Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich joins Nestor once again from MACo in Ocean City to discuss the value of of early childhood education and his lack of interest in building stadia or arenas for sports franchise billionaires on the west side of the Washington, D.C. beltway.
(We experienced a technical difficulty with the video late in the podcast that was later rectified. Apologies, Nes.)
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
montgomery county, county, maryland, school, people, years, classroom, state, strathmore, virginia, county executive, kids, baltimore, money, fda, stadium, build, life sciences, raise, early childhood education
SPEAKERS
Nestor Aparicio, Marc Elrich
Nestor Aparicio 00:01
8
Welcome home. We are W, N, S, T, Towson, Baltimore, Baltimore, positive. We are positively in Ocean City, Maryland. I just like singing the song. Maybe let me be a spokesperson one day for ocmd Gold Rush. Seven stumblers are here for the Maryland lottery. Be giving these away on next Friday at fade Lee’s in downtown Baltimore. Beautiful New Lexington market, our friends at Liberty, pure solutions, as well as Jiffy Lube, multi care. Put Luke out on the road for Orioles and ravens and me on the road to Ocean City, so that I can meet with people in Ocean City, Maryland who are from montgomery county, that I’ve never been down to rockville or any of these places and hung out. We we’ve had him on before. He’s a defending champion. Mark elrich, the county executive, Mr. Ce we welcome you back. How are you?
Marc Elrich 00:44
I’m fine. How would you tell me what’s new in Lexington market? Because I used to love going up there.
Nestor Aparicio 00:49
What’s new is everything they’ve basically they’re gonna raise the old one. They built a completely new structure about 100 yards to the south, little closer to Camden Yards, new facility, new structure, two levels down the Lexington up on topaka, all new stands, all new things. Fadelies was the last one to get in on the south corner that they got the kitchen right and all that. And food’s better than it’s ever been over 200 years.
01:13
A lot of the old vendors managed to make,
8Nestor Aparicio 01:15
some did, some didn’t. And you can imagine that there’s, you know, political Park chicken got a storefront across the street, so they moved out of the market to a storefront right across the street, and now the whole street smells like Park chicken. It’s pretty good. I mean, you know, another one. I’m a royal farms guys, you know, how are you? How’s your county doing?
01:32
My County’s doing fine. We’re doing pretty good. Um, when
Nestor Aparicio 01:36
you come down here to Mako and you see 22 others like you, not everybody has a county executive, sometimes commissioners. Same challenges, crime, potholes, light, lates. We’re not getting enough from Annapolis. We’re either getting too much in Baltimore, they’re not getting enough on the shore. Is it? Is it the same sort of issues?
01:54
8Yeah. I mean, everybody’s, you know, for example, everybody’s struggling with what they’re going to do with the schools and the impact of the blueprint that’s crosses everybody’s boundaries. Well,
Nestor Aparicio 02:04
you’re a lifer educator, so I can you Yes. What are we gonna talk we can talk about Kerwin for 10 minutes. I’d love to do
02:09
that anything you want. We so we’re dealing with we deal with that. We deal with when, when the state ran out of money, every jurisdiction realized we nobody can do a construction project unless they have state money. So unlike Virginia, none of the Maryland counties are allowed to have taxes that raise money on commercial property to build infrastructure. Virginia does this all the time their taxes. And if you’re in Tysons Corner, rather than montgomery county, your taxes are 50% higher than montgomery county taxes for real estate. Well, the
Nestor Aparicio 02:40
same thing will be said here for Ocean City, for Fenwick, right? Like these bordering states on any of these issues, when it’s cannabis, anything you can bring across the state line, tax wise, people will take advantage of that, right?
802:51
They will. So we’re trying to do we’re trying to do more, we’re trying to convince the legislature. But this is something that all the counties agreed to, because when they realized that without state money, they were doing nothing, and all of them got things that need to be fixed and they have economic development implications. Waiting for the state to solve every problem is not the way to run the government
Nestor Aparicio 03:10
well. So how do you do that then?
03:14
So Virginia has set a special taxing districts. They lie primarily on commercial property. They raise money over they do bonds for 20 to 30 years for the so you’re paying a small amount every year, as opposed to all the counties like like us, we have impact taxes. You do them on the front end. They become part of the developers capital stack. If you’re developing Virginia, where they don’t have these that’s not part of what they have to raise the beginning of a project. So it’s more expensive to raise money in montgomery county than it is to raise money in Virginia. You have to raise more in montgomery county, and that has negative impact on development. If we did what Virginia did, we take the money off the back end for 20 years, while you pay for your bonds, the impact on everybody’s much less. It’s a common sense way to do it, but there’s a feeling in the legislature that the legislature should control the revenues, and I would be fine with that if the legislature had the ability to meet the needs that we have. But if they can’t meet the needs, they should let the counties who are willing to step up, let us step up to meet the needs, because we know best. It’s easier for us to convince people that we need to tax our taxpayers, and this for the state to convince people who aren’t in montgomery county to tax for projects in Montgomery County just simplifies things for everybody, and it would be good for all the jurisdictions to have some degree of independence. Doesn’t mean you don’t need the state, but it means that you have the flexibility to raise money locally, which the state can’t do unless they get everybody. That’s what people worry about at the state level. I’m trying to alleviate their need to get everything from everybody. For you
Nestor Aparicio 04:51
8as a teacher, when you see this Kerwin and money, what to do with it, how’s it going to be? I’m sure you’ve been out of teaching a little bit, but challenges you had. Probably similar, maybe even more, given the digital divide and like where we are with how kids are learning today with all these devices and whatnot. What’s important to you as an educator, from a family of educators, as I you know, do a little bit of research on you that would make your grandchildren’s children’s school better at some point,
05:20
I think there are a couple of things they got to do. I think they got they got to get the cell phones out of the schools. Period it is. They’re being used in the middle of class. I’ve been in classrooms where kids are sitting there on the phone instead of paying any attention to anything, and that’s just ridiculous. Not an aid, a distraction. It’s a distraction. It’s not used properly in the schools. It’s used to set up all the wrong things that it sets up during the school day sometimes, and it’s, it’s a bullying device. And so you get kids, you look at their phone, and they see that somebody said something bad about them, and, you know, and social media, it is just disruptive, and it contributes nothing to the classroom. And if parents want to call a kid. I mean, for years, all you did is you called the office and they said, I need to talk to my son, and office go in the intercom to the classroom and say, someone says, parent, you only be tethered to your child eight hours when they’re at school. Apparently, people feel they need to be. But I turned that all right, without
Nestor Aparicio 06:17
my mother being tethered to me, all right. Turned that a half. All right.
06:20
Come on. Every once in a while, parent needs to tell you, like, I’m not going to be there at such a such a time. I want you to go to so and so’s house after school instead of coming home. I get that, but they don’t need to have the phone on during the day, and if it’s an emergency, if you call the office, they can get the kid down to the office to take the phone call. So there are ways the kids and parents can stay in communication without turning the classroom into this massive destruction factory.
8Nestor Aparicio 06:44
I’m an old school guy my elementary school. I was telling Johnny, oh, he knows he we rededicated. We 100 years old. We’re celebrating our 100th anniversary of my elementary school this week. Raised it, brought it back up, but I remember the little intercom would be on, oh, yeah, please. Nestor Aparicio with his book bag back to the office. His parents are here to pick him up, yes, and I’m like, who died? Are you okay? Or was my dad taking me to the Oriole game? Could be anything, but that’s how they that’s how I communicated with my mother. My mother would be on the intercom come home, you know, like that. And it worked. It did work.
07:16
And so now instead, we let him play games. We let him get distracted. We let them insult each other? You we let them I
Nestor Aparicio 07:22
did play the little football game where we folded the paper up, we kicked the field goals. Oh, come on. You know you can’t do that
07:28
8in a classroom. You can do it a lunch across the table. You can’t. You don’t know, we
Nestor Aparicio 07:32
had a substitute teacher there. Wasn’t up to your your chops. Mark Albert’s here. He’s a montgomery county executive, um, for school. You’re free. What? What do you know about education that, as a county executive, really will help you and help the county? For Kirwin?
07:49
Well, first thing I’d say is, I think the most important thing of all the things people talk about doing is early childhood education, because all the problems that start in schools start because so many of the kids enter kindergarten two years behind. This is a scary thing. This is montgomery county. They would tell us that this huge portion of our student body is two years behind. Entering kindergarten when you’re two years behind and you’re four or five years old, you’re functioning like a two or three year old. You’re not ready to be in a classroom if that’s where your function, if the kids had been in early childhood education, if they’d had the opportunity to socialize with other children, if they gotten the sort of basics that you can used to get taught, if parents are home all day, which is not home all day, but the kind of things like, that’s a square, that’s a circle, that’s this color, the letter A, the
Nestor Aparicio 08:39
letter B, number One, the number two. And it’s
808:41
all done organically, without treating them like sit down in that chair and learn this right now, the idea is not to turn it into school, but to create a learning environment where the kids learn naturally, and where you’ve got early childhood education, the kids are get into it, particularly if you started two years old, you wind up with real effects that are long lasting. And so you want to see more resources into that. I want it pre K. If I was gonna put money in any place, I’d start at the beginning. And because I know that as those students work through the system, they’re not going to create the kind of expensive problems that the kid that we have now, 10
Nestor Aparicio 09:15
years from now, if you take a five year old and project that out as a 15 year old, you’re making the world, if you could fix all five year olds now, be a pretty good place in my retirement, this country, this world, right? Literally, right.
09:26
They would be more ready. They’d be more ready to learn, which is the important thing. And the other thing you know that I came to realize, realize, as a teacher, that a lot of kids don’t try. They don’t try because they don’t want to be seen as failures. And so the antidote to being a failure is to demonstrate while you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re
09:54
812, you’re 12, you’re 12, you’re.
10:01
You don’t know painful, so best protection against embarrassment and say, Well, I don’t care. I’m not even trying to do that. And that leads them to too young to make that kind of decision, that this isn’t something I’m going to try to do. So getting them into place when they step into a room, that they’re in a relatively same place with English, relatively same place, with numeracy, with other kids, makes it a lot easier for them to learn. They can fully participate. They don’t sit back and say, What the hell is going on? Why don’t they know any of this stuff? It does all kinds of psychological damage. We know how to fix it. We need to bite the bullet and fix it, and it would, over time, it would alleviate all the intensity that we’re seeing right now in our school system. Down the road, I’ve
Nestor Aparicio 10:44
never met Angela also Brooks. I had you on. I’m gonna have her on next month, September 24 on the oyster tour, before the election. I’m gonna ask a flip in Baltimore question here, right? Because I’m not a commander fan. Certainly wasn’t a Dan Snyder fan or Jack can’t cook fan. How did the stadiums wind up in PG, can’t or Prince George County begin with. And I never hear Montgomery County about to bend over and build Ted. Leone just said this. Or you’re shaking your head. Reach so much there. And I never have to ask Johnny, oh, if the Orioles are going to, you know, build something at Owings Mills, or the ravens are going to move out of downtown. But those Washington franchises, I mean, what Leon just did, the Virginia, DC, the district that I’ve just witnessed, the new guy that’s come in the bought the Orioles, where bashati bought the team, runs out $1.2 billion so they can build a club in the middle of the press box, move the press box to the roof and throw me out. I’m I’m, like, I’m a sports guy, dude. My last name is Aparicio. I built this thing on sports. When I start to talk about real problems with real people and serious people, I wonder, what municipality, what guy like you, dress like you, is going to give them 1.2 billion? It’s never do it. It’s an amazing thing. But how did how does it? And I know you would never do it, right? I mean, it’s your count, and it shows me that. But tell me about sports and industry. And when Dan Snyder comes knocking on your door and says, Build me something gaithersburg or whatever,
12:09
their academic papers that have been written for a long time indicating that, basically, sports stadiums are losers for jurisdictions. You get low wage jobs, you don’t get a lot of jobs. The jobs are sporadic. They’re totally dead end jobs. For the most part, you endure an enormous expense, the police protection, everything else you wind up doing, and you’re giving them all this money, and these guys are rich enough to build their own stuff. It’s not like you got low income people coming in and say, Build me a stadium. You’ve got billionaires demanding that you build them a stadium. And this is just absurd. We’ve gotten this, you know, problems the place that you guys got teams. Montgomery county never had team. Everybody feels like, well, if somebody leaves it, you know, it’s a loss of prestige. And you know, something’s wrong with us. And so when they when the original colts disappeared, I’m all about that. I was
8Nestor Aparicio 13:02
working at the paper when it happened. I mean, I spent the first six years on these airwaves begging to get a team give Baltimore the ball, and then I sat here for two years and said, give them your poor suckers license money. So the 30 years later, some snot nosed executive treats me and my wife like garbage and throws me out and says, I’m not a media member anymore, while my Caucasian employee is accessed every day to the facility so he can cover the team so that they can blackball me. It’s an amazing thing. Mark, what’s going on here? I’ve only written two books about the ravens, that’s all.
13:36
So, you know, you you guys got caught up in this. Why did we lose its scenario. Same thing, DC is terrified. You know now, Prince George is terrified of losing the team to Virginia. I wouldn’t be surprised. I wouldn’t be surprised if they wind up in DC at some point.
Nestor Aparicio 13:51
But if I sat with Angela also books right now, or you, if it was in your county and you inherited, you say, All right, what do you lose by losing FedEx stadium, wherever they’re calling it this week, two, Beyonce concerts, five football games where people would come, three where nobody comes. And like, I’m wondering, what is the economic impact of that facility? The capital center had more economic impact. I went there
14:11
8a lot. Yes. Well, if look, if they, if they, if they left and left this, they have to leave the stadium behind. They don’t take the stadium with him. You turn it into any you can turn into an entertainment venue for much of the year. It would actually work as an entertainment venue. You could maybe build in the middle of it, you know, you could still get Beyonce, right? You want her, so you could probably do fine, creative things to do with the stadium, either way. And I wouldn’t, you know,
Nestor Aparicio 14:39
but you don’t have one of those.
14:41
I don’t have one of those. But if I was asked, you know, would you be willing to because I was asked, my answer was, I’m not interested. You know this, I don’t see the point that the numbers don’t support putting public money into stadiums. Mark
Nestor Aparicio 14:58
Howard, She’s our guest. Sorry. We lost video. I must have hit the button here or something like that. It’s all brought to you by the Maryland. I gotta get rid of you soon, but I want to have an oyster with you, have a crab cake with you, and talk more about sports and money and crab cakes and your your county. What is the economic driver of your county? Well, I don’t know enough about montgomery county,
815:17
so we’re still largely a bedroom community of federal government, so lot of people work downtown. Then you’ve got major labs like NIH, FDA, so we have some of the largest federal facilities that employ a lot of people. Then you get the school system, which employs 25,000 people, less of an economic driver, but certainly a lot of employment in the county. We’ve got some large hospitals, we’ve got some large companies, but our, you know, our collective, I won’t say, bread and butter, but the thing that is our strongest suite in the private sector is actually the development of life sciences. So we’re the number three life sciences center in the country, and nobody knows it now, just something we’ve been trying to fix. We just got the University of Maryland to bring its first graduate level research program over to montgomery county. Here we are, next to the next the University of Maryland, forever, historic. How
Nestor Aparicio 16:20
close is the border to your county, to the campus? Half a mile of the border is the border. The border is college Well,
16:29
College Park is maybe a mile farther than that. But you cross the border, you’re in Prince, George’s County. So they had never done it. They never opened up anything in montgomery county. They have a project with Universities of Shady Grove for the University of Maryland system, the different colleges will set up programs there. But it’s not a true University where the university itself determines what programs it wants to run and what kind of college it wants to be. They’re very dependent on the system. So I’m optimistic that you know, with life sciences, we’re going to do really well. We just signed the agreement with WMATA to solicit a joint developer for joint development agreement to develop the WMATA site. That’s metro train in what’s now pike and road now. It’s now called north bethesda. It used to be white Flint. So you’re going to develop that area around there 14 acres, and that’s focused on That’s down from it, okay, but the goal is over there to first do the property around WMATA, start bringing in life sciences companies, and then get the mall and the other property owners who are already changing their projects from non life sciences to Life Sciences. To fill up both sides of Wisconsin Avenue with Life Sciences projects and make that the Life Science Center. That’s
Nestor Aparicio 17:48
8a job incubator there. It’s
17:49
a job incubator, you know, high end jobs, good quality work, lots of national prestige. The better we are, the more companies we attract. Here, we’ve been going overseas, talking, we’ve been to Korea, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, India, talking to people about bringing companies over here. We’ve had some success bringing companies, smaller companies, over here. So they want to be near DC, they wanted to be near NIH, and they wanted to be near FDA. If you’re anywhere in the world, and you went into the US market, the doors in the FDA, the FDA doors in montgomery county. You’ve got lots of tech support here that’s used to dealing with FDA. You can help companies go through that gauntlet. And so it’s been really illegal, like literally get you approved for, you know, selling drugs in the United States, and so it’s a big deal. And this is something we’ve really been capitalizing on, pushing on. You know, we started out as a bedroom community, totally dependent on federal government. That proved not to be wise. But nobody planned it that way. But that’s the way it evolved. Who came and left right. So now you’ve got, you’ve got to realize the Feds aren’t likely to continue to expand, more likely to contract. Terrible chance of Trump selected the things that we sent out to red states. So you could collapse the job base here depending on which damage he chooses to do. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. So we need to we need to have multiple plans. So we’ve been focused on life sciences, like manufacturing. We’re trying to bring things into the county we haven’t had before, but we want to make sure that we can, you know, continue to grow the economy, whether or not the federal government expands or contracts. Good visit with you. We’re not going to wait till we find out what the bad news. We’re
Nestor Aparicio 19:35
going to Well, all right, I got you. Got 60 days here, about 75 days for the election mark out, which is the good county executive from Montgomery County, where I tend to drive through. Sometimes I stop at strathmore. Sometimes I stop Potomac and get a sandwich or something. But I’m usually going to Wolf Trap or I’m going to Jiffy Lube live. So I come through, I’ll stop a little more often. All right,
19:55
you should check out Strathmore shows. You know, I saw Nils, Lofgren there, the great. Big Nils long, and I saw an amazing Pink Floyd concert there. It wasn’t Pink Floyd, but it was
8Nestor Aparicio 20:09
one of the
20:12
Australian guys. So they’re amazing. I saw John Prine there when he was still alive. They’re just amazing artists to go. They fit that space, and it may be one of the best listening halls. The way it was, everything
Nestor Aparicio 20:24
sounds great in Strathmore. There’s no doubt about my my dear friend Alan McCallum was my longtime ballpark reporter. Ran Strathmore figures. He said at the Kennedy Center now, but he was at strathmore for many years. Would always invite us in good times at strathmore. Get down to montgomery county. We are here in Mako. Everybody should come down to Ocean City and enjoy the beach. My wife has been out on the beach. This morning. We got things going on down here, including senators, Ben Cardin, Chris Van Hollen, visiting with us. It’s all brought to you by the Maryland lottery. Back for more Baltimore positive right after this you.
