...local government's version of a closely held secret...
By Steven L. Katz
Potomac
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Only halfway through 2010, the award for "What Were They Thinking?" in Montgomery County has already been sewn up by the Montgomery County Public Schools, the Montgomery Board of Education and the Montgomery County Council. This dubious honor is for the Cabin John Middle School retaining wall -- unsafe, ugly and, until it was almost halfway built, local government's version of a closely held secret...
Walls are symbols. The Cabin John wall is a symbol of the dysfunctional relationship between the County Council and the school systems that The Post has written and editorialized about recently...
...You can't win this award for a lack of common sense alone, however; it helps to have compounded the error by trying to prevent the public from pointing it out. The school community and neighborhood (where I live) are rightly upset because no one appears to have known anything about the wall until it began going up. Not a single drawing, blueprint, photo, report or Web page available to the public depicted or described the wall until after residents called an emergency meeting. Near as anyone can determine, the first public admission by MCPS's school construction chief of plans for the wall came at an emergency community meeting on May 17...
Even the Montgomery County Planning Board didn't know this wall was going up. When asked for the "street view" of this school the Planning Board was shown an elevation WITHOUT the wall! Way to trick the Planning Board MCPS!
ReplyDeleteWhen will the residents of the county wake up and realize that our elected leaders aren't into oversight? Thanks to Steve Katz for a well written article.
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