, noise, smell and presence of machinery and equipment
associated with commercial seafood operating at any and all hours; provided that nothing
in this chapter shall in any way restrict or impede the authority of the state and of the
County to protect the public health, safety and welfare.
B. It is in the public interest to promote a clearer understanding between seafood industry
operations and residential neighbors concerning the normal inconveniences of seafood
industry operations which follow generally accepted seafood industry practices and do
not endanger public health or safety.
C. This chapter is not intended to and shall not be construed as in any way modifying or
abridging local, state or federal laws relating to health, safety, zoning, licensing
requirements, environmental standards (including those standards which relate to air and
water quality), and the like.
D. An additional purpose of this chapter is to promote a good neighbor policy by advising
purchasers and users of property adjacent to or near commercial seafood operations of the
inherent potential problems associated with such purchase or use. These potential
problems include, but are not limited to, boats leaving and returning at all hours, painting
crab pots, chemicals, paints, dust, power tools, maintenance of boats and any and all
other equipment, running and operation, noise, smell and presence of machinery and
equipment associated with commercial seafood operating at any and all hours. It is
intended that, through mandatory disclosures, purchasers and users will better understand
the impact of living near commercial seafood operations and be prepared to accept
attendant conditions as the natural result of living in or near rural and urban areas.
However, this chapter shall be effective regardless of whether disclosure was made in
accordance with § 129-5 herein ("Right to operate Seafood Industry and Real Estate
Transfer Disclosure").
129-2 Definitions.
COMMERCIAL SEAFOOD OPERATION
Includes, but is not limited to, all matters relating to the harvest of seafood in Talbot
County, including boats leaving and returning at all hours, painting of crab pots, bait, salt,
paints, dust, power tools, maintenance of boats and any and all other equipment, running
and operation, noise, smell and presence of machinery and equipment associated with
commercial seafood operating at any and all hours but not limited to workers, boats,
generators, ice making, refrigerated trucks, chum trucks, boilers, steam generators,
cooking, fork lifts, heating equipment, cooling equipment, soft crab shedding equipment,
tanks, pallets, cooking baskets and drums.
GENERALLY ACCEPTED SEAFOOD INDUSTRY PRACTICES
Those methods used in connection with the commercial seafood and fishing industries
which do not violate applicable federal, state or local laws or public health safety and
welfare and which are generally accepted commercial seafood and fishing practices in the
commercial seafood and fishing industry. Generally accepted seafood industry practices
include practices that are recognized as best management practices and those methods
which are authorized by various governmental agencies, bureaus and departments. If no
generally accepted seafood industry practices exist or there is no method authorized by
those agencies mentioned herein which governs a practice, the practice is presumed to be
a generally accepted seafood industry practice.
HEALTH OFFICER
The Director, Talbot County Health Department or his designee.
LAND
All real property within the boundaries of Talbot County and all territorial waters,
rivers, bays and creeks located within or definingTalbot County.
129-3 Limitation of actions.
A. A private action may not be maintained with respect to a seafood industry operation
on the grounds that the seafood industry operation interferes or has interfered with the use
or enjoyment of property, whether public or private, if:
(1) The seafood operation has been under way for a period of one year or more and if the
operation or any future change in the operation did not constitute a nuisance from the
date the operation or change in the future operation began; and,
(2) The seafood operation is conducted substantially in accordance with generally
accepted seafood industry practices.
B. Notwithstanding any provision of this section, no action alleging that a seafood
industry operation has interfered with the reasonable use or enjoyment of real property or
personal well-being shall be maintained if the plaintiff has not sought arbitration through
Seafood Reconciliation Committee.
129-4 Resolution of disputes and procedure for complaints, investigation and
declaration.
A. Nuisances which affect public health.
(1) Complaints. A person may complain to the Dorchester County Health Department to
declare that a nuisance which affects public health exists.
(2) Investigations. The Health Officer may investigate all complaints of nuisance
received against a seafood industry operation. When a previous complaint involving the
same condition resulted in a determination by the Health Officer that a nuisance
condition did not exist, the Health Officer may investigate the complaint but the Health
Officer may also determine not to investigate such a complaint. The Dorchester County
Health Department may initiate any investigation without citizen complaint.
(3) After the Health Officer has completed his investigation, he will report his findings to
the Seafood Reconciliation Committee, to aid in its determination as to the existence of a
nuisance.
B. Seafood Reconciliation Committee.
(1) If any conflict cannot be resolved regarding an interference with the use or enjoyment
of property from seafood industry operations, the parties to that controversy may file a
written complaint with the Seafood Reconciliation Committee.
(2) There is hereby established the Dorchester County Seafood Reconciliation
Committee, which shall arbitrate and mediate disputes involving seafood operations and
issue opinions on whether such seafood operations are conducted in a manner consistent
with generally accepted seafood industry management practices.
(3) The Seafood Reconciliation Committee shall be composed of five persons, all County
residents, all of whom shall have a seafood industry background, and shall be appointed
by the County Council. Members of the Committee shall serve a three-year term;
however, the initial appointments shall be as follows:
(a) One member shall be appointed to serve a one-year term;
(b) Two members shall be appointed to serve a two-year term;
(c) Two members shall be appointed to serve a three-year term.
(d) After these initial appointments, all appointments shall be for a full three-year term.
(4) The Seafood Reconciliation Committee will conduct its proceedings in an informal
manner and the rules of evidence shall not apply. In each case before it the Seafood
Reconciliation Committee shall engage in nonbinding arbitration in controversies arising
out of seafood industry operations, including but not limited to the invasion of property
and personal rights by seafood industry operations.
(a) If the Seafood Reconciliation Committee or a court finds that the conduct of a party in
bringing or maintaining an action in connection with a seafood industry operation was in
bad faith or without substantial justification, the Seafood Reconciliation Committee or
court shall require that party to pay to the owner of the seafood industry operation (or any
other party opponent) the costs of the proceeding and the reasonable expenses, including
reasonable attorney's fees, incurred by that party in defending against the action.
129-5 RIGHT TO OPERATE SEAFOOD INDUSTRY, REAL ESTATE
TRANSFER DISCLOSURE
A contract or an addendum to the contract of sale for any real property in Talbot County
shall contain in conspicuous type the following disclosure statement:
RIGHT TO OPERATE SEAFOOD INDUSTRY, REAL ESTATE TRANSFER
DISCLOSURE
Notice To Buyer
TALBOT COUNTY ALLOWS SEAFOOD INDUSTRY OPERATIONS (as defined in
the Talbot County Seafood Industry Right to Work, Chapter XXX of the Talbot County
Code). You may be subject to inconveniences or discomforts arising from such
operations, including but not limited to boats leaving and returning at different hours of
the day, odors, fumes and noises associated with the maintenance of boats and any and all
other equipment, noise, smell and presence of machinery and equipment associated with
commercial seafood operating at various hours, including but not limited to workers,
boats, generators, refrigeration, ice making, refrigerated trucks, chum trucks, all other
trucks, boilers, steam generators, boats, cooking, fork lifts, heating equipment, cooling
equipment, soft crab shedding equipment and lighting. Talbot County has determined that
inconveniences or discomforts associated with such seafood industry operations shall not
be considered to be an interference with reasonable use and enjoyment of land, if such
operations are conducted in accordance with generally accepted seafood industry
practices. Talbot County has established a reconciliation committee to assist in the
resolution of disputes which might arise between persons in this County regarding
whether seafood industry operations are causing an interference with the reasonable use
and enjoyment of land or personal well-being and whether those operations are being
conducted in accordance with generally accepted seafood industry practices.
Seller:
Date:
Seller:
Date:
I/WE ACKNOWLEDGE RECEIPT OF A COPY OF THIS STATEMENT:
Buyer:
Date:
Buyer:
Date:
IF YOU DESIRE LEGAL ADVICE, CONSULT YOUR ATTORNEY.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Taxpayers Association: Position on Easton Memorial Hospital
The Board of Directors, in concert with our membership, agree with the Talbot County Council that Easton Memorial Hospital should remain “in or near Easton, Maryland”. Though it may seem to some this position statement is overdue, its important in my mind for readers to understand the mission of the Talbot County Taxpayers Association (TCTA) and its relationship to matters affecting Talbot County taxpayers. In this regard, readers are encouraged to visit our newly created web site at http://tctaonline.org and view our mission statement as well as visit other pages to gain first hand knowledge of what the Association does and is doing.
We have studied in great detail the potential tax base impact if the hospital should be re-located outside of Easton. The impact would be devastating not only for Easton as one of our five, Talbot County incorporated municipalities but also on the County as a whole. We assess the impact to the tax base and ultimately to Talbot County taxpayers to be in the range of $85 to $100 million dollars short term (5-10 years) and well into the 100’s of millions over the long term.
We understand the decision process about the eventual re-location of Easton Memorial Hospital is in the hands of the Maryland University Medical System (UMMS) and its merger partner, the Shore Health System (SHS). We further understand that a decision by these parties to re-locate will result in the hospital remaining in Talbot County – at least in consideration of current Maryland legislation, the existing “Certificate of Need” and the commitment of UMMS/SHS executives to retain the hospital location in Talbot County. What we also understand is the decision is being developed on an economic and demographic basis with less than full regard for the local human impact. A move away from Easton would create a loss of timely medical services to those residing in areas such as Windy Hill, Tilghman Island, and Town of Queen Anne as well as a loss of long-recognized, significant contributions over decades by Talbot volunteers and fund contributors that have supported and sustained Easton Memorial. Equally devastating will be the loss of local revenues to such as Easton Utilities and other local service providers and well as the potential for a significant loss of local, hospital and service provider jobs. Physicians’ offices would likely move to be closer to wherever the hospital is if the new location is well outside the Town of Easton for those doctors and practioners with hospital privilages so as to be able to go back and between hospital and outpatient responsibilities
The TCTA Board and its sizeable membership believe the human dynamic should be the first decision consideration and that offers by Talbot County (land and transport access) and Easton (water, sewer, among other things) represent a unique and viable solution to the desire on the part of UMMS and SHS to create a first-class, modern facility capable of meeting the future needs of the Mid-shore region and its ever increasing population.
Many arguments for keeping Easton Memorial Hospital “in or near Easton” have already been put forth by others; we support fully these arguments.
Owen Wormser
President
Talbot County Taxpayers Association
We have studied in great detail the potential tax base impact if the hospital should be re-located outside of Easton. The impact would be devastating not only for Easton as one of our five, Talbot County incorporated municipalities but also on the County as a whole. We assess the impact to the tax base and ultimately to Talbot County taxpayers to be in the range of $85 to $100 million dollars short term (5-10 years) and well into the 100’s of millions over the long term.
We understand the decision process about the eventual re-location of Easton Memorial Hospital is in the hands of the Maryland University Medical System (UMMS) and its merger partner, the Shore Health System (SHS). We further understand that a decision by these parties to re-locate will result in the hospital remaining in Talbot County – at least in consideration of current Maryland legislation, the existing “Certificate of Need” and the commitment of UMMS/SHS executives to retain the hospital location in Talbot County. What we also understand is the decision is being developed on an economic and demographic basis with less than full regard for the local human impact. A move away from Easton would create a loss of timely medical services to those residing in areas such as Windy Hill, Tilghman Island, and Town of Queen Anne as well as a loss of long-recognized, significant contributions over decades by Talbot volunteers and fund contributors that have supported and sustained Easton Memorial. Equally devastating will be the loss of local revenues to such as Easton Utilities and other local service providers and well as the potential for a significant loss of local, hospital and service provider jobs. Physicians’ offices would likely move to be closer to wherever the hospital is if the new location is well outside the Town of Easton for those doctors and practioners with hospital privilages so as to be able to go back and between hospital and outpatient responsibilities
The TCTA Board and its sizeable membership believe the human dynamic should be the first decision consideration and that offers by Talbot County (land and transport access) and Easton (water, sewer, among other things) represent a unique and viable solution to the desire on the part of UMMS and SHS to create a first-class, modern facility capable of meeting the future needs of the Mid-shore region and its ever increasing population.
Many arguments for keeping Easton Memorial Hospital “in or near Easton” have already been put forth by others; we support fully these arguments.
Owen Wormser
President
Talbot County Taxpayers Association
Money and the Crisis of Civilization
Suppose you give me a million dollars with the instructions, "Invest this profitably, and I'll pay you well." I'm a sharp dresser -- why not? So I go out onto the street and hand out stacks of bills to random passers- by. Ten thousand dollars each. In return, each scribbles out an IOU for $20,000, payable in five years. I come back to you and say, "Look at these IOUs! I have generated a 20% annual return on your investment." You are very pleased, and pay me an enormous commission.
Now I've got a big stack of IOUs, so I use these "assets" as collateral to borrow even more money, which I lend out to even more people, or sell them to others like myself who do the same. I also buy insurance to cover me in case the borrowers default -- and I pay for it with those self-same IOUs!
Round and round it goes, each new loan becoming somebody's asset on which to borrow yet more money. We all rake in huge commissions and bonuses, as the total face value of all the assets we've created from that initial million dollars is now fifty times that.
Then one day, the first batch of IOUs comes due. But guess what? The person who scribbled his name on the IOU can't pay me back right now. In fact, lots of the borrowers can't. I try to hush this embarrassing fact up as long as possible, but pretty soon you get suspicious. You want your million dollars back -- in cash. I try to sell the IOUs and their derivatives that I hold, but everyone else is suspicious too, and no one buys them. The insurance company tries to cover my losses, but it can only do so by selling the IOUs I gave it!
So finally, the government steps in and buys the IOUs, bails out the insurance company and everyone else holding the IOUs and the derivatives stacked on them. Their total value is way more than a million dollars now. I and my fellow entrepreneurs retire with our lucre. Everyone else pays for it.
This is the first level of what has happened in the financial industry over the past decade. It is a huge transfer of wealth to the financial elite, to be funded by US taxpayers, foreign corporations and governments, and ultimately the foreign workers who subsidize US debt indirectly via the lower purchasing power of their wages. However, to see the current crisis as merely the result of a big con is to miss its true significance.
I think we all sense that we are nearing the end of an era. On the most superficial level, it is the era of unregulated casino-style financial manipulation that is ending. But the current efforts of the political elites to fix the crisis at this level will only reveal its deeper dimensions. In fact, the crisis goes "all the way to the bottom." It arises from the very nature of money and property in the world today, and it will persist and continue to intensify until money itself is transformed. A process centuries in the making is in its final stages of unfoldment.
Money as we know it today has crisis and collapse built into its basic design. That is because money seeks interest, bears interest, and indeed is born of interest. To see how this works, let's go back to some finance basics. Money is created when somebody takes out a loan from a bank (or more recently, a disguised loan from some other kind of institution). A debt is a promise to pay money in the future in order to buy something today; in other words, borrowing money is a form of delayed trading. I receive something now (bought with the money I borrowed) and agree to give something in the future (a good or service which I will sell for the money to pay back the debt). A bank or any other lender will ordinarily only agree to lend you money if there is a reasonable expectation you will pay it back; in other words, if there is a reasonable expectation you will produce goods or services of equivalent value. This "reasonable expectation" can be guaranteed in the form of collateral, or it can be encoded in one's credit rating.
Any time you use money, you are essentially guaranteeing "I have performed a service or provided a good of equivalent value to the one I am buying." If the money is borrowed money, you are saying that you will provide an equivalent good/service in the future.
Now enter interest. What motivates a bank to lend anyone money in the first place? It is interest. Interest drives the creation of money today. Any time money is created through debt, a need to create even more money in the future is also created. The amount of money must grow over time, which means that the volume of goods and services must grow over time as well.
If the volume of money grows faster than the volume of goods and services, the result is inflation. If it grows more slowly -- for example through a slowdown in lending -- the result is bankruptcies, recession, or deflation. The government can increase or decrease the supply of money in several ways. First, it can create money by borrowing it from the central bank, or in America, from the Federal Reserve. This money ends up as bank deposits, which in turn give banks more margin reserves on which to extend loans. You see, a bank's capacity to create money is limited by margin reserve requirements. Typically, a bank must hold cash (or central bank deposits) equal to about 10% of its total customer deposits. The other 90%, it can loan out, thus creating new money. This money ends up back in a bank as deposits, allowing another 81% of it (90% of 90%) to be lent out again. In this way, each dollar of initial deposits ends up as $9 of new money. Government spending of money borrowed from the central bank acts a seed for new money creation. (Of course, this depends on banks' willingness to lend! In a credit freeze such as happened this week, banks hoard excess reserves and the repeated injections of government money have little effect.)
Another way to increase the money supply is to lower margin reserve requirements. In practice this is rarely done, at least directly. However, in the last decade, various kinds of non-bank lending have skirted the margin reserve requirement, through the alphabet soup of financial instruments you've been hearing about in the news. The result is that each dollar of original equity has been leveraged not to nine times it original value, as in traditional banking, but to 70 times or even more. This has allowed returns on investment far beyond the 5% or so available from traditional banking, along with "compensation" packages beyond the dreams of avarice.
Each new dollar that is created comes with a new dollar of debt -- more than a dollar of debt, because of interest. The debt is eventually redeemed either with goods and services, or with more borrowed money, which in turn can be redeemed with yet more borrowed money... but eventually it will be used to buy goods and services. The interest has to come from somewhere. Borrowing more money to make the interest payments on an existing loan merely postpones the day of reckoning by deferring the need to create new goods and services.
The whole system of interest-bearing money works fine as long as the volume of goods and services exchanged for money keeps growing. The crisis we are seeing today is in part because new money has been created much faster than goods and services have, and much faster than has been historically sustainable. There are only two ways out of such a situation: inflation and bankruptcies. Each involve the destruction of money. The current convulsions of the financial and political elites basically come down to a futile attempt to prevent both. Their first concern is to prevent the evaporation of money through massive bankruptcies, because it is, after all, their money.
There is a much deeper crisis at work as well, a crisis in the creation of goods and services that underlies money to begin with, and it is this crisis that gave birth to the real estate bubble everyone blames for the current situation. To understand it, let's get clear on what constitutes a "good" or a "service." In economics, these terms refer to something that is exchanged for money. If I baby sit your children for free, economists don't count it as a service. It cannot be used to pay a financial debt: I cannot go to the supermarket and say, "I watched my neighbor's kids this morning, so please give me food." But if I open a day care center and charge you money, I have created a "service." GDP rises and, according to economists, society has become wealthier.
The same is true if I cut down a forest and sell the timber. While it is still standing and inaccessible, it is not a good. It only becomes "good" when I build a logging road, hire labor, cut it down, and transport it to a buyer. I convert a forest to timber, a commodity, and GDP goes up. Similarly, if I create a new song and share it for free, GDP does not go up and society is not considered wealthier, but if I copyright it and sell it, it becomes a good. Or I can find a traditional society that uses herbs and shamanic techniques for healing, destroy their culture and make them dependent on pharmaceutical medicine which they must purchase, evict them from their land so they cannot be subsistence farmers and must buy food, clear the land and hire them on a banana plantation -- and I have made the world richer. I have brought various functions, relationships, and natural resources into the realm of money. In The Ascent of Humanity I describe this process in depth: the conversion of social capital, natural capital, cultural capital, and spiritual capital into money.
Essentially, for the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based) money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship must be monetized. For example, thirty years ago most meals were prepared at home; today some two-thirds are prepared outside, in restaurants or supermarket delis. A once unpaid function, cooking, has become a "service". And we are the richer for it. Right?
Another major engine of economic growth over the last three decades, child care, has also made us richer. We are now relieved of the burden of caring for our own children. We pay experts instead, who can do it much more efficiently.
In ancient times entertainment was also a free, participatory function. Everyone played an instrument, sang, participated in drama. Even 75 years ago in America, every small town had its own marching band and baseball team. Now we pay for those services. The economy has grown. Hooray.
The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item. Today we sell away the last vestiges of our divine bequeathment: our health, the biosphere and genome, even our own minds. This is the process that is culminating in our age. It is almost complete, especially in America and the "developed"
world. In the developing world there still remain people who live substantially in gift cultures, where natural and social wealth is not yet the subject of property. Globalization is the process of stripping away these assets, to feed the money machine's insatiable, existential need to grow. Yet this strip-mining of other lands is running up against its limits too, both because there is almost nothing left to take, and because of growing pockets of effective resistance.
The result is that the supply of money -- and the corresponding volume of debt -- has for several decades outstripped the production of goods and services that it promises. It is deeply related to the classic problem of oversupply in capitalist economics. The Marxian crisis of capital can be deferred into the future as long as new, high-profit industries and markets can be developed to compensate for the vicious circle of falling profits, falling wages, depressed consumption, and overproduction in mature industries. The continuation of capitalism as we know it depends on an infinite supply of these new industries, which essentially must convert infinite new realms of social, natural, cultural, and spiritual capital into money. The problem is, these resources are finite, and the closer they come to exhaustion, the more painful their extraction becomes. Therefore, contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.
Faced with the exhaustion of the non-monetized commonwealth that it consumes, financial capital has tried to delay the inevitable by cannibalizing itself. The dot-com bubble of the late 90s showed that the productive economy could not longer keep up with the growth of money. Lots of excess money was running around frantically, searching for a place where the promise of deferred goods and services could be redeemed. So, to postpone the inevitable crash, the Fed slashed interest rates and loosened monetary policy to allow old debts to be repaid with new debts (rather than real goods and services). The new financial goods and services that arose were phony, artifacts of deceptive accounting on a vast, systemic scale.
Obviously, the practice of borrowing new money to pay the principal and interest of old debts cannot last very long, but that is what the economy as a whole has done for ten years now. Unfortunately, simply stopping this practice isn't going to solve the underlying problem. A collapse is coming, unavoidably. The government's bailout plan will at best postpone it for a year or two (who knows, maybe until 2012!), long enough for the big players to move their money to a safe haven. They will discover, though, that there is no safe haven. As the US dollar loses its safe-haven status (which will happen all the more certainly when the government takes over Wall Street's bad debts), you can expect capital to chase various commodities in an inflationary surge before a deflationary depression takes hold. If a credit freeze overpowers the government's inflationary measures, depression will come all the sooner.
The present crisis is actually the final stage of what began in the 1930s. Successive solutions to the fundamental problem of keeping pace with money that expands with the rate of interest have been applied, and exhausted. The first effective solution was war, a state which has been permanent since 1940. Nuclear weapons and a shift in human consciousness have limited the solution of endless military escalation. Other solutions -- globalization, technology-enabled development of new goods and services to replace human functions never before commoditized, and technology- enabled plunder of natural resources once off limits, and finally financial auto-cannibalism -- have similarly run their course. Unless there are realms of wealth I have not considered, and new depths of poverty, misery, and alienation to which we might plunge, the inevitable cannot be delayed much longer.
In the face of the impending crisis, people often ask what they can do to protect themselves. "Buy gold? Stockpile canned goods? Build a fortified compound in a remote area? What should I do?" I would like to suggest a different kind of question: "What is the most beautiful thing I can do?" You see, the gathering crisis presents a tremendous opportunity. Deflation, the destruction of money, is only a categorical evil if the creation of money is a categorical good. However, you can see from the examples I have given that the creation of money has in many ways impoverished us all. Conversely, the destruction of money has the potential to enrich us. It offers the opportunity to reclaim parts of the lost commonwealth from the realm of money and property.
We actually see this happening every time there is an economic recession. People can no longer pay for various goods and services, and so have to rely on friends and neighbors instead. Where there is no money to facilitate transactions, gift economies reemerge and new kinds of money are created. Ordinarily, though, people and institutions fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening. The habitual first response to economic crisis is to make and keep more money -- to accelerate the conversion of anything you can into money. On a systemic level, the debt surge is generating enormous pressure to extend the commodification of the commonwealth. We can see this happening with the calls to drill for oil in Alaska, commence deep-sea drilling, and so on. The time is here, though, for the reverse process to begin in earnest -- to remove things from the realm of goods and services, and return them to the realm of gifts, reciprocity, self-sufficiency, and community sharing. Note well: this is going to happen anyway in the wake of a currency collapse, as people lose their jobs or become too poor to buy things. People will help each other and real communities will reemerge.
In the meantime, anything we do to protect some natural or social resource from conversion into money will both hasten the collapse and mitigate its severity. Any forest you save from development, any road you stop, any cooperative playgroup you establish; anyone you teach to heal themselves, or to build their own house, cook their own food, make their own clothes; any wealth you create or add to the public domain; anything you render off-limits to the world-devouring machine, will help shorten the Machine's lifespan. Think of it this way: if you already do not depend on money for some portion of life's necessities and pleasures, then the collapse of money will pose much less of a harsh transition for you. The same applies to the social level. Any network or community or social institution that is not a vehicle for the conversion of life into money will sustain and enrich life after money.
In previous essays I have described alternative money systems, based on mutual credit and demurrage, that do not drive the conversion of all that is good, true, and beautiful into money. These enact a fundamentally different human identity, a fundamentally different sense of self, from what dominates today. No more will it be true that more for me is less for you. On a personal level, the deepest possible revolution we can enact is a revolution in our sense of self, in our identity. The discrete and separate self of Descartes and Adam Smith has run its course and is becoming obsolete. We are realizing our own separateness, from each other and from the totality of all life. Interest denies this union, for it seeks growth of the separate self and the expense of something external, something other. Probably everyone reading this essay agrees with the principles of interconnectedness, whether from a Buddhistic or an ecological perspective. The time has come to live it. It is time to enter the spirit of the gift, which embodies the felt understanding of non-separation. It is becoming abundantly obvious that less for you (in all its dimensions) is also less for me. The ideology of perpetual gain has brought us to a state of poverty so destitute that we are gasping for air. That ideology, and the civilization built upon it, is what is collapsing today.
Individually and collectively, anything we do to resist or postpone the collapse will only make it worse. So stop resisting the revolution in human kind. If you want to survive the multiple crises unfolding today, do not seek to survive them. That is the mindset of separation; that is resistance, a clinging to a dying past. Instead, allow your perspective to shift toward reunion, and think in terms of what you can give. What can you contribute to a more beautiful world? That is your only responsibility and your only security. The gifts you need to survive and enjoy will come to you easily, because what you do to the world, you do to yourself.
Owen Wormser
Royal Oak, MD
Now I've got a big stack of IOUs, so I use these "assets" as collateral to borrow even more money, which I lend out to even more people, or sell them to others like myself who do the same. I also buy insurance to cover me in case the borrowers default -- and I pay for it with those self-same IOUs!
Round and round it goes, each new loan becoming somebody's asset on which to borrow yet more money. We all rake in huge commissions and bonuses, as the total face value of all the assets we've created from that initial million dollars is now fifty times that.
Then one day, the first batch of IOUs comes due. But guess what? The person who scribbled his name on the IOU can't pay me back right now. In fact, lots of the borrowers can't. I try to hush this embarrassing fact up as long as possible, but pretty soon you get suspicious. You want your million dollars back -- in cash. I try to sell the IOUs and their derivatives that I hold, but everyone else is suspicious too, and no one buys them. The insurance company tries to cover my losses, but it can only do so by selling the IOUs I gave it!
So finally, the government steps in and buys the IOUs, bails out the insurance company and everyone else holding the IOUs and the derivatives stacked on them. Their total value is way more than a million dollars now. I and my fellow entrepreneurs retire with our lucre. Everyone else pays for it.
This is the first level of what has happened in the financial industry over the past decade. It is a huge transfer of wealth to the financial elite, to be funded by US taxpayers, foreign corporations and governments, and ultimately the foreign workers who subsidize US debt indirectly via the lower purchasing power of their wages. However, to see the current crisis as merely the result of a big con is to miss its true significance.
I think we all sense that we are nearing the end of an era. On the most superficial level, it is the era of unregulated casino-style financial manipulation that is ending. But the current efforts of the political elites to fix the crisis at this level will only reveal its deeper dimensions. In fact, the crisis goes "all the way to the bottom." It arises from the very nature of money and property in the world today, and it will persist and continue to intensify until money itself is transformed. A process centuries in the making is in its final stages of unfoldment.
Money as we know it today has crisis and collapse built into its basic design. That is because money seeks interest, bears interest, and indeed is born of interest. To see how this works, let's go back to some finance basics. Money is created when somebody takes out a loan from a bank (or more recently, a disguised loan from some other kind of institution). A debt is a promise to pay money in the future in order to buy something today; in other words, borrowing money is a form of delayed trading. I receive something now (bought with the money I borrowed) and agree to give something in the future (a good or service which I will sell for the money to pay back the debt). A bank or any other lender will ordinarily only agree to lend you money if there is a reasonable expectation you will pay it back; in other words, if there is a reasonable expectation you will produce goods or services of equivalent value. This "reasonable expectation" can be guaranteed in the form of collateral, or it can be encoded in one's credit rating.
Any time you use money, you are essentially guaranteeing "I have performed a service or provided a good of equivalent value to the one I am buying." If the money is borrowed money, you are saying that you will provide an equivalent good/service in the future.
Now enter interest. What motivates a bank to lend anyone money in the first place? It is interest. Interest drives the creation of money today. Any time money is created through debt, a need to create even more money in the future is also created. The amount of money must grow over time, which means that the volume of goods and services must grow over time as well.
If the volume of money grows faster than the volume of goods and services, the result is inflation. If it grows more slowly -- for example through a slowdown in lending -- the result is bankruptcies, recession, or deflation. The government can increase or decrease the supply of money in several ways. First, it can create money by borrowing it from the central bank, or in America, from the Federal Reserve. This money ends up as bank deposits, which in turn give banks more margin reserves on which to extend loans. You see, a bank's capacity to create money is limited by margin reserve requirements. Typically, a bank must hold cash (or central bank deposits) equal to about 10% of its total customer deposits. The other 90%, it can loan out, thus creating new money. This money ends up back in a bank as deposits, allowing another 81% of it (90% of 90%) to be lent out again. In this way, each dollar of initial deposits ends up as $9 of new money. Government spending of money borrowed from the central bank acts a seed for new money creation. (Of course, this depends on banks' willingness to lend! In a credit freeze such as happened this week, banks hoard excess reserves and the repeated injections of government money have little effect.)
Another way to increase the money supply is to lower margin reserve requirements. In practice this is rarely done, at least directly. However, in the last decade, various kinds of non-bank lending have skirted the margin reserve requirement, through the alphabet soup of financial instruments you've been hearing about in the news. The result is that each dollar of original equity has been leveraged not to nine times it original value, as in traditional banking, but to 70 times or even more. This has allowed returns on investment far beyond the 5% or so available from traditional banking, along with "compensation" packages beyond the dreams of avarice.
Each new dollar that is created comes with a new dollar of debt -- more than a dollar of debt, because of interest. The debt is eventually redeemed either with goods and services, or with more borrowed money, which in turn can be redeemed with yet more borrowed money... but eventually it will be used to buy goods and services. The interest has to come from somewhere. Borrowing more money to make the interest payments on an existing loan merely postpones the day of reckoning by deferring the need to create new goods and services.
The whole system of interest-bearing money works fine as long as the volume of goods and services exchanged for money keeps growing. The crisis we are seeing today is in part because new money has been created much faster than goods and services have, and much faster than has been historically sustainable. There are only two ways out of such a situation: inflation and bankruptcies. Each involve the destruction of money. The current convulsions of the financial and political elites basically come down to a futile attempt to prevent both. Their first concern is to prevent the evaporation of money through massive bankruptcies, because it is, after all, their money.
There is a much deeper crisis at work as well, a crisis in the creation of goods and services that underlies money to begin with, and it is this crisis that gave birth to the real estate bubble everyone blames for the current situation. To understand it, let's get clear on what constitutes a "good" or a "service." In economics, these terms refer to something that is exchanged for money. If I baby sit your children for free, economists don't count it as a service. It cannot be used to pay a financial debt: I cannot go to the supermarket and say, "I watched my neighbor's kids this morning, so please give me food." But if I open a day care center and charge you money, I have created a "service." GDP rises and, according to economists, society has become wealthier.
The same is true if I cut down a forest and sell the timber. While it is still standing and inaccessible, it is not a good. It only becomes "good" when I build a logging road, hire labor, cut it down, and transport it to a buyer. I convert a forest to timber, a commodity, and GDP goes up. Similarly, if I create a new song and share it for free, GDP does not go up and society is not considered wealthier, but if I copyright it and sell it, it becomes a good. Or I can find a traditional society that uses herbs and shamanic techniques for healing, destroy their culture and make them dependent on pharmaceutical medicine which they must purchase, evict them from their land so they cannot be subsistence farmers and must buy food, clear the land and hire them on a banana plantation -- and I have made the world richer. I have brought various functions, relationships, and natural resources into the realm of money. In The Ascent of Humanity I describe this process in depth: the conversion of social capital, natural capital, cultural capital, and spiritual capital into money.
Essentially, for the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based) money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship must be monetized. For example, thirty years ago most meals were prepared at home; today some two-thirds are prepared outside, in restaurants or supermarket delis. A once unpaid function, cooking, has become a "service". And we are the richer for it. Right?
Another major engine of economic growth over the last three decades, child care, has also made us richer. We are now relieved of the burden of caring for our own children. We pay experts instead, who can do it much more efficiently.
In ancient times entertainment was also a free, participatory function. Everyone played an instrument, sang, participated in drama. Even 75 years ago in America, every small town had its own marching band and baseball team. Now we pay for those services. The economy has grown. Hooray.
The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item. Today we sell away the last vestiges of our divine bequeathment: our health, the biosphere and genome, even our own minds. This is the process that is culminating in our age. It is almost complete, especially in America and the "developed"
world. In the developing world there still remain people who live substantially in gift cultures, where natural and social wealth is not yet the subject of property. Globalization is the process of stripping away these assets, to feed the money machine's insatiable, existential need to grow. Yet this strip-mining of other lands is running up against its limits too, both because there is almost nothing left to take, and because of growing pockets of effective resistance.
The result is that the supply of money -- and the corresponding volume of debt -- has for several decades outstripped the production of goods and services that it promises. It is deeply related to the classic problem of oversupply in capitalist economics. The Marxian crisis of capital can be deferred into the future as long as new, high-profit industries and markets can be developed to compensate for the vicious circle of falling profits, falling wages, depressed consumption, and overproduction in mature industries. The continuation of capitalism as we know it depends on an infinite supply of these new industries, which essentially must convert infinite new realms of social, natural, cultural, and spiritual capital into money. The problem is, these resources are finite, and the closer they come to exhaustion, the more painful their extraction becomes. Therefore, contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.
Faced with the exhaustion of the non-monetized commonwealth that it consumes, financial capital has tried to delay the inevitable by cannibalizing itself. The dot-com bubble of the late 90s showed that the productive economy could not longer keep up with the growth of money. Lots of excess money was running around frantically, searching for a place where the promise of deferred goods and services could be redeemed. So, to postpone the inevitable crash, the Fed slashed interest rates and loosened monetary policy to allow old debts to be repaid with new debts (rather than real goods and services). The new financial goods and services that arose were phony, artifacts of deceptive accounting on a vast, systemic scale.
Obviously, the practice of borrowing new money to pay the principal and interest of old debts cannot last very long, but that is what the economy as a whole has done for ten years now. Unfortunately, simply stopping this practice isn't going to solve the underlying problem. A collapse is coming, unavoidably. The government's bailout plan will at best postpone it for a year or two (who knows, maybe until 2012!), long enough for the big players to move their money to a safe haven. They will discover, though, that there is no safe haven. As the US dollar loses its safe-haven status (which will happen all the more certainly when the government takes over Wall Street's bad debts), you can expect capital to chase various commodities in an inflationary surge before a deflationary depression takes hold. If a credit freeze overpowers the government's inflationary measures, depression will come all the sooner.
The present crisis is actually the final stage of what began in the 1930s. Successive solutions to the fundamental problem of keeping pace with money that expands with the rate of interest have been applied, and exhausted. The first effective solution was war, a state which has been permanent since 1940. Nuclear weapons and a shift in human consciousness have limited the solution of endless military escalation. Other solutions -- globalization, technology-enabled development of new goods and services to replace human functions never before commoditized, and technology- enabled plunder of natural resources once off limits, and finally financial auto-cannibalism -- have similarly run their course. Unless there are realms of wealth I have not considered, and new depths of poverty, misery, and alienation to which we might plunge, the inevitable cannot be delayed much longer.
In the face of the impending crisis, people often ask what they can do to protect themselves. "Buy gold? Stockpile canned goods? Build a fortified compound in a remote area? What should I do?" I would like to suggest a different kind of question: "What is the most beautiful thing I can do?" You see, the gathering crisis presents a tremendous opportunity. Deflation, the destruction of money, is only a categorical evil if the creation of money is a categorical good. However, you can see from the examples I have given that the creation of money has in many ways impoverished us all. Conversely, the destruction of money has the potential to enrich us. It offers the opportunity to reclaim parts of the lost commonwealth from the realm of money and property.
We actually see this happening every time there is an economic recession. People can no longer pay for various goods and services, and so have to rely on friends and neighbors instead. Where there is no money to facilitate transactions, gift economies reemerge and new kinds of money are created. Ordinarily, though, people and institutions fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening. The habitual first response to economic crisis is to make and keep more money -- to accelerate the conversion of anything you can into money. On a systemic level, the debt surge is generating enormous pressure to extend the commodification of the commonwealth. We can see this happening with the calls to drill for oil in Alaska, commence deep-sea drilling, and so on. The time is here, though, for the reverse process to begin in earnest -- to remove things from the realm of goods and services, and return them to the realm of gifts, reciprocity, self-sufficiency, and community sharing. Note well: this is going to happen anyway in the wake of a currency collapse, as people lose their jobs or become too poor to buy things. People will help each other and real communities will reemerge.
In the meantime, anything we do to protect some natural or social resource from conversion into money will both hasten the collapse and mitigate its severity. Any forest you save from development, any road you stop, any cooperative playgroup you establish; anyone you teach to heal themselves, or to build their own house, cook their own food, make their own clothes; any wealth you create or add to the public domain; anything you render off-limits to the world-devouring machine, will help shorten the Machine's lifespan. Think of it this way: if you already do not depend on money for some portion of life's necessities and pleasures, then the collapse of money will pose much less of a harsh transition for you. The same applies to the social level. Any network or community or social institution that is not a vehicle for the conversion of life into money will sustain and enrich life after money.
In previous essays I have described alternative money systems, based on mutual credit and demurrage, that do not drive the conversion of all that is good, true, and beautiful into money. These enact a fundamentally different human identity, a fundamentally different sense of self, from what dominates today. No more will it be true that more for me is less for you. On a personal level, the deepest possible revolution we can enact is a revolution in our sense of self, in our identity. The discrete and separate self of Descartes and Adam Smith has run its course and is becoming obsolete. We are realizing our own separateness, from each other and from the totality of all life. Interest denies this union, for it seeks growth of the separate self and the expense of something external, something other. Probably everyone reading this essay agrees with the principles of interconnectedness, whether from a Buddhistic or an ecological perspective. The time has come to live it. It is time to enter the spirit of the gift, which embodies the felt understanding of non-separation. It is becoming abundantly obvious that less for you (in all its dimensions) is also less for me. The ideology of perpetual gain has brought us to a state of poverty so destitute that we are gasping for air. That ideology, and the civilization built upon it, is what is collapsing today.
Individually and collectively, anything we do to resist or postpone the collapse will only make it worse. So stop resisting the revolution in human kind. If you want to survive the multiple crises unfolding today, do not seek to survive them. That is the mindset of separation; that is resistance, a clinging to a dying past. Instead, allow your perspective to shift toward reunion, and think in terms of what you can give. What can you contribute to a more beautiful world? That is your only responsibility and your only security. The gifts you need to survive and enjoy will come to you easily, because what you do to the world, you do to yourself.
Owen Wormser
Royal Oak, MD
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Its Time for Change: The Need for "Vision 2025"
I had, as I am sure you did, high hopes when we brought a new team onto our Council 19 months ago. We still have no public discussion about Adequate Public Facilities Ordinances or serious growth management ordinances, and we are undergoing increasing development pressures at a time when our existing infrastructure is not able to cope.
Talbot is special. We’ve all chosen to be here because of its unique quality of life and rural character. We need to work together to balance the rural aspects of Talbot with changes that are both needed and inevitable. The high cost of living in Talbot County is another issue. It’s going to be one of our toughest problems to solve, Talbot has “city prices” without offering “city wages.”
Managing growth: As a "banner statement" for what residents refer to as the “growth issue”, managing growth captures the essence of accountability, responsibility, governance, and transparency.
I hear very little about taxes, other than how county tax dollars are spent, though there seems to be consensus this is an issue. Maryland is only one of two States in the US that permits its counties to exercise "personal income" taxation as a source of county revenue. The question in my mind is "what" is the tax issue - explicitly(?), can we articulate this issue? One example might be tax incentives within the county to attract new, environmentally sound, businesses into the county. In any case, taxation is a discussion and policy formulation issue needing pro-active leadership from Council members as well as informed citizens such that future requirements for revenues, which match our future vision and comprehensive planning, are understood and agree to by the majority of our citizens.
Services: to me this is almost on par with "managing growth". Talbot county’s population is aging, very few young people schooled here, with family here, stay here for a varity reasons. Those with the view we can simply call on western shore resources to meet our "service" needs are very short sighted in my view. Travel, specifically vehicle fuel costs, will become exorbitant over the coming years - we need basic human services in-county or within the surrounding, Mid-shore counties to ensure the needs of our population can be met within reason. Ready access to "senior citizen" services will become paramount in my view in the not to distant future. There are no real geriatric services in Talbot at this time and planning/funding for these is way behind our growing requirement.
Environment: is perhaps one of the deepest concerns I have spoken about with many people. There are numerous pro's and con's to current environmental policies, especially those centered within our current "Comprehensive Plan". Active farmers have strongly held points of view, true environmentalists have an almost fanatic point of view, many folks seem to be ambivalent and seem to believe the environment will take care of itself if "no growth" is adhered to as a governing policy, and so forth. In other words, folks seem to be all over the map when it comes to environmental matters. I think this issue must be tied to managing growth as well as to environmentally-sound policies, reflective of the unique character of Talbot, its world-class shore line, its pristine beauty, and its status as a major supplier of Bay seafood and agribusiness products.
The Eastern Shore has one of the nation's most unique and irreplaceable environments, with its coastal bays, Atlantic shores, tributaries, extensive wetlands (occupying 16% of its land area), forests, open space, and wildlife habitats. Citizens and environmentalists alike are concerned that poorly planned development will cause loss of open space, forestland, and wildlife habitats, in addition to the degradation of the Shore's sources of drinking water (supplied by aquifers). The U.S. Geological Survey has identified the Delmarva Peninsula as an area at risk for groundwater contamination due to high nutrient loading on land. The health of the Chesapeake Bay and its 53 Eastern Shore tributaries (25 of which are currently on the State's Impaired Waters list) is also of grave concern. Poorly planned development increases runoff and strains the region's water/sewer infrastructure, which in turn contributes to Bay pollution. It was recently announced that Maryland will fail to meet the 2010 Chesapeake Bay restoration goals established in a multi-state agreement with the federal government. One positive development is the establishment of the Chesapeake Bay Restoration Fund (a.k.a., the "flush tax"), which will provide funding to upgrade most sewage treatment plants to the level of nutrient reduction required by the Bay restoration plan, as well as to further reduce nutrient loadings by requiring septic systems to be upgraded and cover crops to be planted.
“VISION 2025”, Planning for Our Future: All these points underscore the real and compelling need for a county-wide, publicly-agreed 10 to 20 year vision and strategic plan with accompanying funding estimates and required actions to support this vision. We must ensure recommended policies in our Comprehensive Plan are implemented in agreement with our long-term vision Likewise, we will need the metrics and tools to measure our progress toward our vision so we know if we are veering off course or need to change direction due to unforeseen circumstances.
As neighbors, we should be focused on ways to work and live together – It is self-defeating to resort to divisive partisan politics. We teach our children not to call each other names, but we often resort to finger pointing and labeling others, rather than doing the hard work required to collaborate and get things done for the good of the community – today and for the future.
Our farmers and our farms are a major component of Talbot’s future economic well-being. We need to work with our farmers to find ways to enhance our rural way of life, while protecting the environment and contributing to the local and national economy.
It is paramount to manage reasonable growth – growth that supports our vision for the next 10 to 20 years and possibly beyond. We will not accept being like the Western shore. We can say NO to developers who want to acquire our land, over-build and leave. No amount of money is worth paving over Talbot. However, we need specific, well-managed growth to survive and thrive, including:
• affordable housing,
• expanded infrastructure (roads, sewer, and water),
• high speed information infrastructure, e.g. internet, cable, cell phones,
• top notch health care,
• 21st century education,
• incentives for new businesses who provide competitive paying jobs
These are growth initiatives needed to keep Talbot competitive economically, while preserving our way of life. Our county relies on all its residents for progress while maintaining our rural character and quality of life; when we help one, we help all. That’s why education is so important. We want our children to be the best educated in the country, not just in our State. We want them to be able to go anywhere, but we should also create opportunities for them to choose to stay here. That’s why we have to have jobs for them to stay for and homes they can afford.
Finally, we need to remember that when we do the right thing for our farmers to preserve their lands and create new incentives for them to keep farming, we are doing the right thing for all Talbot working folks, retired residents, and our children. The same goes for creating incentives for business to come to Talbot. A community is like a quilt. The whole is more beautiful and useful when integrated seamlessly, than any of the pieces by themselves.
Working together we must define a long-term vision for the future of Talbot County
• We are definitely experiencing similar types of real estate development pressures as those on the Western Shore.
• We must have a clear vision of what we want Talbot County to be like in 10 to 20 years.
• Such a long-term vision must be for the welfare of all Talbot residents.
• We have exceptional people resources having a wide range of skill sets.
• Partisan politics should not play a role in this endeavor.
A long-term vision need not be a vision of special interests. I believe it must involve our farmers, business owners, working families, parents, and working teens. We are not talking about growth at all costs versus no growth. Neither is an option. Before we are overwhelmed by out-of-control development pressures we need to define what we want for Talbot – what is our collective VISION for the County. Our County's Comprehensive Plan is a good planning and policy document. However, it continues as primarily a land-use document focusing on priorities for such use without stated metrics and measurement tools to evaluate if we are headed in the right direction across many functional areas in our society, i.e. education, job and new business creation, long-term preservation of open space, environmental protection, health care for all our residents especially for our fixed income population, commercial and residential development, to name but a few.
Talbot County is at a critical point in time. The next 4 years will determine what this County will be like for the next 20 years. Development of a long-term vision and strategic plan that builds on the excellent work in our Comprehensive Plan while providing metrics and measurement tools as well as the means to stay or change course should be the principle objective of such a vision planning process. This process must involve all residents of Talbot and I will commit to making every effort to ensure this is a reality before such a vision and plan is ever produced. Without this future view for Talbot, budgeting and managing growth, allocating capital outlays of our tax dollars for infrastructure, School Board funding, and a number of other functional activities requiring allocation of revenues will make no long-term sense.
Its been said many times: The best way to predict the future is to create it.
Talbot is special. We’ve all chosen to be here because of its unique quality of life and rural character. We need to work together to balance the rural aspects of Talbot with changes that are both needed and inevitable. The high cost of living in Talbot County is another issue. It’s going to be one of our toughest problems to solve, Talbot has “city prices” without offering “city wages.”
Managing growth: As a "banner statement" for what residents refer to as the “growth issue”, managing growth captures the essence of accountability, responsibility, governance, and transparency.
I hear very little about taxes, other than how county tax dollars are spent, though there seems to be consensus this is an issue. Maryland is only one of two States in the US that permits its counties to exercise "personal income" taxation as a source of county revenue. The question in my mind is "what" is the tax issue - explicitly(?), can we articulate this issue? One example might be tax incentives within the county to attract new, environmentally sound, businesses into the county. In any case, taxation is a discussion and policy formulation issue needing pro-active leadership from Council members as well as informed citizens such that future requirements for revenues, which match our future vision and comprehensive planning, are understood and agree to by the majority of our citizens.
Services: to me this is almost on par with "managing growth". Talbot county’s population is aging, very few young people schooled here, with family here, stay here for a varity reasons. Those with the view we can simply call on western shore resources to meet our "service" needs are very short sighted in my view. Travel, specifically vehicle fuel costs, will become exorbitant over the coming years - we need basic human services in-county or within the surrounding, Mid-shore counties to ensure the needs of our population can be met within reason. Ready access to "senior citizen" services will become paramount in my view in the not to distant future. There are no real geriatric services in Talbot at this time and planning/funding for these is way behind our growing requirement.
Environment: is perhaps one of the deepest concerns I have spoken about with many people. There are numerous pro's and con's to current environmental policies, especially those centered within our current "Comprehensive Plan". Active farmers have strongly held points of view, true environmentalists have an almost fanatic point of view, many folks seem to be ambivalent and seem to believe the environment will take care of itself if "no growth" is adhered to as a governing policy, and so forth. In other words, folks seem to be all over the map when it comes to environmental matters. I think this issue must be tied to managing growth as well as to environmentally-sound policies, reflective of the unique character of Talbot, its world-class shore line, its pristine beauty, and its status as a major supplier of Bay seafood and agribusiness products.
The Eastern Shore has one of the nation's most unique and irreplaceable environments, with its coastal bays, Atlantic shores, tributaries, extensive wetlands (occupying 16% of its land area), forests, open space, and wildlife habitats. Citizens and environmentalists alike are concerned that poorly planned development will cause loss of open space, forestland, and wildlife habitats, in addition to the degradation of the Shore's sources of drinking water (supplied by aquifers). The U.S. Geological Survey has identified the Delmarva Peninsula as an area at risk for groundwater contamination due to high nutrient loading on land. The health of the Chesapeake Bay and its 53 Eastern Shore tributaries (25 of which are currently on the State's Impaired Waters list) is also of grave concern. Poorly planned development increases runoff and strains the region's water/sewer infrastructure, which in turn contributes to Bay pollution. It was recently announced that Maryland will fail to meet the 2010 Chesapeake Bay restoration goals established in a multi-state agreement with the federal government. One positive development is the establishment of the Chesapeake Bay Restoration Fund (a.k.a., the "flush tax"), which will provide funding to upgrade most sewage treatment plants to the level of nutrient reduction required by the Bay restoration plan, as well as to further reduce nutrient loadings by requiring septic systems to be upgraded and cover crops to be planted.
“VISION 2025”, Planning for Our Future: All these points underscore the real and compelling need for a county-wide, publicly-agreed 10 to 20 year vision and strategic plan with accompanying funding estimates and required actions to support this vision. We must ensure recommended policies in our Comprehensive Plan are implemented in agreement with our long-term vision Likewise, we will need the metrics and tools to measure our progress toward our vision so we know if we are veering off course or need to change direction due to unforeseen circumstances.
As neighbors, we should be focused on ways to work and live together – It is self-defeating to resort to divisive partisan politics. We teach our children not to call each other names, but we often resort to finger pointing and labeling others, rather than doing the hard work required to collaborate and get things done for the good of the community – today and for the future.
Our farmers and our farms are a major component of Talbot’s future economic well-being. We need to work with our farmers to find ways to enhance our rural way of life, while protecting the environment and contributing to the local and national economy.
It is paramount to manage reasonable growth – growth that supports our vision for the next 10 to 20 years and possibly beyond. We will not accept being like the Western shore. We can say NO to developers who want to acquire our land, over-build and leave. No amount of money is worth paving over Talbot. However, we need specific, well-managed growth to survive and thrive, including:
• affordable housing,
• expanded infrastructure (roads, sewer, and water),
• high speed information infrastructure, e.g. internet, cable, cell phones,
• top notch health care,
• 21st century education,
• incentives for new businesses who provide competitive paying jobs
These are growth initiatives needed to keep Talbot competitive economically, while preserving our way of life. Our county relies on all its residents for progress while maintaining our rural character and quality of life; when we help one, we help all. That’s why education is so important. We want our children to be the best educated in the country, not just in our State. We want them to be able to go anywhere, but we should also create opportunities for them to choose to stay here. That’s why we have to have jobs for them to stay for and homes they can afford.
Finally, we need to remember that when we do the right thing for our farmers to preserve their lands and create new incentives for them to keep farming, we are doing the right thing for all Talbot working folks, retired residents, and our children. The same goes for creating incentives for business to come to Talbot. A community is like a quilt. The whole is more beautiful and useful when integrated seamlessly, than any of the pieces by themselves.
Working together we must define a long-term vision for the future of Talbot County
• We are definitely experiencing similar types of real estate development pressures as those on the Western Shore.
• We must have a clear vision of what we want Talbot County to be like in 10 to 20 years.
• Such a long-term vision must be for the welfare of all Talbot residents.
• We have exceptional people resources having a wide range of skill sets.
• Partisan politics should not play a role in this endeavor.
A long-term vision need not be a vision of special interests. I believe it must involve our farmers, business owners, working families, parents, and working teens. We are not talking about growth at all costs versus no growth. Neither is an option. Before we are overwhelmed by out-of-control development pressures we need to define what we want for Talbot – what is our collective VISION for the County. Our County's Comprehensive Plan is a good planning and policy document. However, it continues as primarily a land-use document focusing on priorities for such use without stated metrics and measurement tools to evaluate if we are headed in the right direction across many functional areas in our society, i.e. education, job and new business creation, long-term preservation of open space, environmental protection, health care for all our residents especially for our fixed income population, commercial and residential development, to name but a few.
Talbot County is at a critical point in time. The next 4 years will determine what this County will be like for the next 20 years. Development of a long-term vision and strategic plan that builds on the excellent work in our Comprehensive Plan while providing metrics and measurement tools as well as the means to stay or change course should be the principle objective of such a vision planning process. This process must involve all residents of Talbot and I will commit to making every effort to ensure this is a reality before such a vision and plan is ever produced. Without this future view for Talbot, budgeting and managing growth, allocating capital outlays of our tax dollars for infrastructure, School Board funding, and a number of other functional activities requiring allocation of revenues will make no long-term sense.
Its been said many times: The best way to predict the future is to create it.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
My Presentation re: County FY 2009 Budget
Owen Wormser’s Presentation to County Council re: FY2009 Budget 6 May 2008
President Foster, members of the Council, I am Owen Wormser, of Royal Oak, Maryland. It is my pleasure to provide my input to your deliberations surrounding our County’s proposed FY 2009 budget.
I commend the County Council and County Manager for several significant accomplishments during preparation of the proposed FY 2009 budget and during execution of the FY 2008 budget. I am are particularly supportive of our Board of Education’s continued endorsement, support, and encouragement for advanced technology initiatives in our schools. I believe our young people leaving TCPS will have benefited greatly from their exposure to, training in, and use of emerging technologies such as advanced laptop computers.
I am deeply concerned County revenue projected for FY 2009 and beyond may well be considerably less than earlier projections, especially revenues derived from county income taxes, recordation taxes, transfer taxes, and development impact fees. This potential impact on both Operating and Capital expenditures will require skilled and careful fiscal management to weather the economic storm expected to intensify over the coming years.
My review of the proposed FY 2009 budget produced two areas of major concern:
• The Board of Education’s (BoE) request for FY 2009 funding is highly questionable in our opinion. In a era when we are witnessing a slow but steady decline in overall Talbot County student population according to the Maryland Department of Education’s county-by-county analysis through CY 2007 and our BoE’s projection of below 4400 students for the coming school year, I ask County Council to consider this budget most carefully. I encourage the Council to scrutinize thoroughly proposed expenditures in the BoE’s budget to ensure there are appropriate justifications. Though I strongly support an annual increase in classroom teacher’s salaries and other classroom teacher benefits, I am not supportive of the continued increases in the non-academic employee ratio to classroom teacher. It appears to me TCPS is becoming top heavy with Administration and non-classroom-specific employees at a time when overall student population is on the decline.
• I believe Council should provide the authority to the BoE to move a given year’s appropriated funds as necessary during the fiscal year and to incentivize BoE efficiencies by allowing such funds to be re-programmed allowing for TCPS expenditures in other areas in need.
• My second area of major concern is the capital expenditure of $6,000,000 for a multi-sport facility to be built at the Talbot Community Center (TCCC). I oppose this expenditure for the following reasons:
1. There has not been a Statement of Need or a requirements study made available to the public according to my research. Thus, there is no known documented need upon which to base such a significant expenditure of taxpayer dollars on a facility we believe is extraneous to Talbot County needs at this time due to many other competing priorities. To wit: Public Safety (i.e. fire & rescue), roads and grounds (infrastructure repairs and replacement), classroom teacher’s salaries, vocational training, to name but a few.
2. Though Department of Parks & Recreation intends to provide scheduled transportation to and from this new facility, from after school until late evening, I do not concur with an expenditure of taxpayer dollars for such an enterprise when capital investment in vehicles, transportation insurance, fuel, maintenance, and personnel costs are all experiencing exponential cost increases.
3. I am equally aware of some limited discussions between the Easton YMCA leadership and our County staff about the planned expansion of indoor sport facilities at the “Y”. In my opinion, there has not been an adequate exploration of alternatives for the proposed $6M multi-sport facility planned for the Community Center. Some argue the “Y” could change leadership and close the door on use of their facility. If this is a widely held view, the question should then arise as to what are the legitimate alternatives and to what extent have these been explored and reported to the public with the end result being selection of the Community Center site? I am not aware of any such efforts.
My Summary of Other FY 2009 Budget Issues
Public Safety Concerns: Volunteer Resources and Planning
• Changing demographics, population growth, and personal commitments are challenging the availability of Public Safety volunteers, a result which could necessitate use of some limited number of fire company career staff in the very near future.
• Once career staff is deployed to support our volunteer system, a clearly developed operational chain of command must be implemented to ensure uniform service delivery and proper organizational management within Talbot’s combined career and volunteer service provider system.
• Demands on the County’s combined fire and rescue system will increase as the population grows. Services such as ladder companies, heavy rescue, advanced and basic life support, water tankers, new stations, and new apparatus must be added to meet growing demands.
• The construction of campus-like facilities, multi-story buildings, assisted living facilities, large single-family dwellings, townhouse communities and other large facilities is creating new demands for innovative and proactive fire suppression.
• Planning for mitigation of natural and man-made disasters, to include prospective acts of terrorism, remains a key focus of the Office of Emergency Management. Responsible and collaborative regional planning efforts must continue to ensure safe and successful special events coordination with sponsors and agencies.
• Talbot County needs a comprehensive Fire and Rescue Service Plan with which to guide future budget development and service delivery goals.
• A Strategic Plan is needed that links a combined fire and rescue system service plan and the County's budgetary process, providing measurable goals for program development and implementation.
• Implement the Federal grant-supported respiratory protection program, which is mandated by State and Federal regulations for using, maintaining, and testing self-contained breathing apparatus for fire and rescue components.
• Conduct 150 fire and rescue training classes and programs; organize a recruit-training program and graduate an estimated 50 recruits over the next 3 years.
• Implement a Talbot County Evacuation Assistance Registry (TEAR) to quickly identify those requiring assistance that are living in evacuation zones.
• Gather additional Geospatial Information System (GIS) data layers for use in the County’s EOC / 911 Center to ensure road class and speed limits for automated dispatch of responders to incidents is consistent with best practices and safety.
Public Safety Concerns: Law Enforcement
The Sheriff is a constitutional officer by virtue of the Maryland Constitution, Article IV, Section 44, elected every four years, and has responsibilities outlined by the General Assembly in the form of State statutes. The Sheriff and Sheriff’s deputies have criminal and civil jurisdiction and are empowered to enforce the laws of the State of Maryland, and the ordinances of Talbot County. These powers may be exercised on any property within Talbot County.
• Population growth within Talbot continues to create significant law enforcement shortfalls with regard to adequate response throughout the county.
• Staffing levels are having difficulty keeping pace with the County's growth and have fallen below the levels needed to reduce response times and caseloads while expanding community policing.
• Proposed openings of new community- based substations will require additional resources.
• An anticipated increase in the number of local inmates requires future expansion of the County’s Adult Detention Center and its associated staffing.
• Increasing workloads are driving the need for additional support staff to handle administrative tasks while ensuring sworn resources are committed to street duties.
• Implementing a Public Safety Master Plan with concomitant identification of funding is critical.
• There is no Law Enforcement Capital Improvement Program (LECIP) for future budgetary consideration.
• Consideration should be given to rationalizing our County’s law enforcement resources into a single resource pool under the leadership and management of a single law enforcement authority. This individual would be a direct report to the County Council. The Office of the Sheriff should be reorganized to meet only those constitutionally mandated tasks associated with court and detention matters. Law enforcement resources currently funded by the towns and those of the county should be folded into a unified force and distributed throughout the county at appropriate sub-stations. This is the most economical way to meet both public safety response needs and the need to find more efficient means for future funding.
Parks & Recreation Concerns: Hog Neck Golf Course (HNGC)
• A feasibility study should be undertaken to assess the continuing financial viability of the HNGC as a publicly resourced facility under the purview of the County.
• More than190 golf courses are now within the same 200-mile radius of Easton that was the original rationale for a “Championship” course on the “Alton” property. At the time the property was donated there did not exist a championship-quality course within 200 miles of Easton – the tables have now turned.
• Given the present costs for personal transportation (with no expectation of any substantial decrease) and other related costs for recreation, we believe annually subsidizing operation costs of the course is not a prudent use of limited taxpayer dollars and that funds presently used for this purpose would be better used for other County priorities.
• There are several professional golf course management companies that should be approached to ascertain if they would assume responsibility for course operation and modernization at their expense while paying a lease fee to the County.
• If no such opportunity materializes, consideration should be given to closing the course and allowing the facility to revert to other recreational uses such as a large game park in keeping with the Alton donation.
• Barring favorable consideration of the above suggestions; as a minimum, I firmly believe the existing 9-Hole Executive course should be closed to ensure operating expenditure containment and put a halt to continued financial losses.
Though these are three of the lesser issues about which I am prepared to discuss, Council’s time constraint for presentations negates my doing so at this time. However, I am more than willing to have such discussions at another time convenient to the Council. In closing, I wish to thank Mr. John Lehner, County Finance Officer, for his time, effort, and responsiveness in helping me understand the complexities and competing demands within the County’s FY 2009 proposed budget.
Owen Wormser
25911 Goose Neck Road
Royal Oak, MD 21662
http://owenwormser.com
410-745-0138
owen@owenwormser.com
President Foster, members of the Council, I am Owen Wormser, of Royal Oak, Maryland. It is my pleasure to provide my input to your deliberations surrounding our County’s proposed FY 2009 budget.
I commend the County Council and County Manager for several significant accomplishments during preparation of the proposed FY 2009 budget and during execution of the FY 2008 budget. I am are particularly supportive of our Board of Education’s continued endorsement, support, and encouragement for advanced technology initiatives in our schools. I believe our young people leaving TCPS will have benefited greatly from their exposure to, training in, and use of emerging technologies such as advanced laptop computers.
I am deeply concerned County revenue projected for FY 2009 and beyond may well be considerably less than earlier projections, especially revenues derived from county income taxes, recordation taxes, transfer taxes, and development impact fees. This potential impact on both Operating and Capital expenditures will require skilled and careful fiscal management to weather the economic storm expected to intensify over the coming years.
My review of the proposed FY 2009 budget produced two areas of major concern:
• The Board of Education’s (BoE) request for FY 2009 funding is highly questionable in our opinion. In a era when we are witnessing a slow but steady decline in overall Talbot County student population according to the Maryland Department of Education’s county-by-county analysis through CY 2007 and our BoE’s projection of below 4400 students for the coming school year, I ask County Council to consider this budget most carefully. I encourage the Council to scrutinize thoroughly proposed expenditures in the BoE’s budget to ensure there are appropriate justifications. Though I strongly support an annual increase in classroom teacher’s salaries and other classroom teacher benefits, I am not supportive of the continued increases in the non-academic employee ratio to classroom teacher. It appears to me TCPS is becoming top heavy with Administration and non-classroom-specific employees at a time when overall student population is on the decline.
• I believe Council should provide the authority to the BoE to move a given year’s appropriated funds as necessary during the fiscal year and to incentivize BoE efficiencies by allowing such funds to be re-programmed allowing for TCPS expenditures in other areas in need.
• My second area of major concern is the capital expenditure of $6,000,000 for a multi-sport facility to be built at the Talbot Community Center (TCCC). I oppose this expenditure for the following reasons:
1. There has not been a Statement of Need or a requirements study made available to the public according to my research. Thus, there is no known documented need upon which to base such a significant expenditure of taxpayer dollars on a facility we believe is extraneous to Talbot County needs at this time due to many other competing priorities. To wit: Public Safety (i.e. fire & rescue), roads and grounds (infrastructure repairs and replacement), classroom teacher’s salaries, vocational training, to name but a few.
2. Though Department of Parks & Recreation intends to provide scheduled transportation to and from this new facility, from after school until late evening, I do not concur with an expenditure of taxpayer dollars for such an enterprise when capital investment in vehicles, transportation insurance, fuel, maintenance, and personnel costs are all experiencing exponential cost increases.
3. I am equally aware of some limited discussions between the Easton YMCA leadership and our County staff about the planned expansion of indoor sport facilities at the “Y”. In my opinion, there has not been an adequate exploration of alternatives for the proposed $6M multi-sport facility planned for the Community Center. Some argue the “Y” could change leadership and close the door on use of their facility. If this is a widely held view, the question should then arise as to what are the legitimate alternatives and to what extent have these been explored and reported to the public with the end result being selection of the Community Center site? I am not aware of any such efforts.
My Summary of Other FY 2009 Budget Issues
Public Safety Concerns: Volunteer Resources and Planning
• Changing demographics, population growth, and personal commitments are challenging the availability of Public Safety volunteers, a result which could necessitate use of some limited number of fire company career staff in the very near future.
• Once career staff is deployed to support our volunteer system, a clearly developed operational chain of command must be implemented to ensure uniform service delivery and proper organizational management within Talbot’s combined career and volunteer service provider system.
• Demands on the County’s combined fire and rescue system will increase as the population grows. Services such as ladder companies, heavy rescue, advanced and basic life support, water tankers, new stations, and new apparatus must be added to meet growing demands.
• The construction of campus-like facilities, multi-story buildings, assisted living facilities, large single-family dwellings, townhouse communities and other large facilities is creating new demands for innovative and proactive fire suppression.
• Planning for mitigation of natural and man-made disasters, to include prospective acts of terrorism, remains a key focus of the Office of Emergency Management. Responsible and collaborative regional planning efforts must continue to ensure safe and successful special events coordination with sponsors and agencies.
• Talbot County needs a comprehensive Fire and Rescue Service Plan with which to guide future budget development and service delivery goals.
• A Strategic Plan is needed that links a combined fire and rescue system service plan and the County's budgetary process, providing measurable goals for program development and implementation.
• Implement the Federal grant-supported respiratory protection program, which is mandated by State and Federal regulations for using, maintaining, and testing self-contained breathing apparatus for fire and rescue components.
• Conduct 150 fire and rescue training classes and programs; organize a recruit-training program and graduate an estimated 50 recruits over the next 3 years.
• Implement a Talbot County Evacuation Assistance Registry (TEAR) to quickly identify those requiring assistance that are living in evacuation zones.
• Gather additional Geospatial Information System (GIS) data layers for use in the County’s EOC / 911 Center to ensure road class and speed limits for automated dispatch of responders to incidents is consistent with best practices and safety.
Public Safety Concerns: Law Enforcement
The Sheriff is a constitutional officer by virtue of the Maryland Constitution, Article IV, Section 44, elected every four years, and has responsibilities outlined by the General Assembly in the form of State statutes. The Sheriff and Sheriff’s deputies have criminal and civil jurisdiction and are empowered to enforce the laws of the State of Maryland, and the ordinances of Talbot County. These powers may be exercised on any property within Talbot County.
• Population growth within Talbot continues to create significant law enforcement shortfalls with regard to adequate response throughout the county.
• Staffing levels are having difficulty keeping pace with the County's growth and have fallen below the levels needed to reduce response times and caseloads while expanding community policing.
• Proposed openings of new community- based substations will require additional resources.
• An anticipated increase in the number of local inmates requires future expansion of the County’s Adult Detention Center and its associated staffing.
• Increasing workloads are driving the need for additional support staff to handle administrative tasks while ensuring sworn resources are committed to street duties.
• Implementing a Public Safety Master Plan with concomitant identification of funding is critical.
• There is no Law Enforcement Capital Improvement Program (LECIP) for future budgetary consideration.
• Consideration should be given to rationalizing our County’s law enforcement resources into a single resource pool under the leadership and management of a single law enforcement authority. This individual would be a direct report to the County Council. The Office of the Sheriff should be reorganized to meet only those constitutionally mandated tasks associated with court and detention matters. Law enforcement resources currently funded by the towns and those of the county should be folded into a unified force and distributed throughout the county at appropriate sub-stations. This is the most economical way to meet both public safety response needs and the need to find more efficient means for future funding.
Parks & Recreation Concerns: Hog Neck Golf Course (HNGC)
• A feasibility study should be undertaken to assess the continuing financial viability of the HNGC as a publicly resourced facility under the purview of the County.
• More than190 golf courses are now within the same 200-mile radius of Easton that was the original rationale for a “Championship” course on the “Alton” property. At the time the property was donated there did not exist a championship-quality course within 200 miles of Easton – the tables have now turned.
• Given the present costs for personal transportation (with no expectation of any substantial decrease) and other related costs for recreation, we believe annually subsidizing operation costs of the course is not a prudent use of limited taxpayer dollars and that funds presently used for this purpose would be better used for other County priorities.
• There are several professional golf course management companies that should be approached to ascertain if they would assume responsibility for course operation and modernization at their expense while paying a lease fee to the County.
• If no such opportunity materializes, consideration should be given to closing the course and allowing the facility to revert to other recreational uses such as a large game park in keeping with the Alton donation.
• Barring favorable consideration of the above suggestions; as a minimum, I firmly believe the existing 9-Hole Executive course should be closed to ensure operating expenditure containment and put a halt to continued financial losses.
Though these are three of the lesser issues about which I am prepared to discuss, Council’s time constraint for presentations negates my doing so at this time. However, I am more than willing to have such discussions at another time convenient to the Council. In closing, I wish to thank Mr. John Lehner, County Finance Officer, for his time, effort, and responsiveness in helping me understand the complexities and competing demands within the County’s FY 2009 proposed budget.
Owen Wormser
25911 Goose Neck Road
Royal Oak, MD 21662
http://owenwormser.com
410-745-0138
owen@owenwormser.com
Monday, March 3, 2008
A Case for "Wiring" Talbot County
Senator Mikulski (D MD) Has Made it Possible for a Fiber Optic, Information Super Highway to be Implemented between Wallops Island and the Delaware River Bridge
Talbot County government appears to be apathetic about preparing our County for the 21st Century. We are far behind our Western Shore competitors with respect to our use of telecommunications and information technology. Businesses and consumers find themselves unable to interact reliably with potential suppliers, investors, or customers. Many parts of our county lack cell phone as well as wireless and cable access to the Internet. Simply stated: we are not “wired for the 21st Century”.
Information technology experts who deal with “continuity of business” issues and initiatives everyday know full well the value of dispersing information technology assets to remote locations for information safety, recovery, and cost factors. Since 9/11 2001 many companies now value dispersing information technology for business survival. The Eastern Shore could serve as a remote location for information recovery assets belonging to companies and government agencies from New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia / Wilmington to Baltimore, to Washington DC, and to Northern Virginia. With the majority of financial institutions operating within 200 miles of Talbot, and with banking concentration in Wilmington and the Federal Government concentration around Washington, Talbot provides a close but rural location for business continuity services.
Eastern Shore broadband telecommunications infrastructure and services will make it possible for us to manage our growth without the need for a large influx of people. Though we have been undergoing substantial development pressures, and though for the time being this pressure has subsided due to the “credit crunch” I wrote about in an earlier blog article; we can accommodate growth associated with an influx of broadband capabilities. By adhering to our Comprehensive Plan, we can avoid the effects of suburban sprawl unlike our urban counterparts on the Western Shore. Eventual renovation and infill in our towns, supported by competitively priced broadband access, can also provide substantial quality of life and environmental advantages.
Information technology investments companies might make in our towns include information archives, computing centers, data-backup server clusters for organizations such as financial firms (insurance, securities, banking), hospitals (telemedicine), and various government agencies. I believe our County Council should encourage corporations, State and Federal counterparts, and the health care industry to use infrastructure assets we have her in Talbot when developing their business continuity plans. However, before this will be possible we should be doing a whole lot more to energize, advertise, and expaqnd the efforts of the Maryland Broadband Cooperative (MBC) as well as providing County County leadership and appropriate funding to ensure Talbot has the most modern, up-to-date infrastructure to make use of MBC’s Eastern Shore fiber optic backbone. At present, wireless technologies such as WiMAX offers us an opportunity to “wire Talbot” at a cost significantly less than that required for a fiber optic infrastructure. WiMAX deployed on water towers, silos, radio towers, etc. could provide 100% coverage of Talbot. In the longer-term, every effort should be made to develop a county-wide fiber optic infrastructure to meet eventual increased bandwidth requirements as new applications, reliability, security, and quality of service considerations dictate.
Broadband wireless is the most cost-effective Internet access technology for Talbot to use for expanding the availability of affordable broadband service to all our businesses, schools, service providers, and residents. Our Council’s support for the Maryland Broadband Cooperative is essential to develop a common, open system broadband “back haul” infrastructure that would be used by future wireless internet service providers (WISPs) as they gear up to offer cost-effective broadband service throughout Talbot. Where there’s leadership and the will – there’s a way.
These are broad assertions, where’s are specifics? My intent here is to provide specifics. As I see it, there is a hierarchy of need in our community beginning with family and quality of life, followed closely by parenting, individual responsibilities, then jobs, education, housing, cost of living, recreation, volunteerism and so forth. I want to relate the “why and how” wiring Talbot is critical to our future from a family, quality of life, and parenting perspective. As I tour our county speaking with residents from all walks of life, I find the number one personal concern is the breakdown in family and the resulting impact on quality of life and parenting. Concerns range from “all my children have moved away and our ability to travel to be with them has become extremely challenging”; to: “why can’t there be jobs in Talbot that pay a decent wage so our children will stay here?”; to: “our family has become totally dysfunctional since our children have moved away; to: “my son wants to drop out of school because he sees mowing grass as being a better opportunity than graduating from high school”. The testimonies abound. Bottom line: we need a well-paying job environment in Talbot that affects our children’s attitudes and decisions. Bringing information technology business into Talbot will create an economic dynamic having a profound effect for our children’s futures. Jobs in this industry are well-paying, averaging $65,000/yr for a computer programmer with basic skills, more for systems engineers, site managers, etc. Should we look into forming a wireless task force to create a WIFI solution for our County, similar to what’s happening now in Cambridge? This Task Force would focus on the value of free wireless access from anywhere in our County.
Having this sort of environmentally-sound job base will impact student motivation, family prospects for real unity and much more. Its our responsibility to create a future for our youth. Not hand outs, but real opportunity motivating interest in getting an education, giving parents a basis for encouraging their sons and daughters by focusing on the positive aspects of a future in Talbot, providing our schools with solid rationale, drawn on local example, for our students to stay in school and perform well. And, most important, providing families with real reasons to feel pride and a sense of dignity in their Our Eastern Shore broadband telecommunications infrastructure and services will make it possible for us to manage our growth without the need for a large influx of people and additional large-scale development.
Recognizing agriculture plays a major role in the economy of Talbot is one reason for getting our County “wired”. Today, there is an abundance of interactive, technical tools on the Internet available to our farmers and nurserymen providing much needed capabilities about ways to make agriculture more profitable. These tools are best known as precision agriculture tools. They process everything from soil type analysis; what and when to plant; how much seed / nutrients to employ per acre; types row spacing and seed drill settings; coupled with such tools for assessing irrigation requirements, harvesting techniques and more, much more. Talbot should have a comprehensive database detailing every geospatial parameter for agriculture lands in Talbot. Such a data repository could be accessed while plowing, seeding, spraying, or harvesting a field via an interactive, wireless computer carried on the tractor coupled to the Global Positioning System. Such applications are not uncommon these days on large-scale farms in our country’s breadbasket and the cost for such systems have dropped drastically.
Likewise, our County’s Economic Development Office partnering with our Chamber of Commerce could carry out a marketing strategy focused on bringing major corporation “business continuity centers” into Talbot. The Internet is indeed ubiquitous, its everywhere. However, its infrastructure remains vulnerable because Internet deployment has relied heavily on available right-of-ways, e.g. AMTRAK as one example. You may remember several years ago a major train fire in the railroad tunnel passing through Baltimore. The intensity of that fire destroyed all sorts of commercial telecommunications cabling running through that tunnel. In a similar vain, the destruction of the twin towers on 11 September 2001 brought a halt to many major Internet services supporting all sorts of business and private activities along the eastern seaboard and to points west. The DELMARVA presents a perfect solution for a survivable alternative North/South route for Internet networking. For many years now our Federal Government has been wrestling with Critical Infrastructure Protection. Though progress in the Federal Government sector has been steady and focused, private industry has been slow to invest in business continuity systems primarily due to a lack of available, redundant, secure, survivable infrastructure. Our County should support the on-going efforts by our Mid Shore Regional Council and the Maryland Broadband Cooperative to deploy a broadband, high-speed, telecommunications backbone from Wallops Island to the Delaware Bridge.
With this backbone in place our opportunity to provide broadband Internet access to every Talbot resident as well as meeting requirements for “business continuity centers”, tourism, and other activities becomes a reality.
The IT industry, as its known, is one of several enterprise opportunities for creating decent, environmentally-sound, well-paying jobs in our County. We need to do more than simply talk about keeping our youth in our County. We need to put our tax dollars and common sense to work to ensure our County is ready for the 21st Century and the jobs such enterprises provide.
Owen Wormser
Talbot County government appears to be apathetic about preparing our County for the 21st Century. We are far behind our Western Shore competitors with respect to our use of telecommunications and information technology. Businesses and consumers find themselves unable to interact reliably with potential suppliers, investors, or customers. Many parts of our county lack cell phone as well as wireless and cable access to the Internet. Simply stated: we are not “wired for the 21st Century”.
Information technology experts who deal with “continuity of business” issues and initiatives everyday know full well the value of dispersing information technology assets to remote locations for information safety, recovery, and cost factors. Since 9/11 2001 many companies now value dispersing information technology for business survival. The Eastern Shore could serve as a remote location for information recovery assets belonging to companies and government agencies from New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia / Wilmington to Baltimore, to Washington DC, and to Northern Virginia. With the majority of financial institutions operating within 200 miles of Talbot, and with banking concentration in Wilmington and the Federal Government concentration around Washington, Talbot provides a close but rural location for business continuity services.
Eastern Shore broadband telecommunications infrastructure and services will make it possible for us to manage our growth without the need for a large influx of people. Though we have been undergoing substantial development pressures, and though for the time being this pressure has subsided due to the “credit crunch” I wrote about in an earlier blog article; we can accommodate growth associated with an influx of broadband capabilities. By adhering to our Comprehensive Plan, we can avoid the effects of suburban sprawl unlike our urban counterparts on the Western Shore. Eventual renovation and infill in our towns, supported by competitively priced broadband access, can also provide substantial quality of life and environmental advantages.
Information technology investments companies might make in our towns include information archives, computing centers, data-backup server clusters for organizations such as financial firms (insurance, securities, banking), hospitals (telemedicine), and various government agencies. I believe our County Council should encourage corporations, State and Federal counterparts, and the health care industry to use infrastructure assets we have her in Talbot when developing their business continuity plans. However, before this will be possible we should be doing a whole lot more to energize, advertise, and expaqnd the efforts of the Maryland Broadband Cooperative (MBC) as well as providing County County leadership and appropriate funding to ensure Talbot has the most modern, up-to-date infrastructure to make use of MBC’s Eastern Shore fiber optic backbone. At present, wireless technologies such as WiMAX offers us an opportunity to “wire Talbot” at a cost significantly less than that required for a fiber optic infrastructure. WiMAX deployed on water towers, silos, radio towers, etc. could provide 100% coverage of Talbot. In the longer-term, every effort should be made to develop a county-wide fiber optic infrastructure to meet eventual increased bandwidth requirements as new applications, reliability, security, and quality of service considerations dictate.
Broadband wireless is the most cost-effective Internet access technology for Talbot to use for expanding the availability of affordable broadband service to all our businesses, schools, service providers, and residents. Our Council’s support for the Maryland Broadband Cooperative is essential to develop a common, open system broadband “back haul” infrastructure that would be used by future wireless internet service providers (WISPs) as they gear up to offer cost-effective broadband service throughout Talbot. Where there’s leadership and the will – there’s a way.
These are broad assertions, where’s are specifics? My intent here is to provide specifics. As I see it, there is a hierarchy of need in our community beginning with family and quality of life, followed closely by parenting, individual responsibilities, then jobs, education, housing, cost of living, recreation, volunteerism and so forth. I want to relate the “why and how” wiring Talbot is critical to our future from a family, quality of life, and parenting perspective. As I tour our county speaking with residents from all walks of life, I find the number one personal concern is the breakdown in family and the resulting impact on quality of life and parenting. Concerns range from “all my children have moved away and our ability to travel to be with them has become extremely challenging”; to: “why can’t there be jobs in Talbot that pay a decent wage so our children will stay here?”; to: “our family has become totally dysfunctional since our children have moved away; to: “my son wants to drop out of school because he sees mowing grass as being a better opportunity than graduating from high school”. The testimonies abound. Bottom line: we need a well-paying job environment in Talbot that affects our children’s attitudes and decisions. Bringing information technology business into Talbot will create an economic dynamic having a profound effect for our children’s futures. Jobs in this industry are well-paying, averaging $65,000/yr for a computer programmer with basic skills, more for systems engineers, site managers, etc. Should we look into forming a wireless task force to create a WIFI solution for our County, similar to what’s happening now in Cambridge? This Task Force would focus on the value of free wireless access from anywhere in our County.
Having this sort of environmentally-sound job base will impact student motivation, family prospects for real unity and much more. Its our responsibility to create a future for our youth. Not hand outs, but real opportunity motivating interest in getting an education, giving parents a basis for encouraging their sons and daughters by focusing on the positive aspects of a future in Talbot, providing our schools with solid rationale, drawn on local example, for our students to stay in school and perform well. And, most important, providing families with real reasons to feel pride and a sense of dignity in their Our Eastern Shore broadband telecommunications infrastructure and services will make it possible for us to manage our growth without the need for a large influx of people and additional large-scale development.
Recognizing agriculture plays a major role in the economy of Talbot is one reason for getting our County “wired”. Today, there is an abundance of interactive, technical tools on the Internet available to our farmers and nurserymen providing much needed capabilities about ways to make agriculture more profitable. These tools are best known as precision agriculture tools. They process everything from soil type analysis; what and when to plant; how much seed / nutrients to employ per acre; types row spacing and seed drill settings; coupled with such tools for assessing irrigation requirements, harvesting techniques and more, much more. Talbot should have a comprehensive database detailing every geospatial parameter for agriculture lands in Talbot. Such a data repository could be accessed while plowing, seeding, spraying, or harvesting a field via an interactive, wireless computer carried on the tractor coupled to the Global Positioning System. Such applications are not uncommon these days on large-scale farms in our country’s breadbasket and the cost for such systems have dropped drastically.
Likewise, our County’s Economic Development Office partnering with our Chamber of Commerce could carry out a marketing strategy focused on bringing major corporation “business continuity centers” into Talbot. The Internet is indeed ubiquitous, its everywhere. However, its infrastructure remains vulnerable because Internet deployment has relied heavily on available right-of-ways, e.g. AMTRAK as one example. You may remember several years ago a major train fire in the railroad tunnel passing through Baltimore. The intensity of that fire destroyed all sorts of commercial telecommunications cabling running through that tunnel. In a similar vain, the destruction of the twin towers on 11 September 2001 brought a halt to many major Internet services supporting all sorts of business and private activities along the eastern seaboard and to points west. The DELMARVA presents a perfect solution for a survivable alternative North/South route for Internet networking. For many years now our Federal Government has been wrestling with Critical Infrastructure Protection. Though progress in the Federal Government sector has been steady and focused, private industry has been slow to invest in business continuity systems primarily due to a lack of available, redundant, secure, survivable infrastructure. Our County should support the on-going efforts by our Mid Shore Regional Council and the Maryland Broadband Cooperative to deploy a broadband, high-speed, telecommunications backbone from Wallops Island to the Delaware Bridge.
With this backbone in place our opportunity to provide broadband Internet access to every Talbot resident as well as meeting requirements for “business continuity centers”, tourism, and other activities becomes a reality.
The IT industry, as its known, is one of several enterprise opportunities for creating decent, environmentally-sound, well-paying jobs in our County. We need to do more than simply talk about keeping our youth in our County. We need to put our tax dollars and common sense to work to ensure our County is ready for the 21st Century and the jobs such enterprises provide.
Owen Wormser
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Our County Council has Asked Planning and Zoning Staff to form a Committee to Consider Purchase Development Rights (PDR’s)
What Does This Mean, What is the Potential Impact on Our Farmers and Our County Budget?
A Purchase of Development Right (PDR) program permits a landowner to voluntarily sell his development rights to a governmental agency or a land trust. The agency or trust pays the farmer the difference between the agricultural value of the land and the land’s potential development value. For example, if a farmer’s land is worth $2000 an acre for agricultural use and $5000 for development, the farmer can sell his development rights for $3000 an acre, assuming this is the agreed-to negotiated price. When the sale occurs, a legal document called a conservation easement is created. This easement restricts the use of the land to farming, open space, or wildlife habitat. The farmer retains private ownership of the land and can sell it, hold it or pass it on to heirs. There are several benefits and drawbacks to PDR programs:
Benefits—It is a volunteer program. No one is forced to sell his development rights. It permanently protects the land from development (Although some easements have clauses that allow the landowner to repurchase the development rights under specific circumstances). It converts land equity to cash. It helps keep farmland affordable for the next generation. Finally, protected farmland helps local governments balance their budgets by contributing more in tax revenue than it demands in community services.
Drawbacks— Since the program is voluntary, it is sometimes difficult to protect large contiguous blocks of land because a landowner surrounded by other protected farms may not want to sell his development rights. The program is expensive, and it cannot meet farmer demand; for every farmer who has participated in a PDR program, there are six more waiting to sell their development rights. Finally, property owners/farmers must pay taxes on the sale of development rights
A Transfer of Development Right (TDR) program is a market-based farmland protection program. Governmental agencies establish sending areas (land to be protected) and receiving areas (land to be developed). Landowners in areas known as “sending areas” sell their development rights to developers who use them in the receiving areas (incorporated towns and municipalities in Maryland) to build at higher densities than allowed under existing zoning. There are several benefits and drawbacks to TDR programs:
Benefits—TDR gives equity compensation to landowners whose land is zoned for agriculture. It promotes private financing of land protection rather than public financing. Finally, it ties farmland conservation to growth management, downtown revitalization and infrastructure efficiency by directing growth to appropriate areas (This promotes the idea of building what should be built and saving what should be saved).
Drawbacks—TDR programs are very complicated to develop and administer. It requires a great deal of "buy-in" from farmers; homeowners accepting increased density in their area; and, developers, who pay for TDRs. Finally, it relies on an active real estate market to maintain the balance between land protection and compensation. Without land to develop, a TDR program does not work.
As food for thought, a PDR program can complement and/or enhance a TDR program because it helps to establish a floor price for TDRs. If farmers do not get enough money from developers via the TDR process, they sell their development rights to the County instead.
Ways to Approach 11,000+ acres in our Countryside Preservation Areas:
Among options for Talbot is what I call an Installment Purchase Agreement (IPA). An IPA is an innovative payment plan offered by a handful of Maryland jurisdictions with active PDR or easement programs. By using IPAs, local governments can leverage preservation funding while lands are still available and offer landowners financial advantages that developers cannot duplicate. At settlement, the landowner grants the jurisdiction a permanent agricultural conservation easement in exchange for an IPA. IPAs spread out payments so that landowners receive semi-annual, tax- exempt interest over a term of years (typically 20 to 30). The principal is due at the end of the contract term. Jurisdictions can purchase zero-coupon U. S. Treasury bonds to cover the final balloon payments. “Zero Coupon Bonds” do not generate regular interest income. Instead, they yield a lump sum when the bond matures. Because zero coupon bonds cost a fraction of their face value, the public entity leverages available funds. Landowners also can sell or securitize IPA contracts at any point to realize the outstanding principal.
The advantages of an IPA program to the landowner are:
• Tax-exempt interest semiannually for up to 30 years on the full value of their sale. They pay no federal or state income taxes on such interest;
• Deferral of taxes on capital gains—landowners entering into IPAs may defer recognition of capital gains until they actually receive the principal amounts of such purchases;
• Better estate planning—by deferring recognition of capital gains indefinitely, selling landowners create the opportunity for IPAs to pass to their estates, where federal estate taxes paid may reduce or eliminate any capital gains taxes that would ultimately be due by the heirs;
• Charitable deduction—landowners can realize deductions that are equal to the difference between the appraised value of the lands or easements sold and the prices the county.
IPAs are an excellent way for Talbot County to increase its return on investment. By pushing implementation costs into the future, and at the same time realizing costs savings by acting immediately, the return on investment is increased, thereby improving the financial position of the County. I support the Committee studying possible use of PDR’s in Talbot and hope they will consider the IPA approach I have discussed above. We can and should preserve what lands we have IF we truly believe in the words most folks around Talbot say to me all the time: “we must retain our rural character and quality of life”. I believe our majority is committed to this solgan – I know I am and I know who we can do it. IPA’s is one tool we should consider using and soon.
Owen Wormser
A Purchase of Development Right (PDR) program permits a landowner to voluntarily sell his development rights to a governmental agency or a land trust. The agency or trust pays the farmer the difference between the agricultural value of the land and the land’s potential development value. For example, if a farmer’s land is worth $2000 an acre for agricultural use and $5000 for development, the farmer can sell his development rights for $3000 an acre, assuming this is the agreed-to negotiated price. When the sale occurs, a legal document called a conservation easement is created. This easement restricts the use of the land to farming, open space, or wildlife habitat. The farmer retains private ownership of the land and can sell it, hold it or pass it on to heirs. There are several benefits and drawbacks to PDR programs:
Benefits—It is a volunteer program. No one is forced to sell his development rights. It permanently protects the land from development (Although some easements have clauses that allow the landowner to repurchase the development rights under specific circumstances). It converts land equity to cash. It helps keep farmland affordable for the next generation. Finally, protected farmland helps local governments balance their budgets by contributing more in tax revenue than it demands in community services.
Drawbacks— Since the program is voluntary, it is sometimes difficult to protect large contiguous blocks of land because a landowner surrounded by other protected farms may not want to sell his development rights. The program is expensive, and it cannot meet farmer demand; for every farmer who has participated in a PDR program, there are six more waiting to sell their development rights. Finally, property owners/farmers must pay taxes on the sale of development rights
A Transfer of Development Right (TDR) program is a market-based farmland protection program. Governmental agencies establish sending areas (land to be protected) and receiving areas (land to be developed). Landowners in areas known as “sending areas” sell their development rights to developers who use them in the receiving areas (incorporated towns and municipalities in Maryland) to build at higher densities than allowed under existing zoning. There are several benefits and drawbacks to TDR programs:
Benefits—TDR gives equity compensation to landowners whose land is zoned for agriculture. It promotes private financing of land protection rather than public financing. Finally, it ties farmland conservation to growth management, downtown revitalization and infrastructure efficiency by directing growth to appropriate areas (This promotes the idea of building what should be built and saving what should be saved).
Drawbacks—TDR programs are very complicated to develop and administer. It requires a great deal of "buy-in" from farmers; homeowners accepting increased density in their area; and, developers, who pay for TDRs. Finally, it relies on an active real estate market to maintain the balance between land protection and compensation. Without land to develop, a TDR program does not work.
As food for thought, a PDR program can complement and/or enhance a TDR program because it helps to establish a floor price for TDRs. If farmers do not get enough money from developers via the TDR process, they sell their development rights to the County instead.
Ways to Approach 11,000+ acres in our Countryside Preservation Areas:
Among options for Talbot is what I call an Installment Purchase Agreement (IPA). An IPA is an innovative payment plan offered by a handful of Maryland jurisdictions with active PDR or easement programs. By using IPAs, local governments can leverage preservation funding while lands are still available and offer landowners financial advantages that developers cannot duplicate. At settlement, the landowner grants the jurisdiction a permanent agricultural conservation easement in exchange for an IPA. IPAs spread out payments so that landowners receive semi-annual, tax- exempt interest over a term of years (typically 20 to 30). The principal is due at the end of the contract term. Jurisdictions can purchase zero-coupon U. S. Treasury bonds to cover the final balloon payments. “Zero Coupon Bonds” do not generate regular interest income. Instead, they yield a lump sum when the bond matures. Because zero coupon bonds cost a fraction of their face value, the public entity leverages available funds. Landowners also can sell or securitize IPA contracts at any point to realize the outstanding principal.
The advantages of an IPA program to the landowner are:
• Tax-exempt interest semiannually for up to 30 years on the full value of their sale. They pay no federal or state income taxes on such interest;
• Deferral of taxes on capital gains—landowners entering into IPAs may defer recognition of capital gains until they actually receive the principal amounts of such purchases;
• Better estate planning—by deferring recognition of capital gains indefinitely, selling landowners create the opportunity for IPAs to pass to their estates, where federal estate taxes paid may reduce or eliminate any capital gains taxes that would ultimately be due by the heirs;
• Charitable deduction—landowners can realize deductions that are equal to the difference between the appraised value of the lands or easements sold and the prices the county.
IPAs are an excellent way for Talbot County to increase its return on investment. By pushing implementation costs into the future, and at the same time realizing costs savings by acting immediately, the return on investment is increased, thereby improving the financial position of the County. I support the Committee studying possible use of PDR’s in Talbot and hope they will consider the IPA approach I have discussed above. We can and should preserve what lands we have IF we truly believe in the words most folks around Talbot say to me all the time: “we must retain our rural character and quality of life”. I believe our majority is committed to this solgan – I know I am and I know who we can do it. IPA’s is one tool we should consider using and soon.
Owen Wormser
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