A teacher and lifelong activist turned politician, it’s always a refreshing visit with Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich, who takes Nestor to class on citizenship, early education and the destructive power of money in politics. There’s even a little baseball in here…
Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich discussed his progressive governance, emphasizing social justice and economic opportunities for all residents. He highlighted the county’s demographic transformation, now 16% Asian, 21% Black, and 22% Hispanic, and the potential job losses due to federal instability, estimating 20,000-40,000 federal jobs could be at risk. Elrich also addressed the impact of immigration policies on the local workforce, potentially losing up to 80,000 Hispanic workers. He stressed the importance of early childhood education and the economic consequences of Trump’s immigration policies. The conversation also touched on personal stories and the role of sports in community building.
Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich on Citizenship, Education, and Baseball
- Nestor Aparicio introduces the show, mentioning the 27th anniversary of WNST and the Maryland Lottery’s sponsorship.
- Nestor welcomes Marc Elrich, Montgomery County Executive, and discusses his use of the term “socialism.”
- Marc Elrich explains his philosophical approach to governance, focusing on serving the people, especially the least among us and middle-class families.
- Marc discusses the economic disparity in Montgomery County, noting its wealth and poverty coexist.
Montgomery County’s Demographic and Economic Transformation
- Marc Elrich describes the demographic transformation of Montgomery County, from predominantly white to a majority non-white population.
- He highlights the county’s reliance on federal government jobs and the potential job losses due to federal instability.
- Marc discusses the impact of federal job losses on the local economy and the potential for significant job losses.
- Nestor and Marc discuss the economic and social implications of federal job losses and the potential impact on the local workforce.
Immigration Policies and Their Impact on Montgomery County
- Marc Elrich discusses the federal government’s immigration policies and their impact on Montgomery County.
- He expresses concern about the potential deportation of immigrants who are contributing to the local economy.
- Marc highlights the importance of farm workers and other essential workers in the local economy.
- Nestor and Marc discuss the broader implications of immigration policies on the American economy and society.
Personal Stories and the Impact of Immigration Policies
- Nestor shares his personal story as a son of Venezuelan immigrants and the challenges his family faced.
- Marc Elrich shares his own family’s immigration story and the impact of immigration policies on his community.
- They discuss the broader implications of immigration policies on American society and the importance of a diverse and inclusive community.
- Marc emphasizes the need for a path to citizenship for immigrants and the economic benefits of maintaining a diverse workforce.
Historical Context and the Evolution of American Society
- Marc Elrich discusses the historical context of immigration in America and the challenges faced by different immigrant groups.
- He highlights the importance of education and job opportunities for immigrants to integrate into American society.
- Marc shares his experiences growing up in a diverse community and the impact of segregation and discrimination.
- They discuss the evolution of American society and the importance of maintaining a melting pot culture.
The Role of Education in Shaping American Values
- Marc Elrich emphasizes the importance of education in shaping American values and fostering a diverse and inclusive society.
- He shares his experiences as an elementary school teacher and the impact of early childhood education on students’ long-term success.
- Marc discusses the challenges of funding early childhood education and the importance of investing in the future workforce.
- They discuss the broader implications of education policies on American society and the need for a well-educated workforce.
The Impact of Political Polarization on American Society
- Marc Elrich discusses the impact of political polarization on American society and the importance of finding common ground.
- He shares his experiences as a political activist and the challenges of advocating for progressive policies.
- Marc emphasizes the need for a balanced approach to governance and the importance of serving the interests of all citizens.
- They discuss the broader implications of political polarization on American society and the need for a more inclusive and collaborative approach to governance.
The Role of Local Government in Addressing National Challenges
- Marc Elrich discusses the role of local government in addressing national challenges, such as job losses and immigration policies.
- He highlights the importance of local government in providing essential services and supporting the local economy.
- Marc shares his experiences as a county executive and the challenges of balancing local and national interests.
- They discuss the broader implications of local government policies on American society and the need for a collaborative approach to governance.
The Importance of Community and Social Cohesion
- Marc Elrich emphasizes the importance of community and social cohesion in fostering a healthy and inclusive society.
- He shares his experiences as a community leader and the challenges of building bridges between different groups.
- Marc discusses the broader implications of social cohesion on American society and the need for a more inclusive and collaborative approach to community building.
- They discuss the importance of community events and festivals in promoting diversity and inclusion.
The Role of Sports in Building Community and Identity
- Marc Elrich discusses the role of sports in building community and identity, sharing his personal experiences as a sports fan.
- He highlights the importance of sports in fostering a sense of belonging and promoting social cohesion.
- Marc shares his experiences as a baseball fan and the impact of sports on his community.
- They discuss the broader implications of sports in American society and the need for a more inclusive and collaborative approach to sports.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Montgomery County, citizenship, education, baseball, socialism, federal jobs, immigration, workforce, economic impact, racial justice, community integration, early childhood education, federal government, job losses, political activism.
SPEAKERS
Marc Elrich, Nestor Aparicio
Nestor Aparicio 00:00
Welcome home. We are W, N, S, T, am 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We are Baltimore. Positive. We are positively here at Mako Ocean City, Maryland. Everybody coming together, all the politicals, the electeds and people like me here, chasing bands and food. It is our 27th anniversary. We’re eating great food. I’m having some ugly pie here from Salisbury, Maryland, also some fishers popcorn. We will be at Faith Lee’s on Thursday, kicking off five consecutive days of crab cake tours. All that are brought to you by the Maryland lottery. We get some Raven scratch offs going next week as well, as well as GBMC and our partners for our 27th anniversary curio wellness. This guy is a defending champion that I love having on the program. He is the sitting montgomery county executive. Mark elrich is a baseball fan, a wonderful guy to talk to late night here during the Mako convention about all things political. And you have a unique sort of designation because you use the S word socialism, is a word you use. I don’t know how you get elected montgomery county, but you do because you don’t talk about it. Well, go ahead, let’s talk about
Marc Elrich 01:06
it well. But even I policies especially made based on what are the best policies. So what I try to do is frame an issue. What are the problem we’re trying to solve, and then what are the things you do to solve the problem? I’m informed by, you know, a belief that the function of government is to do the best to serve the people, and, you know, particularly, to look after the interests of the least among us who have the you know, the most stress in their lives. Also to make sure that middle class families, you know, have the opportunities and that we meet the expectations of providing a community they can live in. But for me, the socialism is kind of just a philosophical approach of Who do you govern for? I’m more interested in what the powerful people with money want me to do, or am I more interested in making sure I take care of the people who expect me to provide a place that’s decent.
Nestor Aparicio 01:57
We have a lot of people with powerful people a lot of money in your county. I mean, yes, we do. You are a rich county by any real measurement in the country, right? Upper 1% you would say, yeah. Is that true? Probably, yeah.
Marc Elrich 02:08
We’re probably in the top 10. Okay, I think Maryland’s got the most millionaires, one of the wealthiest states in the country, which is the irony sometimes when, when you run out of money and
Nestor Aparicio 02:18
can’t do for Potomac is one of the more affluent, yes, places that I’ve been in this country and that. But you also have poverty in your county. You have all sorts of things in your
Marc Elrich 02:27
county, right? Mean, we’re, we’re pretty spread out, you know, we the county, which was when I was growing up, 95 or more percent white. Today is 16% Asian, 21% black, 22% Hispanic. And, you know, in the mid 40s white. So it’s been a huge is majority non white, majority non white. Over 50 years, it’s been a real serious transformation. And you know, our job base, which was originally largely federal government, one of the problems that’s got been talked about down here is counties like ours and to some extent, Prince George’s County were dependent on the federal government, and we were, you know, we were, we were inflation proof, because our businesses didn’t go up and down. We weren’t dependent. We didn’t have a lot of big companies. So that that level was stayed pretty level, and everybody always had a federal job. It’s in recent years that obviously, the federal government’s become a lot more unstable. We’d have no assurance of how many jobs are looking at job losses now, maybe could be 20 to 40,000 job losses from the feds. Well,
Nestor Aparicio 03:28
you knew the first time around with Trump. You sat through that. And now this time around, we’re eight months into this. I I can’t think of anybody who probably dislikes Donald Trump more than me than you. You know, being there. But this time around, the whole chainsaw with the Nazi Creek from South Africa, all of that for you is that keeps you up at night in
Marc Elrich 03:52
your calendar, keeps me up at night because of the things they think about doing. I mean, it really great to me when they talk about, you know, the tax dollars should only go to Americans who pay the taxes that our immigrant population pays taxes they don’t have social security numbers because they can’t get them, because we won’t legalize them. So they they file under with these ITINs, so they’ve got an account number, but it’s not a Social Security account money number. The Federal Government and Maryland collect a ton of tax money from these people because on their jobs, they’re required to pay taxes. Their taxes are deducted, and so they’re paying like everybody else, and don’t have the blessings of the benefits that come from their tax dollars in a lot of
Nestor Aparicio 04:31
already using them and screwing them for being citizens. They’re not real full they don’t have any full rights at all. And now we’re going to take guys with masks without ID and throw people in the vans. Chris Van Allen here later on discussing
Marc Elrich 04:45
it, yes, you know, we, you know, he started out this whole thing was, we’re going to get these, the thugs and the criminals off the streets, if that’s what you wanted to do. We don’t have any problem with it. We have worked with ice. I mean, we, you know, we were no longer on the sanctuary list. Hopefully, that. Less. But you know, our policies were, if they were serious criminals, we had a list of crimes, and the ice came to us and a you
Nestor Aparicio 05:07
know, if they were ms, 13 is a real thing. So if they’re
Marc Elrich 05:11
gang members, and if they’ve done crimes, and particularly anything vaguely violent, anything with weapons, you know, heavy drug dealing, you know, things like that, we’ve been willing to work with them so and they, when we met with him, and I met with ice more than once, they would insist we’re not interested in the low level crimes. We’re not interested before Trump, before Trump, before Trump, but literally, like months
Nestor Aparicio 05:33
before Joe Biden had ice too. It just wasn’t known for it, right?
Marc Elrich 05:37
And so did Obama. Yes, everybody’s had it, and everybody’s used it. And we, you know, we report anybody gets arrested, gets put into the national database. We’ve not done things to try to prevent them from enforcing the law, but we’ve, you know, kind of emphasize people in our community who are working every day should not be subject to being deported if they’re I shudder to think. And I keep reminding people, and you heard it last yesterday, one of the conversations that I was on a panel about there’s real concern in Maryland and the agricultural counties for the loss of farm workers, same as picking craps. And I’ve already Yes, and I’ve already had somebody mentioned that they they know a farm that had to shut down because they couldn’t, they couldn’t pick their crops.
Nestor Aparicio 06:21
That’s a realizing the people that are growing, picking, providing, transporting, cooking, washing and bringing to your restaurant. Yep, food. You want to criminalize those people. What’s wrong with you people? The worst, but, you know, because they look like me,
Marc Elrich 06:41
but you’re kind of brown. Yes, you got it.
Nestor Aparicio 06:46
I thought I was white for a long time. Mark, I did. You know what? I mean, I’m not white. I’m just not. I didn’t realize that I’ve had some privilege of being white, but I wouldn’t have Trump’s Gestapo came in here.
Marc Elrich 06:56
And that’s the thing. You know these folks, if, when they shut that down, it’s like you’re also taking food off the table. Do you realize that you know you’re going to collapse American agriculture, and I in my county, where, you know we’re less agriculture, that we do have temporary workers who come in and out of the county. If you go to
Nestor Aparicio 07:15
construction in North County, North part of your county, or Sure,
Marc Elrich 07:18
right where the Ag reserve is, but if you go to construction sites in montgomery county, you go to any restaurant montgomery county, a whole lot of the back house of the restaurants, and a whole lot of people working on construction sites
Nestor Aparicio 07:29
around that’s not montgomery county. That’s every count. That’s everything. That’s every count.
Marc Elrich 07:33
And so these folks are doing these jobs, and if you deport them all, have you contemplated the effect that’s going to be because you don’t have enough unemployment in the rest of the population to replace these jobs. So already you’re guaranteed not to have the workforce to do the work these people are doing. And then you’ve got the fact that, for example, on farm labor, there were experiments done in California trying to get college kids to do farm later so they could cut themselves off, so they could cut out the supply of immigrants coming across that fit, that experiment
Nestor Aparicio 08:04
failed. White kids in Fresno did not want to farm. No
Marc Elrich 08:07
in white kids, you know, in college, did not want their summer spent working on a farm in the hot sun, picking crops. So however you feel about immigration, you ought to think about the economy and ask yourself, if you do this, if you carry out what Trump’s talking about doing, what the hell happens to the workforce? What’s it mean for the business owners? What’s it mean to the price of food? What’s it mean to the price of food? These are real things that are going to happen, and I can’t believe they’re making policy without thinking the whole thing. They hate people so much that you will, like, cut off your nose to spite your face, is really stupid. You know, they’re hateful people. That’s bad. Being hateful and stupid is even worse. And to be willing to endanger the economy because you hate people and don’t want them here is just mind boggling to me. Offer them a path to citizenship. Make sure you get all their taxes, whatever the hell you need
Nestor Aparicio 08:57
to the son of a Venezuelan immigrant who was only here out of the blessing of having a cousin who was a Hall of Fame baseball player. That’s why my father wound up here. And you know, part of the story is, I understand it was Louis played in Chicago from 56 to 64 he and Bill VEC did not get along at all, even though he returned years later. He was never getting paid fair. Because this was the whole Brooks Robinson one get paid fair. Mickey Mantle will get paid fair. But in 64 he came to Baltimore, and what he wanted to do was bring his family and two cousins came with him, my father, my father’s brother and I am. I am the last Aparicio left in Baltimore. I’m the only Aparicio that ever really lived in Baltimore, because I was adopted. My father went back to Venezuela in 81 after my father became a citizen here. My father worked to become a citizen here for 16 years, and decided, and then decided to go back to Venezuela, because that’s where his mother was and his family was, you know, and he left me here because I was adopted. I tried to steal me. Literally tried to abduct me.
Marc Elrich 09:54
Congratulations on avoiding that
Nestor Aparicio 09:56
big time. Yeah, yeah. So you. I have a different perspective on certainly Venezuelans mark. So I flew down to Disney World for a day back in March. And cheap flight, good, bam. Was playing at Epcot. I went down alone for a day. And my brother lives in Kissimmee, who was born in Venezuela, but it is an American citizen. He and his wife own businesses here, their first language, Spanish speakers, their children in college. They’re the kind of people that Trump would try to throw an Alligator Alley. Now that being said, I landed down there and I had two Uber rides when I was there. My brother said everyone in kissimmee’s Venezuela, everyone every hotel I went into, every coffee, everyone there looks like me. The girls are beautiful too. Men are handsome and the girls are beautiful. My Uber driver was your age? Well, tell everybody how young you are, 75 All right, this guy was 73 he was a 73 year old man who was an Uber driver for me, and I’m in the back seat of his Uber, and he picked me up at the Orlando airport. I’m in his car 20 minutes, and we had a 20 minute political. Are you Venezuela? You later? Louis, I believe. Oh, yeah, you know. So it was all that, right? I didn’t say that to the end. I was just BS, it with him on the way out, I told him, Hey, you might know my family a little bit, but he told me, he said that he was from Caracas, and he said he turned he looked at me, spoke to me through the rear view mirror. So it’s very dramatic. You know what I mean? His eyes were up in the mirror, view mirror on the road, and he said to me, he said to me, something made me cry. He said, We are not nomadic people. I am not here because I wanted to come to America. I’m 70. I came to America. Was 61 years old. Learned English 15 years ago enough to speak to you in the car, and I’m driving an Uber in America, because I would have died in Venezuela. Chavez came in and took everything from everyone. He said, I had a job, I had a career, he said, and then it was gone, and there was nothing for me there except poverty, theft, all of that. He said, I’m, we’re not nomadic. I didn’t want to live in America. There is no Venezuela for me to go back to that is safe for me and my family. But
Marc Elrich 12:08
think of you know, that’s a story of the immigrants that make up this country’s population. You’re, you were born outside of here. Your kids will be first generation. I’m so I was born.
Nestor Aparicio 12:17
You were born from hospital. Don’t have the ice cream. Pull me over. Come on now. I was born to Churchill hospital, yeah. So
Marc Elrich 12:24
I’m I’m second generation. My grandmother came over here around 1903 with all my grandparents came over from Europe in the early 1900s every single group that immigrated to America faced what the Hispanic population faces today every single group except for white Anglo Saxon Protestants from England, but if you were from any place else in Europe, Germans lived in what we would call ghettos. They couldn’t live in the other other communities. As late as the 60s and 70s, places like New York and Boston had urban collections of population that were pretty much segregated by the ethnic groups they came from. I remember being Little Italy, but I remember being told, like there was a pizza shop that we wanted to go to. And it’s like, well, you can’t walk over to the pizza shop because that’s, you know, somebody else’s territory. And so, like that movie The Warriors, right? So we’ll drive over there, and then you go, and somebody will go and quickly get the pizza, and then we’ll leave. And so we were really ethnically divided for a very long time, but everybody who’s come here, we have integrated into America. That’s why we all have such a common set of values. And we, you know, we we go to the same schools, speak the same language, we are comfortable. We’re not at each other’s throats. There were differences in religion. It was designed to be a melting pot, and we’re not fighting over things. It’s amazing to me when I we do these festivals because we’re so multicultural, and you’ll see people that if they’re back in their home countries, would not be able to stand each other. They would be killing each other. And here they’re next to each other in tents in a festival and talking with each other. It is the melting pot. Has worked, and it would work perfectly well with the Hispanic population if we just focused on making sure that kids get educated, people get jobs, and they will wind up just like the rest of us. Someone will become Republicans, that sure is held true in the Hispanic community, and someone will become Democrats, and some will get more radical, whatever it is they will be like the rest of us have turned out. And this fear of this one population and our I think, it ignorance of ourselves. People don’t know what their grandparents went through. Nobody talks about a lot of kids grew up and their grandparents are very old. They weren’t talking about, oh, I came here and I lived in a ghetto in New York, or I lived in a ghetto in Boston.
Nestor Aparicio 14:44
Well, I’ve never met a Jew who didn’t have a grandmother, grandfather that was involved in some way in fleeing the Holocaust. And the thing that breaks my heart, man, I went to Amsterdam. I’ve been am a bunch of times, but three years ago, I finally went through the Anne Frank House. I did. You done that
Marc Elrich 15:00
experience? I didn’t do the Anne Frank, yes, I had never done it. Probably
Nestor Aparicio 15:04
five times went to air before I did six times. I went and we went with the man who saved my wife’s life, who’s German, and we went in there. You go into the house, and you’re trapped in the house. In this row house, you’re trapped in the room that. Anne Frank, I mean, it’s you walk out of there, you can’t do anything. You walk out of there and you’re paralyzed. My son said to me at Costas and Dundalk about four months ago, we’re having dinner, and he and his wife did the Anne Frank House last year on their own. And he lives in in Colgate, East Point, East Baltimore, the neighborhood I grew up in. I was the only Hispanic in the schools. Another family called the Flores family from the father was from Colombia. Mother was American, gringo like my mother, but they were three Colombian kids, but they were as American as me. They didn’t speak Spanish. None of them did. So there were no Hispanics in my name first language Hispanics in my neighborhood, none, not anyone in a house. There were no black people in my in my neighborhood, either. It was Archie Bunker’s Dundalk 1970 redlining. So now in the same house that my parents bought 1951 when my dad came here to work on bombers in the 40s from Scranton, Pennsylvania, Martin Marietta, my parents bought a house in 1951 my I lived in it three generations. My son now has that house. So my son is in the house that I grew up in, in the same bedroom I grew up in the whole deal, and that neighborhood is 78% Hispanic. And my son said to me in May when we went to dinner, he said, Dad, the neighborhood is like Anne Frank. Everyone has their shades now. Everyone’s afraid to talk to everybody else. Everyone’s afraid that if one of them gets raided, the thing they’re going to do is finger everybody else in the neighborhood. So everybody’s afraid of each other and of being outed. Yep, this is not a good America, Mark. It’s really not. This
Marc Elrich 16:59
is not where we should have wound up, and it’s, it’s really a shame, but, you know, say, as disturbing as that is, I don’t want the issue with black Americans to get pushed to the side, because this is the other group that didn’t ask to come here and has been here 400 years, and they’re still don’t have the full rights, and You know, the abilities in society that white people have, and we’ve not privileged, and we have refused to come to term with the effects of racism. And so every time you know the immigration issue is important, and it’s really, it matters a lot to me, but I don’t want people to forget that you’ve got this whole community who we have systematically figured out, how do we keep them out? How do we make sure they don’t have the opportunities that everybody else had? And it’s really disturbing. You know, I grew up in DC, and my neighborhood from I lived there from 49 until about 1960 in my neighborhood, which but there was the third neighborhood we lived in since I was born. I was there from when I was about four and a half, because I went to kindergarten there, and I started kindergarten when I was four and a half. So between that and 1960 my neighbor goes from all white to all black in 11 years, from 54 to 66, years, seven years. That’s quick. People were not prepared to have black kids in their school or to have black kids on their block. I had so they moved out. They moved out. I had white flight. I had friends. These are like, we’re like, nine year old kids, and we’re friends. And I remember going over to my friend’s house to ask him to come out and play like I always did. His mother answers the door and says, I see that you touch black kids, Ronnie can’t play with you anymore. It’s like, holy shit. What did you say that? What’s wrong with you? It’s like,
Nestor Aparicio 18:50
how that’s what you learn as a nine
Marc Elrich 18:52
year old boy. That’s what I and I’m like, how do you think like that? And when I came to Montgomery County, to which was segregated and very few played well up until it was the place the white people went up to the right, up to the up to the fair housing law. Almost every piece of property in montgomery county had covenants on it. You couldn’t rent to a black or Jew, and you couldn’t sell to a black or Jew. And sometimes they threw in Catholics. Well,
Nestor Aparicio 19:18
there weren’t any there to buy. They weren’t, they didn’t put them on,
Marc Elrich 19:21
that’s right, they weren’t there. But so I, you know, I have this memory of this kind of exclusionary society, and it’s in my lifetime, and I think about, you know what? And again, you see, I grew up, and I have, and I still think is myself as a kid. My parents are working class. My father was a postal clerk. He’s sorted male. My mother was a waitress. She had a seventh grade education. My father had a high school education. I think about growing up and thinking I could be anything and do anything. I thought about the black kids I knew who didn’t think they could be anything or do anything, including President, including
Nestor Aparicio 19:56
President the Obama thing Marco, which is here, he is the Cook County. Executive at Montgomery County just in south we got better crab cakes. We’ll get into that later. And Obama getting elected twice, I thought we had really made strides, man. I thought like, we’re in the good days here the pendulum of politics and of racism and money and really, let’s get to the heart of this. I’m not a conspiracy theorist at all, but the outside influence, I mean, as we sit here right now, Donald Trump’s playing footsies with Putin on our soil,
Marc Elrich 20:31
war criminal, yes, and who’s supposed to be arrested because he’s a war criminal. Second
Nestor Aparicio 20:36
time around, this racist felon has disrupted our culture, and it’s really being done with the influence of Russian compromise. It’s being done with the Internet. It’s being done with money of oligarchs. It’s being done with dark money and PAC money. You’ve seen all of it. How long you been in politics? A long time.
Marc Elrich 21:02
So let’s say I was active in University of Maryland. Actually started. We always get arrested. A couple times right at night, almost got arrested. I’ve studiously avoided getting arrested because I was always afraid what would happen to me in jail. The only time I got arrested was voluntarily at the South African Embassy, where a bunch of us lined up and the police knew we were going to do we’re going to walk up to the embassy door. We were going to say, we want to come in and talk. They’re going to say, No, we would just not move. And then the police would take us, put us in nice little handcuffs, gently, no rough treatment or anything, and then put us in a bus. And then no charges were pressed. That was the only time I was arrested. But when I was in protest, you know, I did not. I grew up being afraid of being in jail and being afraid of what the police would do, and being, you know,
Nestor Aparicio 21:46
you were afraid of the police, yeah, okay. I mean, most of
Marc Elrich 21:49
us were, when you drove, you drove, I had long hair, and, you know, let my hair out. No, all right, but I had long hair, and, you know, and a beard and driving a fort Econoline van, it was, like, it’s a paranoid thing to do, but the thing and I remind people, I could stop being profiled the moment I cut my hair, there are people there’s nothing they can do to stop being profiled. If you’re black, you’re always black, you’re always clear who you are. For me, I cut my hair, I, you know, go on this different path, and I’m just like, like everybody else, and that’s what this country should be. Like it should be, you know, that everybody gets to do everything. So I, like I said, I started doing political stuff at the University of Maryland. Then I didn’t do political stuff, except I was involved, like, in demonstrations against the wars in Central America and stuff like that. I got involved in climate change, and, you know, supporting efforts to, you know, the early wakening of the climate change movement in the early 70s. I did all that stuff. And then at some point, I ran for, ran for county count, city council in Takoma Park, lost my first election, came back five years later, ran again, won an election, served 19 years.
Nestor Aparicio 23:04
What was your vocation? What did you do? Good? So I What were you doing when you ran?
Marc Elrich 23:08
What I was teaching, teaching you teaching. Actually, before I was working in the food Co Op, we had a food Co Op. We still have a food co op in takoma park. It started in silver on the edge of takoma park in silver spring. I was part of their first worker collective. It was a community owned Co Op. The workers managed the store. The community decided what products we want, what hours we want you open. So I had really early experiences in worker managed businesses, which I really liked as a model, and I did that, and then I went into teaching, and I taught elementary school for 17 years in one of the highest poverty schools in the county. I moved into the neighborhood that that school served. So I had options. My options, I wanted to live in an integrated neighborhood where I could raise my kids in a place where they would see and be able to be with everybody, and not in other neighborhoods, right? They wouldn’t have been exposed to that. I ran for county council four times and lost, but I always got people would say you get more votes per dollar than anybody does. But I didn’t get any dollars because I never took developer money, never took money from the big special interests, and so they knew that if you don’t have money, it’s very hard to win, and I had a relationship with newspapers. They wouldn’t cover me, and because they knew that if they don’t cover me and they don’t say what I said, if they don’t put me in articles about the election and don’t say, Well, this is his opinion about this, then my message never gets out. And the media was very good at making sure my message never got out. And on my fifth try, I won a county council seat. And also then you got a voice with very little. And I, that year, I raised a whopping $65,000 the other three at large council members, I were in the neighborhood of three and $400,000 so I had made my final break though, and then I had two more elections. I won. On top vote getter the last two I’ve got more votes as county executive in two races. I ran very tight primaries, but my last primary that was that spent like $24 million to one and the development community has poured money into this guy’s campaign, and he poured millions of dollars of his own wealth into the campaign. I’m thinking like, it would have been cheaper to get me killed, right? Yeah, yeah. So, so I’ve, you know, I’ve been
Nestor Aparicio 25:26
when I was going to run, which is why you’re sitting here now. Why are you sitting here now? Is my wife got cancer 11 years ago, and I watched her try to survive for two years, and she did, and then the city caught on fire. The mayor went to jail. Healthy Holly Trump got elected. I’m seeing all this happen. I’m like, I got to get loud. I got to do something. And Ted venoula late, great. Ted venoula said to me, you’ll get more done losing an election than you will win. It is what he said to me, right, interesting. And I didn’t run because I couldn’t win. But when I did talk to people about running for mayor, and this is when Brandon got elected and won, nobody thought Brandon could win. When I sat down with Brandon, they’re like, nice kid, he can’t win. He didn’t have money. Nobody’s gonna invest in him, and they’re gonna put their money behind the White candidate, Mary Miller. It’s just all of that, right? The Baltimore suns money, the right wing money that’s always trying to out the city. And everyone I talked to who knew what they were doing about Paula. Real politics. Don molar, being primary, being my partner, said to me, you got to go into basement. You got to call people and ask for money. You got to call St John’s. Probably got a call. And I’m like, I’m not doing that. I ask people for money all day long to do this. I get sponsors. You know? I’m like, I’m good at asking for people for money, and I’m good at selling it. I’m not selling my soul to win an elected seat. I’m not going to do that. I’d rather lose than do
Marc Elrich 26:48
that. People tell me what I could do to get money or support if I would take certain positions, and I can’t do that. It’s like, this is my position. It’s like, I’m not going to tell the residents that this is what I’m going to do and this is what I support and then flip my position, because I’m going to get a check for flipping my position. I can’t. I would rather lose. But I would also say, like I was a school teacher, and I knew that if I lost an election, I’m going back to the classroom the next day where I was the day before. And I love teaching. And teaching elementary school was a really great you know, seven three to teach. I taught 14 years of fourth grade and three years of fifth grade. Really great years. Really great years for kids in their learning trajectory, it’s like the little kids you couldn’t have a serious conversation with, the fourth graders and fifth graders are starting to think about their place in the world, and they’re cognizant of more things, yeah, and so you could. So I would, I would ask my kids, you know, would you what I would call moral questions? I’d pose a dilemma, like, if a state, if a state, passed a law saying that a woman can couldn’t take a job without her husband’s permission, would you consider that just or unjust? Just to engage them in thinking about bigger things. And I heard the most fascinating discussions in the class, and then you realize their brains are working. They are they have values. They have senses of what’s right and what’s
Nestor Aparicio 28:16
wrong. The boys don’t see the girls less than them. Well, they might, no, but you’re not gonna in your classroom. Think about that. Yeah, think about think about that. Just think, think about what that person over there and that person over there,
Marc Elrich 28:27
what did they think? And, you know, I was also pretty strict. I mean, that I didn’t tolerate the no racist comments in my classroom. You couldn’t ask me to change your seat, because I don’t want to sit next to that person. If I don’t want to sit next to a girl, it’s like, that’s your seat. That’s your seat. That’s your seat. I’m not changing your seat. Don’t ask me again. You’re gonna have to learn in the real world how you live with everybody, and it’s gonna start here. And I had very little trouble after that. Once they realized there were boundaries and rules and stuff, it was not so hard to manage. And I really liked it. It was kind of fun.
Nestor Aparicio 28:58
Yeah, I could tell, I could tell mark our just here. What are the biggest issues for your county? I mean, we talked employment a little bit regard to the federal government and all that. What? What keeps you up? But what? What are the three things that are hot buttons from montgomery county right this,
Marc Elrich 29:11
in this moment, what happens with federal job losses? We’re looking at, you know, we could lose anywhere 20 to 40,000 jobs, and the ripple effect on government employees, then goes through the subcontractors who you know have contracts like when USAID was shut down, a whole bunch of montgomery county companies had to fire everybody because their work was doing USAID missions overseas. They were the ones who executed, did programming.
Nestor Aparicio 29:39
Are now dead because they haven’t been fed the last
Marc Elrich 29:43
Yeah, that kind of stuff. Yeah. So, so that worries us, because, you know, obviously you lose, say, 20 to 40,000 high paying jobs, plus the private sector jobs, which are also pretty decent. You lose that that’s an enormous hit on your income taxes. That. It handicaps our ability to fund programs that we want. I worry about losing the Hispanic workforce. We could probably lose up to 80,000 people if Trump is as serious as he says he is, and if he creates his
Nestor Aparicio 30:13
little ice we all look the other way and allow this lawlessness.
Marc Elrich 30:17
You You know, the frustrating thing is, you can’t stop them. You know it’s heartbreaking to tell people, but I cannot put my police between ice and these people. It’s just it will not work and it will not happen. You arrested. That would definitely get me arrested, but I’m not sure the police would, you know, if they had to choose between doing what the federal government says and doing what a county executive says, or county government says, they might choose the federal government and so, and I know a lot of people have the same question about, you know, where the police departments would line up on that if it actually came down to it, that’s a real thing to worry about. But if you lose that percentage of your population, my construction sites go dead, and there are not other people. I keep going back to this. There are not enough unemployed people to fill the void of removing 80,000 workers from the workforce, the restaurants, good at the retail shops, good agriculture, agriculture. And we tried to appeal to one of the other county executives down here, who’s
Nestor Aparicio 31:18
going to mow the lawns for these rich people.
Marc Elrich 31:21
Well, they, well, you can buy now these robot lawn mowers, the AI lawn right? So there isn’t, there is an AI lawn mower that will do this job for you, and the rich people can easily afford. But those, that’s one big thing that keeps me worried. I’m worried about cuts to the budget from at the state level because of this, if I’m not allowed to spend County, if I’m not allowed to spend federal dollars on Head Start programs, what’s it going to cost us to fill the gap to make the sure those programs go forward? Because if the kids don’t have those programs, that’s that’s one of the programs in school that we know helps level the playing field for these kids. Long term.
Nestor Aparicio 31:58
I have the why on all the time talking about that, yeah, so you take that away,
Marc Elrich 32:03
and then what happens to these kids? They enter kindergarten further behind, and you’ve seen that as a teacher, and I see it, and you like, this is one of the most frustrating things as a teacher. Almost all the resources in the school system went to assisting kids who were in the in middle school or high school, almost no money was spent in the elementary school. Yet every study that was done says that you know by third grade what the kids trajectory is going to be academically, because if they haven’t learned the basics, they don’t get them later. And everything in the later grades is based on the foundation you get in the early grades. And so the failure to get that foundation has lifetime consequences for kids. If you don’t have the money to fund early childhood education, we don’t have the money to make sure interventions in elementary school happen, we’re going to produce another generation of kids who are not going to be fit for the workforce and not able to do what a modern society needs them to do. That keeps me might
Nestor Aparicio 33:01
be uneducated enough to vote for Donald Trump, and
Marc Elrich 33:03
might be, but it’s like it’s not just my world. It’s going to be everybody’s world. And that’s what I wish everybody would take a deep breath, regardless what they think on race issues, and just say, think about your economic self interest just for one freaking second. And what happens to a world when these people aren’t there, working, play
Nestor Aparicio 33:22
this out, strategize this. Do the long the long tail. Yes, Mark our which is here, he’s become a cat. I have Brock learman gonna come on and we’re gonna talk to me. So I just quick hit on baseball. I mean, your Yankees steak right now, they might not even make the playoffs. Tell you that
Marc Elrich 33:35
it’s really disappointing, isn’t it? It’s amazing. That much money wasted. I am not an Aaron Boone fan, and I think the Yankees have had consistent problems with pitcher and injuries for several years both, but they seem to be on steroids with that. And what worries me about pitching in baseball too much emphasis is, can you hit 100 and in the old days you had pitchers are thrown in the 90s, not everybody was throwing. You know that whatever Nolan Ryan was, the golden speeds was all a part. Yes, it was that was pitching. It was ball movement, it was location, it was fooling the batter, all those things I knew, like I could pitch a little bit. And my kid was playing ball. I would pitch for, pitch batting practice to the kids, I would throw a curve ball and I’d throw it at their heads, but the ball would break over the plate, and I’d watch the kids fall back, of course. And I said, guys, read the rotation on the ball. If the ball is going like this, it’s curving, it is not going to hit your head. Dynamics will force it to break to the left if you throw, and it’s a hard pitch to throw, if you throw a screwball on, break your wrist in the opposite direction and it’s spinning that way, it’s going to go in on you. So read the rotation. So I love that. So I love that so, but also because your point about pitching, when you had to be a complete pitcher, you didn’t have to throw your arm out you. When you’re everybody’s trying to throw it high speed, max effort every single time you are going to bust your elbow at some point. And they all are, and they’re doing them multiple times. It’s amazing. You can go through Tommy John surgery more than once. We
Nestor Aparicio 35:13
got Brad coming back second time here. So yeah, well, my team’s in last place, hopefully this time next year, it’s a little better than that for us all.
Marc Elrich 35:19
Right, yeah. Well, Yankees got to pick up a pitcher. They need a catcher. They got to do something about Volpe at shortstop. And everybody had the highest hopes for him, but he like, he’s batting with 208,
Nestor Aparicio 35:28
or two. I love seeing the Yankees suffer while we suffer. So I was
Marc Elrich 35:31
like, when I was growing up, I loved watching the royal suffer, because I grew up in the era where the Yankees were winning all the pennants in the World Series. And so my Oriole friends in school is like, always like, you know, it’s tough. You guys aren’t going to be there in the postseason. First time the Orioles won, I had to endure
Nestor Aparicio 35:48
Yankees doing so you’re probably a Mets fan of 69 for a minute or two.
Marc Elrich 35:53
Well, my National League I was, I was a Hank Aaron fan. When I was he was my favorite base, him and mantle were my two favorite baseball players, and when I learned to bat, looking at how Aaron bet, because he had a thing where he moved, how he rotated his wrists, there was something that was pointed out to me when I was like, young and playing ball and a little bit
Nestor Aparicio 36:12
of a follow through for power. Steve garb, yeah, yeah.
Marc Elrich 36:16
So I followed Aaron, and he was in Milwaukee in the 50s, when they went to Atlanta, I broke my usual prohibition on rooting for a team and the Confederacy. And I said, I’ll root for the Atlanta Braves as long as Aaron plays. And then when Aaron’s done, I go back to the Mets. And so when Aaron was done, left baseball, I went back to the Mets. You like my the way I do my baseball, all my sports teams, it’s union state over Confederate state. Union state over border state. Border state over Confederate state. If they were territory at the time of the Civil War, I tried to figure out if they were free or slave territory, and then I would make the same calculation, free over slave and because you got to have a reason for liking teams. And I figured the best rationale they could have is free in slave states. And that was, that’s how I make all my sports choices. We’re gonna get
Nestor Aparicio 37:06
together. We’re gonna get a crab cake in Macomber county mark. Ours is here. He is montgomery county executive. I gotta go. I like I could sit here all day and go with an old school teacher about baseball. We are Mako. It’s all brought to you by the Maryland lottery. We’re talking to all sorts of people about all sorts of things. Love being down here does our 27 our 27th anniversary. Back for more in Ocean City. We are Baltimore positive. Stay with us.
