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I am proud to be endorsed by these civic leaders:

• Jud Ashman, Mayor of Gaithersburg,
• Sidney Katz, Montgomery County Council for District 3 and former mayor,
• Cheryl Kagan, State Senator District 17
• David Trone, US Congressman Maryland 6th District,
• Ryan Spiegel, State Delegate District 17 and former city council member,
• John McCarthy, Montgomery County State’s Attorney,
• Maxwell Uy, Sheriff, Montgomery County,
• Gabe Albornoz, Montgomery County Council member at-large,
• Evan Glass, Montgomery County Council president,
• Marilyn Balcombe, Montgomery County Council member District 2,
• Jim McNulty, Gaithersburg City Council member,
• Lisa Henderson, Gaithersburg City Council member,

Said Senator Kagan, “Gaithersburg Councilmember Neil Harris– a thoughtful and effective leader. From his fiscal prudence to his advocacy on transportation, education, and more, I strongly endorse him for reelection this fall!!!”

Jud Ashman, Mayor of Gaithersburg said, “Neil Harris continues to be an essential member of our City Council, spearheading work on school capacity and better transportation, diligently watching over our budget, and providing thoughtful and practical guidance on public safety and smart growth. I enthusiastically endorse his re-election.”

Sidney Katz, Montgomery County Council and former Mayor of Gaithersburg: “Neil Harris is serving our city for the right reasons, not about personal advancement but about a genuine dedication to giving back by improving the lives of our residents.”

Maxwell Uy, Sheriff, Montgomery County: “It’s a pleasure working with a thoughtful and fair-minded official who wants to keep our people safe, which is why I endorse Neil Harris’s re-election in Gaithersburg.”

John McCarthy, Montgomery County State’s Attorney: “Neil Harris’s support for local law enforcement including funding and training serves our community well and makes him the right choice for Gaithersburg’s City Council.”

And Congressman Trone added, “It has been a pleasure working with Neil Harris during my time in Congress. He exemplifies what is most important in our leaders: he’s pragmatic, driven, and deeply committed to serving his constituents and his community. Gaithersburg is thriving today in part because of Neil’s hard work and dedication. By applying the lessons he’s learned as a successful business owner to his results-driven and detail-oriented approach to governing, he continues to be an excellent advocate for the people of Gaithersburg and Montgomery County.”

As a boy in the 1960’s, I was enthralled by the space race and by NASA going from its start and a series of loud failures to landing on the moon inside the decade. Not only was that an inspiration for all mankind – and the moon landing was watched by on live TV by billions of people worldwide – but the work advanced technology and brought us microchips, satellites, and medical advances.

There are two stickers on my car window, one from Wharton where I went to school and he other from the Starfleet Academy where I wish I did. I was an original Star Trek fan, watching the show each week during its original run and then almost daily in reruns. I worked at Star Trek conventions in a role that was basically like a roadie, setting up and doing whatever was needed. I got to meet the stars, the writers, and other fans like me – some a bit weirder than me, I think. What we all had in common was an optimistic view of the bright future for all humanity, when we would all get along regardless of race, religion, or nationality, aided by technology. Some of Star Trek’s vision has come to pass – we’re all carrying pocket communicators, and we have computers we can talk to. Hopefully more of the vision will come to pass as well.

When I was a boy, we worried about our environment. When I went for hikes with my boy scout troop, anywhere there was a stream with a waterfall, there was a huge pile of suds — because of phosphates in the water. When you looked at the horizon there was a dark brown haze from pollution in the air. The waterfronts smelled terrible and many rivers were devoid of life. But my second-least-favorite president, Nixon, created the Environmental Protection Agency and, years later, the waters are clean, the rivers are alive, and the brown haze is gone. We need to deal with new threats like greenhouse gases and plastics in the waterways, and I am confident that the good people of planet Earth will rise to the challenges.

I believe in good people. I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world. Everywhere the cultures are different – people listen to different music, eat different food, dress differently. But everywhere people are also the same – they love their children, they form communities to help each other, and they strive for a better life. In India, I walked past a beautiful house in Delhi with a beautifully manicured lawn, and I saw a family living in a tent on that lawn, cooking their dinner on an open fire – and they looked happy, smiling and conversing. In rural China I saw people pushing an iron plow behind an ox, hard, hard work, and they were also talking to each other and laughing.

Not everyone is good. We need police and soldiers, but most people are good. Culturally we’re making progress – not as fast as technology, of course – but when I visited England I read some history and realized that it was only a few hundred years ago that religious rivals were chasing each other around the countryside and burning each other at the stake. That hardly ever happens any more. Since I was a boy in the 60’s we have made some progress as a country in improving things for women, for gays, for people of color – slowly, but mostly moving in the right direction.

And I believe that incentives are more powerful than punishments. I learned this in a high school psychology class and see this power in my work and my family and in public life. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a very short story called Harrison Bergeron about a future where smart people had to wear headphones that played random loud noises, where graceful people had to wear weights, all with the goal of making everyone equal. That is not the vision of the future we aspire to. When I worked in the videogame industry, one of our new game producers decided to personally punish players for bad behavior by banning them, but then the producer realized that she was not going to reach her bonus goals because banning players meant that they did not spend money in the game. So she quickly shifted to developing new systems in the game that automatically prevented the bad behavior. And she later created a system where players were able to advance by mentoring other players, teaching skills to help them advance, and also fostering a community.

 

 

Neil Harris Runs for Second Term on City Council

 

The MoCo Show was kind enough to invite me to join them, and the podcast can be heard here:

 

 

This is an article from the Montgomery Sentinel on the announcement of my re-election campaign.

Harris seeks second full term on Gaithersburg Council

My election owes much to many fine people.

To the voters of Gaithersburg, I appreciate your confidence and will work to maintain it. Not only in Kentlands and Lakelands, where the support was kind of overwhelming, but throughout our city.

To our elected officials:

Cathy Carlson Drzyzgula, my campaign chair, you will be missed on the Council. Your advice and encouragement and your unflagging support for the entire city leaves a void — so, don’t expect me to stop calling!

Jud Ashman, our great “new” mayor, your support, leadership, and energy are so important. Congrats on the well earned win, and thanks for everything so far and to come.

Michael Sesma, thanks for your endorsement, great work, and friendship.

Ryan Spiegel, all kidding aside, I appreciate sitting next to you, the snarky notes, and the political and governance insights. Congrats on another big win!

Robert Wu, you ran a great campaign and I’m very happy to serve with you. We got to know each other over the past year and you are a great asset to the city. Stealthy or no, I appreciate the mutual support during the heat of the campaign.

Henry Marraffa Jr, you ran a solid campaign and continue to contribute to our city, and I enjoy serving with you.

Sidney Katz, what can I say? I would not be doing this without your support. The example you set for steadiness and dedication are without peer. You are a superstar.

Cheryl C. Kagan, so many thanks for the endorsement but also for the ongoing stream of great advice and all your support for me and for our city.

Andrew Platt thanks for the endorsement, the planning, the input from your experience, and your ongoing energy on behalf of our city and our economic development.

And District 39 Delegate Charles Barkley (not on FB?), thanks for your support. You are a good man.

Campaign team:

My treasurer and dear friend, Ayesha Arora-Sharma, thanks for everything, as always. And Shelley Sharma, a great friend, for your help & support.

Neighbors, friends, and contributors: Jerry Stringham, Michael Bonnell, Steve Wilcox, Bikram Bakshi, Ann Marie Clements, Jennifer Carter, Joy Martin Nurmi, Leigh Henry, John P. Lin, Elaine Saba Koch, Bill Albright, Barney Gorin, James Mifsud, for the business people who provide the economic backbone for our city, for my many classmates from Wharton Executive MBA East class of 2005, and so many more, this means more than I’m capable of expressing. Bernard Unti for good company on the campaign trail, and Eileen E Noseworthy, Vicki Stander Understein, Julie M McGaughran for booth duty at Oktoberfest, Peg Nottingham for the website, and more!

Special thanks to Luc Brami and Shaun Auxier, Luc for the signs and banner, advice, & support, and Shaun for the awesome design work and everything you do.

And finally, but clearly not last, I could not do this without my family: Michelle Harris, Liz Harris, Jess Harris, Lona Feldman, Susan Feldman, Rich Lewis, Stephen Lewis, M’Liz Scotton Riechers, Mike Riechers, Robert K. Chester, Eric Mates, Juliet Guennoun, Sophia Guennoun, Sam Harris, Shirley Sieger, Mary Ann Elliott, and the innumerable Canadian cousins and extended family all over the world. Your love and support means everything.

View the entire candidates forum held this month. It’s about 2 hours long and well worth it to see all the candidates in depth. View it on the News and Blog page.

 

The county council is considering legislation to ban the use of synthetic herbicides and pesticides in the county. We faced that discussion in the Kentlands HOA in 2013, and I’d like to share what we did.

We had a full house at a board meeting, with about 100 people evenly divided between those who wanted the chemical ban and those who felt that the chemicals were safe and were important to the neighborhood’s beauty. So we did what any good board does and we appointed a committee. We chose a balanced list of residents, some from either camp and some who were still undecided on the issue. The committee brought in experts from the University of Maryland and other organizations, and after a good six months of weekly meetings and field trips, made its recommendations.
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Transportation makes growth possible. Land use planning makes growth possible. But too often these are viewed as separate processes, when in reality they have huge effects on each other.

Opportunities abound in Gaithersburg. The Corridor Cities Transitway (CCT) will connect our western side to the Metro system and to points north. It runs right through the middle of our most vibrant economic corridor, home to NIST, Johns Hopkins’ planned Science City development, MedImmune, and much more. And the route 355 Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) plan runs past Olde Town and LakeForest and through what was once our major shopping and job centers as well as the new Watkins Mill Interchange developments.
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We need more schools. This is not just an issue in Gaithersburg – it is a county-wide and even a state-wide issue. There is not nearly enough money to build the new classrooms we need. So what do we do?

A recent county conference focused on infrastructure needs, mainly on schools but also on transportation needs, and a number of creative approaches were presented that impressed me and much of the audience. There is a lot of empty office space – can we use office buildings for classroom space? Alexandria Virginia has used this kind of creative thinking to reduce costs for adding classrooms and it’s working – we need to get there in Montgomery County, too.
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