Tag Archives: Nine Districts for MoCo

Adam Pagnucco, MCDCC, Montgomery County Council, Robin Ficker, taxes

MoCo Democrats Take Position on Charter Amendments

By Adam Pagnucco.

As they do in every election year, officials of Montgomery County’s Democratic Party gathered tonight to take positions on charter amendments and ballot questions.

The standard format is for the party’s ballot question advisory committee, which studies such questions, to present information to the party’s precinct organization. The precinct organization, comprised of the party’s network of precinct officers, hears opinions, discusses the questions and takes votes. The party’s central committee takes the final votes establishing the party’s position, although they usually don’t go against the precinct organization’s stance unless the latter’s vote is close.

Tonight, County Executive Marc Elrich and a majority of the county council made their case to the precinct organization on the county charter amendments. The precinct organization voted in line with their recommendations and so did the party central committee. I don’t have exact vote tallies but my sources say they were all lopsided.

The ultimate vote by the MoCo Democrats was:

Yes to Question A, which was Council Member Andrew Friedson’s proposal to redo the county’s charter limit on property taxes.

No to Question B, which was Robin Ficker’s charter amendment to impose a hard cap on increases to property tax collections.

There was huuuuuge support for A and equally huuuuuge opposition to B (the Ficker amendment).

Yes to Question C, which was Council Member Evan Glass’s proposal to increase council district seats from five to seven and retain the current four at-large seats.

No to Question D, which is a charter amendment to convert the county council into nine district seats. No doubt the Democrats paid heed to the fact that Republicans support this proposal because they believe it might create a Republican council seat.

The party also voted to support state question 1 (which would grant more budgetary authority to the General Assembly over the governor’s budgets) and state question 2 (which would allow sports betting).

The exact language of all the questions and charter amendments can be seen on the official county ballot.

The party’s vote tonight is important because it will be expressed on its sample ballot, which is customarily mailed to hundreds of thousands of registered county Democrats. The vote is a particular blow to the Nine Districts for MoCo group, which has depicted its charter amendment as bipartisan but now has it supported by county Republicans and officially opposed by county Democrats.

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Montgomery County Council, Robin Ficker, taxes, washington post

Post Editorial: Vote Against All Charter Amendments

By Adam Pagnucco.

The Washington Post’s editorial board has weighed in on MoCo’s competing charter amendments and recommends voting against all of them. The Post wrote that both citizens’ initiatives – Robin Ficker’s amendment on taxes and the nine council district proposal – were bad ideas. But the Post also said, “Yet neither of the council’s competing proposals is preferable to the status quo.” The Post’s verdict is to vote against all of the amendments and stick with the county’s current property tax system and council structure.

You can read the Post’s editorial here.

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Connie Morella, Ike Leggett, Montgomery County Council

Anti-Ficker, 9 Districts Charter Amendments Group to Speak on Monday

By Adam Pagnucco.

A new group formed by former County Executive Ike Leggett, former Congresswoman Connie Morella, businessman and former county executive candidate David Blair and business owner Carmen Ortiz Larsen is holding a press event on Monday to discuss their plans to oppose charter amendments by Robin Ficker and Nine Districts for MoCo. Maryland Matters discussed the group in broad terms today but did not name its leaders. The group’s news advisory (listing Leggett’s former public information officer Patrick Lacefield as contact) appears below.

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COUNTY LEADERS LEGGETT, MORELLA, BLAIR, LARSEN TO ANNOUNCE LAUNCH OF “NO ON QUESTIONS B & D COMMITTEE”

Former County Executive Isiah Leggett, former Congresswoman Connie Morella, non-profit leader David Blair, and Latina tech business owner Carmen Ortiz Larsen will speak out against November Montgomery County ballot questions B and D and urge a “NO” vote on both. Question B would put an inflexible cap on County property taxes, on top of already existing limitations on increases, severely hampering the County from responding to crises such as COVID-19 and sustaining critical services such as education and public safety. Question D would eliminate the County’s four at-large Council seats and replace it with nine individual districts. The impact would reduce the number of Councilmembers each voter can vote for from five to one.

WHEN: Monday, September 14 at 10:15 AM
WHERE: Outside of the Dennis Avenue Health Center, 2000 Dennis Avenue in Silver Spring
CONTACT: Patrick Lacefield

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Confederate Monuments, Montgomery County Council, Montgomery County Public Schools, schools

Top Seventh State Stories, August 2020

By Adam Pagnucco.

These were the top stories on Seventh State in August ranked by page views.

1. The Squeaky Wheel and Inequities Hiding in Plain Sight
2. Is Talbot County Killing its Golden Goose?
3. Revealed! Funders of Nine Districts
4. Hogan Overturns MoCo Closure of Private Schools
5. MoCo Shuts Down Private Schools – Again
6. Volcano in Rockville
7. Two Districts vs Nine Districts
8. Council Drops Poison Pill on Nine Districts
9. Is the Council Violating the Open Meetings Act?
10. Friedson Asks for Answers on Private School Shutdown

Congratulations to MoCo PTA Vice-President Laura Stewart on writing our top post of the month! Laura’s excellent analysis of school construction geography was widely seen and provoked questions about county capital project decision making. Our Talbot County post saw lots of circulation and commentary on the Eastern Shore. The two major stories of Nine Districts and private school reopenings accounted for most of the rest of our top August posts. Keep reading and we’ll keep writing!

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Adam Pagnucco, Montgomery County Council, Will Jawando

Jawando Pushes Back on Misleading Nine Districts Video

By Adam Pagnucco.

Council Member Will Jawando, who is shown in a video by Nine Districts for MoCo in alleged support of their position, has denounced the video as intended to “mislead the public.”

The video, for which Nine Districts has taken out a Facebook ad, shows footage of Jawando speaking at a session of the county’s charter review commission in February. The video prefaces his remarks with the statement, “Why Montgomery County needs 9 Districts…” The video then shows him saying the following in an edited clip:

People should elect who represent their values, and to some points earlier, you know, there’s growing upcounty population… I do think the issue of representation is important. You know, I don’t… everyone in the county is not equally heard. Right, big surprise.

Here is what the Nine Districts group is not telling people: not only does Jawando not support their position, he actually argued against it in front of the charter review commission at that very same event. The commission posted a video showing Jawando’s full comments (along with everyone else) and he mentioned Prince George’s County, which had a nine district council for decades and added two at-large seats in 2018:

I’d also add that the Prince George’s County model that was mentioned is not insignificant because they were in that district model for a long time and, again, added two members, went to eleven, added two at-large members because they were having these parochial fights that they couldn’t get anything done and were not as collegial as they wanted to be. And I’ve spoken to a lot of them and they think it’s working pretty well with the at-large members.

And I think you don’t want to give people less representation, you want to have more. Right now, it’s true, you can decide whether you think this is good or not, but every person in the county votes for five members of the council, a majority of the council, and I just think that’s such a significant and powerful point. Now whether they come to your community or not, or they’re representing… I certainly try, you know, when anyone wants me to come, I’ll come, and I don’t know what’s been true in the past, but I think that is a powerful, powerful tool and to lose that, I think it’s not good for the voter.

The commission’s video, starting at the point when Jawando’s full remarks begin, is below.

I asked Jawando for a statement on the Nine Districts video. He said:

It is disappointing but perhaps not surprising that the Nine District campaign is using a partial clip of a longer statement of mine in order to mislead the public. Let me be very clear that I support Question C, which adds two additional district seats while maintaining At-Large Councilmember seats. Voters deserve more representation not less and must be able to have their voices heard by five councilmembers – four at-large and one representative for their district. The Nine District proposal to eliminate at-large seats actually disenfranchises voters by limiting their voice on the council to one elected member.

It’s clear that Jawando opposes nine districts. He argued against the proposal at the same event from which the Nine Districts group uses an edited video clip to allege that he supports them. Jawando also voted in favor of a rival proposal to keep the at-large seats and add two district seats. Nine Districts knows all of this very well. Their video is indeed misleading and should be taken down.

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Adam Pagnucco, Montgomery County Council

MoCo Board of Elections Certifies Nine Districts for the Ballot

By Adam Pagnucco.

The Montgomery County Board of Elections has certified the Nine Districts for MoCo group’s charter amendment for the ballot. The amendment would convert the county council from its current structure of 4 at-large seats and 5 district seats to 9 district seats, which is the same council structure used by Prince George’s County from 1982 through 2018. The amendment needed 10,000 valid signatures to qualify. The group submitted 16,391 signatures and the board found 11,522 to be valid.

The board’s letter to the group is reprinted below. It contains a tally of the reasons why signatures were accepted and rejected. The home address of the group’s chair is redacted to protect her privacy.

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Adam Pagnucco, Montgomery County Council, Republicans

Why Republicans Want Nine Districts, Part Two

By Adam Pagnucco.

In Part One, I explained the primary reason why the county’s Republican Party leadership supports Nine Districts, even going so far as to use the party’s official website to raise money for the group. The Republicans believe that having nine county council districts instead of five could produce one (or more) districts in which Republicans could compete. Using 2018 general election data, I built a 32-precinct district that accounts for one-ninth of the county’s registered voters and maximized Republican electoral participation while minimizing Democratic participation. (I used registered voters as an admittedly imperfect proxy for population.) Here is what my so-called Red District looks like on a precinct map.

The Red District has the strongest presence of Republicans and the weakest presence of Democrats of any contiguous district I can construct. But could it actually elect a Republican to the county council? Let’s find out.

First, let’s compare the eligible voters by party as of the 2018 general election between the county as a whole and the Red District.

In the county as a whole, Democrats had a 43-point advantage over Republicans in eligible voters. In the Red District, the Democratic advantage shrank to 13 points. Democrats still held a plurality in the Red District, but with 44% of eligible voters, they were not a majority.

Now let’s look at actual voters.

Among actual voters, Democrats had a 48-point advantage over Republicans countywide. (2018 was a year in which Democrats were highly motivated to vote by the current occupant of the White House.) But in the Red District, the Democratic advantage shrank to 16 points. Once again, Democrats were a plurality but not a majority of Red District voters.

The table below shows the performance of the two major-party gubernatorial candidates, Democrat Ben Jealous and Republican Larry Hogan, in the county as a whole and in the Red District. Only election day votes are shown because precinct data does not include other voting modes.

Jealous won the election day vote countywide by 5 points. (Counting all voting modes, Jealous won MoCo by 11 points.) But in the Red District, Hogan blew out Jealous by 33 points on election day. Clearly, the Red District is VERY different from the rest of the county in its preference for governor.

But Hogan is an unusual Republican whose popularity extends well into the Democratic voting base. Judging a propensity to favor the GOP by looking at Hogan’s vote tallies alone is problematic. And so, as a proxy for hypothetical support for a generic Republican, I calculated the combined votes for the Democratic council at-large candidates (Gabe Albornoz, Evan Glass, Will Jawando and Hans Riemer) and the Republican council at-large candidates (Robert Dyer, Chris Fiotes, Penny Musser and Shelly Skolnick) for both the county as a whole and the Red District. Those results are shown in the table below.

In the county as a whole, the Democratic council at-large candidates totally blew out the Republicans by 72-26%. That’s why the Republican leadership hates the at-large seats as much as they do – Democrats can roll up their vote totals in Silver Spring, Takoma Park, Chevy Chase, Bethesda and Kensington and Republicans can’t pick up enough votes elsewhere to win. But in the Red District, the Democratic council at-large candidates only had a 6-point edge. Compared to the rest of the county, that’s a narrow margin.

Let’s remember that 2018 saw massive Democratic turnout in reaction to the individual in the Oval Office. That makes it an unusual year. Given that fact, the above data suggests that in a more normal year, a strong Republican council candidate could defeat a weak Democrat in the Red District. That’s the dream of MoCo Republicans. And that’s why they support Nine Districts.

Now, would something like the Red District actually be created in a nine district system? That’s hard to know. Redistricting is nominally within the purview of a commission appointed by the council every ten years, but the council can substitute its own map if they wish. That means if Nine Districts passes, council Democrats will effectively design the districts directly or indirectly. They could scatter rural Republicans around two or three districts (perhaps one based in Potomac, another based in Clarksburg and maybe a third based in Damascus). Doing that would create two or three competitive general elections. Or they could do what state-level Democrats did in designing the current congressional districts, which was to pack Republicans in one district (Congressman Andy Harris’s District 1). If they elected to go that route, they would design something very close to my Red District.

One thing is for sure: the Republican Party would be jumping up and down to get a chance to compete. They don’t have that in the current system. But they might have it if voters approve nine districts.

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Adam Pagnucco, Montgomery County Council

Nine Districts Appears Headed to the Ballot

By Adam Pagnucco.

Multiple sources confirm that Kevin Karpinski, counsel to the Montgomery County Board of Elections, told the board yesterday that the charter amendment petition to convert the Montgomery County Council to a nine district configuration has received enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. The threshold is 10,000 signatures or 20% of the registered voters of the county. Nine Districts for MoCo submitted 16,448 signatures on August 3.

Margaret Jurgensen, the county’s election director, told me, “Mr. Karpinski did confirm that it appears that the Petition has succeeded garnering the number of valid petitions.”

The board still needs to complete its verification process and release a formal determination, which should occur later in the week. Once it does so, the county attorney must draft language for the ballot. At that point, only one thing could stop the question from appearing on the ballot: litigation, which has happened before. In 2016, a group opposing Robin Ficker’s term limits petition tried to get it thrown out in court over signature issues but was unsuccessful. I have heard of no such entity willing to challenge Nine Districts’ signatures.

That means Nine Districts could be officially headed to the ballot within days.

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Adam Pagnucco, Montgomery County Council, Republicans

Why Republicans Want Nine Districts, Part One

By Adam Pagnucco.

In a prior column, I noted the participation of many county Republican Party leaders in the Nine Districts group. These leaders even went so far as to use the party’s official website to raise money for the Nine Districts campaign fund. Why is the GOP’s local leadership so interested in eliminating at-large county council seats and replacing them with nine districts?

The answer is simple: nine districts might be the only way they can get a Republican elected to the county council.

It’s important to remember that the council has not always been unanimously Democratic. District 1 (Bethesda-Chevy Chase-Potomac) elected two Republican council members: Betty Ann Krahnke (1990-2000) and Howard Denis (2000-2006). District 2 (Upcounty) was represented by Republican Nancy Dacek from 1990 through 2002. Those were the days when Republican Congresswoman Connie Morella represented most of MoCo – a much less partisan time. District 2, which represents much of Upcounty, is the most Republican-heavy council district in the county. Its current seat holder, Council Member Craig Rice, has won his last three general elections with 59% of the vote in 2010, 60% of the vote in 2014 and 71% of the vote in 2018. The shift of the GOP from being the party of Morella to the party of Donald Trump has brought hard times to local Republicans.

Nine districts could resuscitate the party. That’s because a change from five districts to nine districts could allow enough Republicans and independents to congregate into one district to make it competitive in a general election. That is clearly what the county’s Republican leadership is hoping for. But could it actually happen? Could dark blue MoCo – even the reddest one-ninth of it – ever elect a Republican again?

To test that hypothesis, I pulled precinct-level data from the 2018 general election. I used the following criteria to select precincts that would form the most Republican-intensive district possible in the county:

Lowest percentage of registered Democrats
Highest percentage of registered Republicans
Lowest percentage of actual voting Democrats
Highest percentage of actual voting Republicans
Lowest percentage of votes going to Democratic council at-large candidates
Highest percentage of votes going to Republican council at-large candidates

There were two additional requirements. First, the precincts had to be geographically contiguous. (No random splatters of territory like Maryland’s Third Congressional District!) And second, the precincts had to contain one-ninth of the county’s registered voters, which I used as a proxy for population.

In practice, this turned out to be pretty easy since 23 precincts met all six of the above criteria. Two more met five criteria, three more met four criteria and two more met two criteria. Two precincts met none of the criteria but they had to be included to make the district contiguous. A few others did well on qualifying criteria too but were either non-contiguous or created difficulty in keeping the district at the appropriate size. All of this reinforces a central fact: in MoCo, partisanship is heavily geographic.

And so here it is: 32 precincts containing 73,269 eligible voters as of the 2018 general election, almost exactly one-ninth of the total registered voters in the county. (Again, I’m using registered voters as an admittedly imperfect proxy for population.)

Let’s call this the Red District. Here is what it looks like on a map.

The Red District has the shape of a jagged “C” and hugs the western Potomac River, the Frederick County border and the Howard County border. Its largest communities are Clarksburg, Damascus, Poolesville and part of Potomac. It is not geographically compact, but it does have a community of interest because it includes the least dense, and most rural, parts of the county. Its shape was inevitable. These are the areas where Republicans are strongest and Democrats are weakest.

How would the Red District have voted in the 2018 general election? We will find out in Part Two.

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Adam Pagnucco

Nine Districts Might Have a Problem with Some Petition Signatures

By Adam Pagnucco.

A June opinion from the office of Maryland’s Attorney General indicates that the Nine Districts for MoCo group may have collected some electronic signatures in a manner that was inconsistent with state law and policy established by the State Board of Elections. Whether this impacts the group’s ability to qualify for the ballot remains to be seen.

Maryland law requires that both petition signers and petition circulators sign a ballot question or charter amendment petition. The signer and the circulator may be the same person. The circulator must sign and date an affidavit that states:

Under penalties of perjury, I swear (or affirm) that: (a) I was at least 18 years old when each signature was obtained; (b) the information given to the left identifying me is true and correct; (c) I personally observed each signer as he or she signed this page; and (d) to the best of my knowledge and belief: (i) all signatures on this page are genuine; and (ii) all signers are registered voters of Maryland.

The circulator must also provide his or her name, residence address and telephone number.

On April 22, the State Board of Elections established a temporary policy (SBE Policy 2020-01) allowing electronic signatures on petitions due to the COVID-19 crisis. The policy states: “For an electronic signature to be valid under this policy, in addition to meeting the requirements of Elec. Law § 1-101(y), the signature must reflect an affirmative action by the signer to type or electronically sign or affix the signer’s name on to the signature page.”

The key phrase here is “affirmative action.”

According to Assistant Attorney General Andrea W. Trento, who was asked to provide an opinion on Nine Districts’ system for gathering electronic signatures, the group’s website through June asked voters to “fill in [their] information by typing the info to populate the signature page… It then ‘asks if you want to accept,’ and if the voter does so, it ‘states that you successfully signed the petition.’… The signature and accompanying information are then populated both into the signature field and the circulator field. The voter does not see the circulator oath before signing, nor does the voter take any affirmative action to sign the circulator affidavit as distinct from the petition.”

Accordingly, Trento opined that “these features are clearly inconsistent with Maryland law” and “the format as described to me is not consistent with Policy 2020-01.” Trento’s opinion was shared with the Nine Districts group on June 8.

Does this mean that Nine Districts’ petition will be thrown out? Not necessarily. The Attorney General’s opinion states that the group “may have changed its web form” after discussions with the county board of elections. The group also gathered MANY physical signatures prior to the onset of COVID-19. But these are the kinds of technicalities that result in petitions being rejected. Even Robin Ficker, the undisputed master of charter amendment signature gathering, had a term limits petition thrown out in 2010. (Six years later, Ficker got term limits on the ballot and passed it with 70% of the vote.)

Trento’s opinion is reprinted below. (The home address for Nine Districts’ chairwoman has been redacted.)

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