Housing

In an era of left-right political strife, it looks to me like we can forget the basics. While we are arguing about policy and allocating resources right or left, we forget to provide the essentials that everyone needs government to provide.

When I led the large HOA in Kentlands, it became very clear that everyone cared a lot about a few things — collecting the trash, managing the pool, plowing snow from our alleys, maintaining common buildings and amenities, and making sure we were fiscally sound. Everything else was nice to have, but only once the basics were covered.

In municipal government, it’s much the same — collect the recycling, plow the snow, maintain the roads, manage parks and events, and keep everyone safe. Educating the children and keeping traffic moving are on the list, except they are out of our control as a municipality. When I joined the council, I made it my mission to work with outside agencies to improve the areas outside of the city’s direct control.

As a commuter, our region is a bit of a nightmare. We have some of the worst traffic congestion in the country. I spent some time commuting from Gaithersburg to Reston — no job is worth that daily commute. Coming home on Fridays could take 2 painful hours. It’s not like I made the choice to live here and work there — when I bought my house I worked locally, but things change. And I could not understand why one of the wealthiest regions in the wealthiest country in the world could not manage its transportation.

Classroom space in our schools is another huge issue. My nearest elementary school was built for 650 students and has well over 1000 now, and growing every year. I see schools all over Gaithersburg and beyond at higher capacity.

Our infrastructure is stretched because of many factors. Our region is attractive — good jobs, good schools, safe streets — so people want to live here. Even when we don’t build more housing, people keep coming — the number of people in a household keeps growing.

The answer is to balance infrastructure with the demands of a growing population. The answer is many things — more transit, more roads, more schools. We’re out of balance. To catch up with school capacity would cost close to a billion dollars — that would get all the kids out of portables, build new schools to accommodate the 2500+ new students added to MCPS each year, and repair or replace the schools that are becoming dilapidated. That’s a lot of money in a system where we are happy when the state provides an extra $10 million in a year for school construction — not enough for a single school building.

The transportation system is a much bigger challenge. WMATA just determined that it needs $25 billion (with a B!) over the next 10 years to catch up on its infrastructure, and Metro only handles 15% of the work commutes in the region. Many officials believe that focusing new construction at Metro stations is the answer — but unless ALL the new residents use Metro, the new housing adds still more congestion to our roads.

It’s time for a new approach — we need to look at how we are allocating the budgets in the region and re-think where the money goes. From what I see of budgets in the region, a lot of the new spending is going anywhere but to the basic infrastructure and services that are so desperately needed here.

I’m not running for anything, I was elected to the Gaithersburg City Council in 2015 and I’m just trying to do the job that I was elected to do. I am not advocating for or against growth, but I am observing that growth happens and we’re not doing our region justice by ignoring the infrastructure to keep up. We can get there if we balance our priorities and take care of the essentials.