Fred’s Harford County

When is The Aegis going to announce the official start of construction on the new Bush River Bridge connecting Edgewood to Perryman? 

The bridge will be a 200 million dollar donation from the people of Perryman to county executive Clark Turner.  The bridge will provide an alternate route to enter or leave the peninsula of Perryman. 

Presently, Perryman Road is the only way in and out.  With a $200 million bridge to Edgewood, Clark will be able to build the 3500 new homes for the 10,000 new neighbors we, down here, will all get to know. 

I guess we’re waiting for Billy and David to Hancock the bill.

I wish the people of Forest Hill who are enraged over a Kohl’s store would look at our situation in Perryman and help us.  Soon our whole community will transform from rural to urban. 

No one in the county council resides in Perryman. 

No one in the county delegation resides in Perryman. 

So The Aegis is reporting on the infighting among our elected delegates and senators.  The hardliners, namely McComas and McDonough, are pointing fingers at James claiming she single handedly torpedoed the elected school board bill.  The fact of the matter is the delegation didn’t put any energy into getting the bill through the assembly session and they wanted special favors or courtesies after marching into Annapolis denouncing the Democrats, the governor, and voting against the tax hikes.  The word “strategy” is not in their vocabulary. 

The delegation must have known that they needed to kiss some butt to get any bills to the floor.  Did they?  Nope.  They played the role of tough Republicans.  Like they’re the snow ball that will defeat hell.  Last year they played the same role and came home with nothing.  The days of special treatment they experienced during the Ehrlich tenure are long gone.   A professional finds ways to get things done and can claim some victories even when the odds are against them.  As a county we pay a lot of money to the state in income taxes so we should get something for it.

As for the lack of effort; when it came to special taxing districts or as The Aegis more succinctly puts it, the Developers Relief Act of 2008, the county brought out all the heavy guns – county executive Clark Turner, county spokesman David Craig, the county council, and the delegation (minus Dan Riley).  They gave it their 110% all, screaming for more taxes.  The result:  money in the bank.  We didn’t see that kind of energy with anything else the delegation took to Annapolis. 

Here’s the big question for 2009:  Do you think our delegation will bring home an elected school board?  With this gang….it’s not going to happen.

Well another general assembly session has come and gone.  It seems like just yesterday that our contingency lead by the honorable delegate McComas of Bel Air marched to our state’s capital to mix things up and bring home the cash we need for our county.  They were also going to see to it that the perverts get locked up for centuries. 

The session is now ending and what were the fruits of their labor?  Taxes.  Just taxes.  Being inept happens but this delegation reached new levels.  They were going to do away with the draconian O’Malley tax increases instead they gave us more taxes – STD’s for Perryman – and the O’Malley hikes remain. 

Did they bring home any money for school construction?  How about any cash for our crumbling infrastructure?  What good is a delegation that can’t do anything for their constituents?  Next time we should just keep the delegation here at home; the results will be the same.

The only effective spokesperson for Harford County is county executive Clark Turner who passionately moved the assembly to endorse special tax districts that will allow him to tax Perryman homeowners for the expenses of development and construction that they don’t want.  Way to go Clark! 

Jim Kennedy, Allan Vought and company have decided that we in Harford County should imitate the good people of the great state of Kansas.  In Kansas, the school boards are elected by the people.  Every member is elected.  Major campaigns are held with huge sums of special interest cash spent for school board positions. 

And what do they get in Kansas?  School boards dominated by religious extremists.  This is exactly what The Aegis wants for us.  They want the extremist right wing ideologues that are prevalent in Harford County to run the schools in the same fashion that the wackos of Kansas run theirs. 

The days of moderate, center-right, conservatives are numbered in our great county.  We have seen that in order to get elected, you must be part of the far right club.  Just look at our delegation in Annapolis.  They are considered so extreme that they are not taken seriously by the state.  They bring home no bacon.  A creationist school board will only confirm the state’s impression of Harford. 

The idea of a school board that is two thirds elected and one third appointed makes much more sense.  It’s much better than what we have now and the one third that is appointed will act as a check on the extremist religious ideologues that are bound to seek positions on the board. 

I find it hard to explain.  Our local paper has typically been a cheerleader for the Craig Administration, the Simmons Administration, BRAC, sex, and even the New England Patriots.  But all of a sudden, out of no where, they are calling things right.  I’m sure this is a temporary aberration and we can soon all look forward to The Aegis sucking up to the movers and shakers once they have their latest sit down with county executive Clark Turner’s representative David Craig,  but let’s all enjoy this while we can! 

The following is the second half of the Oscar winning editorial published in the March 7, 2008 editorial of The Aegis entitled “A Taxing Problem”: 

>>When our state legislators get finished explaining to the taxpayers why they like this tax (Special Taxing Districts) so much, which they won’t do honestly, then they need to explain why they will never support a tax on hotel/motel rooms. 

That’s easy.  They’re all afraid of former Del. W. Dale Hess, who has been out of power for more than three decades after his exit from state government and subsequent disgrace, but who elected officials won’t tell to pound sand.  Hess owns hotels along I-95 in Harford and Cecil counties and every time the words room and tax are uttered together, Hess gets on the phone and reminds everyone that they’re against it and they fall in line. 

Just another case of our elected officials looking out for the well-heeled at the expense of the regular taxpayers.  It’s OK, they think, to create special districts and new taxes on homeowners, but it’s not OK to tax those who stay overnight as they pass through Harford County, even though so many countless jurisdictions charge a tax on room rentals. 

We would like nothing better than to force our state legislators to explain why they are looking out for developers and former state power broker and hotel owner at the expense of so many other taxpayers. 

Those explanations would be tales that would make Pinocchio proud, or at least make his nose grow much, much longer.<<

The Aegis has never been more eloquent.  I feel verklempt….just talk amongst yourselves.   I’ll give you a topic:  Who’s more important, David Craig or Clark Turner? 

{The following is a section of an editorial published in the March 7, 2008 edition of The Aegis)

Let’s be clear about this:  Sen. Barry Glassman, Sen. Nancy Jacobs, Del. Susan McComas and every other member of the Harford County delegation to the Maryland state legislature, who supports the Special Taxing District legislation, are charter members of the Gov. Martin O’Malley club. 

That’s the tax, tax, tax, and then tax all of us even more club.  It’s shameful that Glassman, Jacobs, McComas, et al go before the voters and consistently say they’re good Republicans, who are against taxes, and then go and support this legislation that is nothing more than the Developer’s Relief Act of 2008.  Glassman introduced the Harford County bill in the State Senate, Jacobs introduced the Cecil County version in the Senate and the House of Delegates version of the bill was introduced by the Harford County delegation – that’s all of them. 

Here’s how it works:  an area is designated a Special Taxing District, which allows developers to get special financing that provides them the cash to bulldoze the land, lay pipes, build the roads and do the other things it takes to take a piece of open land and turn it into more and more profitable houses for them.  Who pays for that special financing to help the developers build even faster and make more profit?  The poor saps, of course, who buy the houses.  They get hit with an extra tax on top of all the other exorbitant taxes it costs to live in Harford County. 

And they pay that additional tax every year until the special tax district loans are paid off.  Jacobs, McComas and the rest of our local chapter of the O’Malley Tax, Tax, Tax and More Tax Bunch think the special taxing district idea is a good one.  They not only think it’s a good idea, but also can’t wait to make it happen, hence their readiness to get the bills introduced so they can make them law. 

Who is Nancy Jacobs trying to fool when she writes, “I will continue to vote against new taxes – the people of Harford County are already over-taxed” elsewhere on this page?  No one should accept such delusional misrepresentations, nor ever forget this pox on Harford and Cecil County homeowners that she not only supports, but also introduced. 

All of our good Republicans, and their Democratic colleagues have the stench of this wholly unfair and wholly unnecessary tax on their hands.  If this bill becomes law, it will be nothing more than the government sanctioning the taxpayers giving more of their hard-earned pay to make life easier for the developers.  Talk about your taxation without representation.  With the passage of this law and the enactment of Special Tax Districts, our elected state representatives should never again be allowed to say they’re against taxes, nor that they represent taxpayers.