I get quite a few pats on the back from Cato at Delmarva Dealings but tonight it’s my turn to heap praise upon him for his thoughts on the Wicomico County budget. Something tells me that, if he doesn’t have a guest tomorrow, Bill Reddish may have something to say about Cato’s sentiments.
Also, I made a comment on the DD post where I alluded to a link. Since I wasn’t quite sure if a link would work off his comment box, here’s the entirety of what I wrote about Rick Pollitt at the Pittsville forum, and I excerpt here:
“Finally, we got to the two County Executive candidates who were at the event…Drawing first blood was Rick Pollitt, who touted his family’s 300 year history in the area but sought to make the county the home of “stay-heres.” In a bow to the hosts, he also used part of his opening statement to note that the fire department in Fruitland has a seat on their planning and zoning board, which gave them input on egress issues, among others. He continued by saying that he “would do better by fire companies” in the budget but the budget had to be prioritized. In fact, Pollitt claimed that each year he started the Fruitland city budget from scratch and built it as a whole (rather than the federal style of baseline budgeting.) (emphasis mine, in repost). Pollitt advocated a “climate of thrift and economy” with incentives for department heads to save money.
I saw Rick’s answer on the sprinkler question as telling – it was “unfortunately” up to the individuals whether or not to install sprinklers in new single-family dwellings. Where growth was concerned, Pollitt claimed to be running on his record of making “growth pay for growth” with impact fees and other measures like making developers build out the “paper streets” found in most developments (these are stub streets that would connect to future subdivisions.) Rick also claimed that the trouble with reducing property taxes for seasoned citizens lay in the assessments.
In his first 100 days in office, Pollitt vowed to start by “building bridges and establishing relationships” and would immediately begin working on the education portion of the budget instead of waiting until the spring as has been the usual case.
Pollitt closed by pleading guilty to the charge brought by his opponents of being a bureaucrat and said he did so “with a lot of pride.” He “knows the limits of government” and agreed with the residents cited by (opponent Charles) Jannace in his remarks that water and sewer bills in Fruitland were too high – Rick promised to establish a “blue-ribbon panel” to study putting together a countywide water and sewer authority. If you control the water and sewer, Pollitt claimed, you can control growth. He finished by stating that he was “motivated by his children” and hoped there would be another 300 years of Pollitts in the area.
Oddly enough, I can do a twofer with this because I also remarked in that post about what Pollitt said regarding residential sprinklers, something that’s become a hot subject on Salisbury News. And here is what Rick Pollitt said in response to my post with my two cents on the subject of residential sprinklers.
Both Delmarva Dealings and Salisbury News put up excellent posts this weekend, and hopefully folks will spend their Monday morning catching up on these websites if they didn’t see them over the weekend. I know my readership drops a bit on the weekends because people are out enjoying life, but Monday jumps the count right back up.
Finally, I encourage both of these gentlemen to submit the articles for CofM7 next week and share this excellent writing with the rest of Maryland.
