Tag Archives: Gwen Wright

Casey Anderson, Montgomery County Council, Montgomery County Planning Board

Knives Out at Planning

It’s hard to keep up. Since I last wrote, a lot has happened.

Planning Board Chair Casey Anderson was removed from the Kojo in Our Community segment on WAMU on Thrive. (Disclosure: WAMU is owned by American University, my employer.)

Planning Board Vice Chair Partap Verma has gone on medical leave from the Planning Board.

Parks Department Deputy Director Miti Figueredo filed a complaint against Partap Verma. Fired Planning Director Gwen Wright says that the complaint is accurate. Though employed in the capacity of professional staff, both are staunch allies of Anderson. Figueredo, highly personable and well-regarded, previously worked as Anderson’s senior advisor. Extremely effective and well-connected, she also worked for two current members of the Montgomery County Council and the Chevy Chase Land Company.

Does anyone at Planning know anything about harassment law? Figueredo’s complaint against Verma could well be seen as illegal retaliation for his original complaint, especially since it was made public. Even if every word is true, and I don’t know the veracity of any of the complaints flying around, the information in Figueredo’s complaint related to the Verma’s complaint should have been given to appropriate person investigating these issues.

As with Wright’s comments before she was fired, there should be procedures in place–enforced by the Board and Staff leaders–to handle this correctly. Figueredo complained about the firing of Wright as retaliation for speaking out in defense of Anderson but nobody should be commenting publicly, let alone dismissing, harassment complaints whatever one thinks of Verma’s complaint or Wright’s dismissal.

Both Verma’s and Figueredo’s complaints appear like timely power plays. Verma had hoped to have Anderson’s support to become Chair. But Anderson hurt Verma’s reputation with his office booze offs and is rumored to support Councilmember Hans Riemer, another ally who has run up against term limits and came in third in the exec primary.

Now, Anderson’s supporters—Wright and Figueredo—are striking back even though both are supposed to be professional staff and not involved in Planning Board disputes. (One also wonders which staffers, if any, drank with Anderson in his office.)

The County Council seems to be unable to get a grip on this. While expressing grave concern about Wright’s dismissal, Council President Gabe Albornoz has not expressed concern, at least to my knowledge, about the massively inappropriate handling of these issues by virtually everyone concerned.

The debate among Planning Board members isn’t about Thrive 2050, as they all support it. But it does reflect on the process. These scandals indicate both political and staff leadership being willing to take extreme measures to achieve their goals.

Albornoz’s statement regarding the great community consultation during the creation of Thrive is naïve and uninformed at best. Most of the consultation consisted of Planning staff telling people positive spin about it rather than seeking input. Only input from firm supporters has been truly considered by either the Planning Board or the Council. Anderson’s approach is a big part of the problems at Planning.

Much about Thrive 2050 makes sense. We should have more density in urban nodes, which has been a consistent part of Master Plan revisions. But this document is visionary only in the sense that it looks backward. It takes no account of the massive rise in telecommuting and its impact on either transportation or housing patterns. Fewer people are riding public transit or riding in cars because of systemic changes. People working form home are likely to want more interior space and privacy as well as easy access to a little green. Thrive 2050 would have been a great plan to adopt in 1990.

Thrive 2050 represented an opportunity to bring the community together around a land use vision for the future. This was far from impossible. It occurred around the Bethesda Master Plan, which pleased many of the constituencies at odds here. But both the Planning Board and the County Council have failed in this endeavor and assured intense acrimony into the future. The current pile up of scandals shows why.

Rather than saving the next Council from these issues, the current one is simply storing up trouble. Adam and I disagree about lots of issues around Thrive but we agree that the Council needs to fix this.

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Montgomery County Planning Board

Scandal, Drama Enveloping the Planning Board

On October 6, WJLA reported that Planning Board Vice Chair Partap Verma sent an email accusing Planning Board Chair Casey Anderson of creating a “toxic misogynistic and hostile workplace.” The Montgomery County Council appoints and oversees the Planning Board, which is part of M-NCPPC and an independent agency.

Lots of questions remain to be answered beyond the veracity of the allegations directed at Anderson. For starters, when did Verma learn about these problems. Is Verma a required reporter who must report allegations like these immediately and cannot keep them confidential? Did he report them to Human Resources or other appropriate personnel in a timely manner?

Commissioner Partap Verma sent his letter only to Carol Rubin and Marlene Michaelson, so who leaked the allegations to the press? These matters should be kept confidential to protect everyone involved, including Casey Anderson.

Planning Director Gwen Wright issued a statement defending Anderson: “There may be people who have concerns with Casey, but they are not my employees.” Except that there is no way for her to know the experience of every staff person at Planning. Wright’s definitive statement could discourage other employees who might want to come forward with similar experiences.

It’s a sign of how gone wrong matters are at the Planning Board that Wright also thinks it’s appropriate for staff to lobby the Council in support of Thrive, rather than providing information when requested. It gives credence to views that staff joined Anderson in skewing this process to a pre-determined outcome. In any case, Thrive is now supposed to be with Council staff.

In a shocker, the Planning Board voted 4-0 to dismiss Wright on October 7. Casey Anderson recused himself from the vote. Wright is an at will employee, so the Board did not have to give a reason for her dismissal. It’s also a personnel matter, so they may be constrained in discussing it. But it’s still stunning to see a longtime, highly experienced senior staff person fired just a few months before her retirement.

The commissioners voting to remove Wright included Carol Rubin, who worked 16 years at M-NCPPC as an attorney and special projects manager, prior to her appointment to the Board and thus knew Wright from both the perspective of a staff member and planning commissioner. Like Verma, Rubin was caught in the undertow of Anderson’s office bar scandal. The County Council reprimanded and docked one day’s pay from both Rubin and Verma.

On Facebook, Wright said that she suspects that she was “fired because I showed support for Casey and attempted to protect my staff from being dragged into the Board’s conflicts.” But the Planning Director should not be taking sides in Board decisions or intervening in investigation of these and other serious allegations beyond relaying what she knows to the appropriate people and ensuring that proper processes are followed.

Meanwhile, at least some defenders of Anderson are already parading “locker room talk” excuses for his alleged inappropriate statements. Here are several tweets from former Council Candidate John Zittrauer:

And now the County Council has scheduled a meeting for later today to discuss a personnel matter:

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Casey Anderson, Montgomery County Planning Board

Verma Accuses Anderson

The rumored internal turmoil at the Montgomery County Planning Board has burst into the open. Last night, WJLA reported that a confidential informant—revealed to be Planning Board Vice Chair Partap Verma—sent an email accusing Chair Casey Anderson of creating a “toxic misogynistic and hostile workplace.”

You can read the details of the accusations on WJLA’s website but we’ll keep them out of this family publication. The email doesn’t portray Anderson as someone open to hearing, let alone incorporating, ideas at odds with his own. Planning Director Gwen Wright defended Anderson.

Anderson and Verma had previously been very tight. Verma has been a staunch supporter of Anderson and clearly hoped to succeed him as Chair. But that alliance had fallen apart by September 22nd, when Verma purged Anderson from a Facebook photo of him and the governor:

Originally posted on August 18th
By September 22nd

All of this drama could have been avoided if either the other members of the Planning Board or the County Council had exercised proper oversight and taken action much earlier on the other numerous issues over at M-NCPPC.

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Thrive 2050

Why Thrive Dropped the Ball on Equity

Thrive 2050 has many words about equity. So why didn’t the Office of Legislative Oversight’s (OLO) racial equity and social justice (RESJ) review end up giving it a gold star?

Thrive’s staunchest advocates still can’t believe it. Yesterday’s post outlined how they utterly reject the claims made in the RESJ review. Planning Board Chair Casey Anderson and Planning Department Director Gwen Wright doubled down on their assertations that Thrive addressed RESJ extremely well in their lengthy response.

But it turns out that these problems with Thrive were not a February surprise but were flagged last August in a memo to Councilmember Hans Riemer by the Office of Racial Equity and Social Justice (ORESJ), an executive agency. Riemer chairs the Planning, Housing and Economic Development (PHED) Committee which was in the midst of work sessions on Thrive. So what happened? Where did Thrive go awry?

Both the Council and the Executive have offices to do RESJ analyses. How does the Planning Department do the same? Planning staff in June 2020 outlined an action plan to incorporate RESJ into Master and Functional Plans that was approved by the Planning Board.

But, as far as I can tell, Planning did not follow either the Council or the Executive’s model and identify a staffer or establish an office with the requisite skills. Planning’s website highlights their equity plans going forward, including for Thrive 2050 (emphasis added):

Montgomery Planning is developing an Equity Agenda for Planning to systemically dismantle the institutional racism that exists in our work and prevent it in the future. Developing an Equity Agenda for Planning is ongoing and will require constant attention to the influence of institutional racism on all planning and zoning processes. We’ve begun working on this through some recent master plans and studies and through Thrive Montgomery 2050, the update to the county’s General Plan. . . .

It will take some time to fully develop a new methodology and approach for equity in the planning process, but we cannot delay applying an equity lens to our work.

But nearly two years after approving the action plan, there is no formalized framework, mechanism or staff to ensure that both outreach and Thrive were done in line with intentional RESJ practices. Nor is there evidence that Planning reached out to OLO or ORESJ for their expertise despite the warning back in August.

Instead, the Planning Board has relied on its own interpretation of what constituted an “equity lens”. There was no separate in-house or independent analysis along the lines of what either the Council or the Executive requires.

Many words about equity does not mean that the process was inclusive or that the substance meaningfully addresses the issue. While Anderson and Wright vehemently defend their work product, they would be in a better position to do so if they had such an analysis. Instead of deciding that they know what constitutes equity, they would have an informed and impartial analysis to buttress their claims that they had done this the right way and addressed all RESJ issues.

In short, this appears to have been handled sloppily, much like the Planning Board’s repeated ethics problems. As I explained yesterday, I think that at least part of this stems from a firm urbanist belief that their ideas will assure racial and economic equity. This makes it all too easy for the Planning Board to misguidedly define their own preferences as “equity”.

But hewing to a particular school of thought and relying on one’s own judgment of what constitutes equity is not the same as genuine outreach to people in the community, let alone communities of color and low-income residents, or incorporation of their ideas and desires into the plan.

That Thrive reflects the nexus of suppositions by Anderson, Wright, Riemer—all very successful Whites—and outside support groups like the Coalition for Smarter Growth—whatever their intentions—so perfectly indicates that the process and the result were more performative than inclusive.

Many may question the entire enterprise of RESJ reports and such an intense focus on issues related to it. But the centrality of claims regarding equity to arguments made by Thrive’s advocates only make Planning’s failure more stunning and acute.

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