Parents' Coalition Obtains Financial Disclosure Forms for 11 Planning Board Applicants from MD State Ethics Commission

Under Maryland Land Use law, the public was to have 3 weeks to review the list of applicants for the Montgomery County Planning Board. [That didn't happen.]  

Applicants were to file financial disclosure statements with the State Ethics Commission with copies to the chief administrative officer of the county and the county council. [We don't know if all that happened.]

These financial disclosure statements were to be filed 5 days before the applicant was interviewed.  [That didn't happen.]

During that 5 day period, the financial disclosure statements would have been available for the public to review.  

Obviously, in this recent appointment process for Montgomery County Planning Board the 5 day period between filing of the financial disclosure statements and interview did not happen.  At best, the public had one day to view the financial disclosure statements of the applicants.  And that would have only been possible if a county resident traveled to Annapolis to the office of the State Ethics Commission.  

In the interest of transparency and accountability, and with a look at how this process was supposed to be run under Maryland law, the Parents' Coalition has obtained the financial disclosure statements of the 11 applicants, and we are making them public now. The public should have been able to view these documents before the interviews, but nothing in this appointment process has followed the timeline established by Maryland law. With that, we give you the financial disclosure statements of the 11 applicants: 

2022 October Montgomery County Planning Board Applicant Financial Disclosures | Scribd

Individual                                 Year            Date Filed

 

Raj Barr-Kumar                        2021            10/22/22    (amended 10/26/22)

Cherri Branson                          2021            10/24/22    (original 10/22/22)

Francoise Carrier                       2021            10/23/22

Norman Dreyfuss                     2021             10/22/22    (properties do not have addresses and does not disclose membership on board of Affordable Housing Conference of Montgomery County) 

Barbara Goldberg Goldman      2021            10/23/22    (does not disclose Quora business or board membership on nonprofit Affordable Housing Conference of Montgomery County)

David Hill                                2021            10/22/22

William E. Kirwan III               2021            10/22/22    (Did not list Silver Spring property)

Vincent Napoleon                     2021            10/21/22  

Roberto Pinero                         2021            10/23/22

Amy Presley                             2021            10/21/22

Jeff Zyontz                               2021            10/21/22    

Metadata Shows The Baltimore Post May Have Sparked Baltimore County Schools’ Mass Shredding of Financial Disclosure Statements

Details surrounding the destruction of thousands of financial disclosure statements at Baltimore County Public Schools’ Office of Law last year may be sparse, but the timeline of events leading up to the mass shredding may have just become a bit clearer.

According to metadata discovered by The Baltimore Post of electronic files provided by the school system’s law office last year, it appears that a system employee created a document to log the future destruction of the financial records on the same day – and less than one hour after – The Baltimore Post began requesting the documents on February 14, 2018, a full two months prior to the attested date of actual destruction which purportedly occurred on April 27, and again later on August 1, 2018.

What initially began last year as a query into various employees’ ties to vendors, quickly transformed into an investigation involving the nature of the sudden destruction of the very documents requested during a six-month Baltimore Post investigation.

But any attempts to obtain information specifically surrounding the purge of nearly 2,600 financial disclosure records, has left The Baltimore Post with more questions than answers since the office that destroyed the documents says there are no records of any costs, employees, contractors, individuals, equipment, certificates, sign-in logs or even shredding companies involved in the destruction of roughly 40,000 pages containing financial information for hundreds of employees.

But on Thursday, the metadata brought some clarity...

https://thebaltimorepost.com/metadata-shows-the-baltimore-post-may-have-sparked-mass-shredding-of-financial-disclosure-statements/?fbclid=IwAR1CnPCHvHf0kdhbWZQcCZz-zcai-F8pfcr-WEEvEnfFGJ8qYIneHi6bmvQ