I’ve tried in this summary of my time on the City Council to go beyond a mere recitation of ordinances and amendments, because that wouldn’t truly capture the essence of Council service. Yes, I worked on legislation, but that was just part of my overall focus on government being a positive force in the community. Indeed, I probably spent as much or more time responding to individual residents or neighborhoods on municipal problems or questions they raised as I did working for passage of ordinances. And, while some issues can be addressed relatively quickly, others are never truly “complete.” So this summary contains an overview of what my Council work entailed, a list of key issues in which I played a role, and a discussion of some ongoing challenges.
OVERVIEW -- SERVING ON THE COUNCIL
Councilmembers don’t pass legislation on their own -- it takes the votes of at least three other Council colleagues. Beyond that, most Council legislation is developed collaboratively, with multiple authors having a hand in the final product. Few of the achievements listed below are mine alone. They wouldn’t have been possible without involvement from Mayor Stewart and my Council colleagues. Moreover, on many major initiatives the Council works not only with City staff, but with other levels of government, non-profits and businesses to advance the City’s interests.
For example, I often spoke to Montgomery County officials, and also testified before the County Council and the Maryland legislature, lobbied State legislators, and joined my colleagues in developing recommended priorities for the Maryland Municipal League (MML). I also worked with our Annapolis lobbyist, reached out to Congressman Raskin and our U.S. Senators, participated in Greater Washington Council of Governments discussions (especially through my membership on COG’s Air Quality Committee), and attended MML and National League of Cities conferences.
In some cases, although I wasn’t the lead sponsor of a proposal before the Council, I helped lead the way on adding language responding to concerns which needed to be addressed in order for an initiative to be effective. Examples include clarifying in the plastic bag ban that farmers markets and bulk food aisles can use compostable “plastic” bags; allowing residents to request dimmers to prevent LED streetlights from shining into their homes; requiring the closure of Laurel Avenue for the Streetery to include a separate public area for those who aren’t patrons of the businesses there; ensuring the plastic straw ban bill accommodated disabled people who need to use straws; mandating a greater focus on racial equity groups and youth in the appointments to the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force; and amending the Indigenous Peoples Day resolution to call for not merely designating the day, but for organizing City programs honoring it.
As referenced above, the Councilmember job also involves assisting the community, separate from passing ordinances or resolutions. In my case that included such efforts as working with North Takoma residents and lobbying the County Council to modify the Montgomery College math and science building design so it would better fit the neighborhood, and to mitigate the project’s construction impact on close-by residences; pressing the State Highway Administration for safety upgrades on roadways they control in Takoma Park, and seeking similar improvements for City streets and sidewalks; coordinating with neighborhoods to request increased Police presence and response when there were upticks in crime; working with Congressman Raskin to press the US Postal Service for more consistent local mail delivery; joining my Council colleagues and Adventist HealthCare to define the services they would provide following the hospital’s departure from the City; urging utility companies to be more sensitive to neighborhood concerns when they undertake major projects; helping individual businesses and local business associations navigate the regulatory and political world: and promoting local non-profit groups.
With regard to helping individual residents, which is so central to good government, it was everything from noise and garbage problems to tree permits, parking questions, snow plowing, accessing COVID funds and services, code enforcement issues, crime and policing, and -- yes -- potholes.
KEY ISSUES I WORKED ON
Some topics appear under both Key Issues and Ongoing Challenges. Issues like advancing racial equity, responding to climate change, and addressing housing affordability don’t reach an end date; we have to stay committed to addressing them over time. One theme that runs through most if not all of the issues listed below is the goal of greater inclusion. Whether it’s expressed in terms of engaging with a broader cross section of the community or working to expand participation in our programs and initiatives, it’s been a major area of concentration for my Council colleagues and me. We’ve emphasized that Takoma Park values, welcomes, and defends people of all backgrounds. For example, we sharpened the focus of our recreation and grant programs to encourage greater inclusion of youth, people of color, and immigrants; fought to strengthen our sanctuary law (I testified in support of a statewide sanctuary bill in Annapolis); condemned violence against the LGBTQ community; decried anti-semitism and other forms of bigotry; made it clear we welcomed refugees; and designated Indigenous Peoples Day. I have no doubt the City will remain committed to these efforts on into the future.
Budget and Taxes: I consistently sought to keep spending at a reasonable level and avoid property tax rate increases (and if possible reduce the rate). When I joined the Council in 2015 the tax rate was .5850 cents per $100 of assessed value, and during my time on the Council I didn’t vote in favor of any rate increases and frequently supported rate cuts. Over the last 7 years the Council either reduced the rate or kept it the same, with the exception of Fiscal Year 2020 when it was bumped up despite my no vote from .5291 to .5397, where it’s remained ever since. I understand that, depending on the amount and timing of property value re-assessments, keeping the tax rate flat may still mean some residents pay more than in the previous year. As a result, some have argued that we should establish as our base in the budget each year the Constant Yield rate (the rate at which the City is estimated to take in the same overall amount of property tax revenue as in the previous year). I wouldn’t favor doing that, since it would make it difficult to be able to compensate for inflation (which would be especially problematic in periods with high inflation, as we’re currently experiencing). However, as outlined below, I do think it would make sense to consider several different property tax rate scenarios in each budget, which could include Constant Yield or possibly Constant Yield with an inflation adjustment.
Cell Tower Ordinance: When the Trump-era Federal Communications Commission issued a harmful ruling in 2018 significantly pre-empting municipalities’ ability to control the appearance and location of small cell towers in City-controlled property, I helped push for successful passage of a strengthened local ordinance. It gave us the maximum control and influence we could have under the FCC’s ruling. I’ve also joined with my colleagues in pushing via the Federal court system and the U.S. Congress to soften the impact of the FCC ruling, as well as pressing for County rules (which cover private property) to be more protective of residents and neighborhoods.
Climate Framework: I was an early advocate for the idea of declaring a climate emergency, and setting a carbon neutral deadline for the City. I then played an active role in developing the Framework, including specifically calling for coordinating our climate change efforts with those of the County and State; improved outreach to under-served communities in the City as we consider implementation options; stressing adaptability to and mitigation of climate change; assisting lower income residents with costs related to climate change responses; emphasizing the importance of addressing increased stormwater flows due to more intense rainstorms; ensuring that our climate response work meshes appropriately with the City’s efforts on racial equity, urban forest policies, affordable housing, public space management and the like; and transitioning to sustainable investment and banking policies and practices. There’s now of course a lot of work to be done on implementation to achieve our net zero carbon goal by 2035.
COVID Response: This was an unprecedented challenge for a city of our size which doesn’t have a health department. I was glad to play a key role in ensuring that we had the budgetary flexibility we needed in the early stages of the pandemic, and -- as the pandemic continued -- by pushing for increased financial assistance to residents struggling with housing, job loss, and food insecurity, plus allocating aid for small businesses. I also helped push successfully to provide sufficient funding for the direct payment program in our ARPA spending plan to enable City households with incomes below $50,000 to be eligible for one-time $1,000 payments.
Election Synchronization: Residents approved a non-binding referendum in 2015 shifting our City elections from odd to even years -- thereby synchronizing our vote with the State ballot -- to boost turnout. Previously, in Presidential elections the Takoma Park turnout could be well over 75% and even in Gubernatorial years above 40%, whereas the local election turnout would be 10 - 20%, with some Wards as high as 30% or as low as 5%. Despite the strong endorsement of synchronization in the referendum vote (the “yes” votes were over 75%), there was some opposition on the Council, and I worked hard for the successful passage of synchronization legislation. I also attended several County Board of Elections meetings to lobby for the Board’s support and to help make sure implementation would go smoothly.
For the just completed 2022 election, the City received 5,756 ballots (a turnout rate of just under 50%). For purposes of comparison, in 2020, around 6500 ballots were received (a turnout rate close to 55%), while there were only about 2500 ballots in both 2015 and 2017. So turnout is up, but due to COVID we switched in 2020 and 2022 to primarily mail-in ballots, meaning we didn’t have a true test of the degree to which changing the dates would increase turnout. It’s possible the ease of voting by mail has contributed to the higher turnout, rather than synchronization. Alternatively, it may be that a general heightened awareness of political campaigns in Presidential -- and to a lesser degree Gubernatorial -- years increases residents’ focus on local elections. In any case, we are seeing greater participation in our elections, including from Wards with more renters, Black and Brown residents, and speakers of other languages.
Housing and Economic Development Strategic Plan: I successfully urged that we include in the plan more details in areas like preventing and reducing economic segregation; the importance of seeking zoning changes; collaborating with other levels of government and regional and national partners; the necessity of addressing renters’ concerns; focusing on the housing needs of the disabled community; helping residents who may be facing eviction or who in other ways may find it difficult to remain in the community; working collaboratively with small businesses; and responding to the economic challenges posed by the Purple Line. I’m glad that all of those points were in the end more specifically called out in the plan. I was also focused on ensuring that racial equity and climate change would be key considerations throughout the plan, and I’m pleased both of those priorities are appropriately emphasized. Of course, there’s still plenty of work to be done in order to move toward achieving the plan’s goals and objectives. But I think it gives us a firm base from which to make significant advances in housing policy and economic development, with a key emphasis on promoting affordability.
Library Renovation: I see the Library as a very important City resources, which provides vital services to students, immigrants, residents without Internet service, seniors and many others. But it’s 60 years old and in need of a major upgrade, and I’m an enthusiastic support of the renovation. I’m pleased we’re moving ahead with an expansion beyond the earlier proposed version -- which would have had less public space and fewer books than we now have -- without a further impact on property taxes beyond what we borrowed via the State bond process in 2017. The difference in the annual costs to the City for that bond is $390,000 versus a rough estimate of $220,000 if we’d taken out a bond for the earlier proposal. That’s less than one percent of our budget, and in a population of now 18,000, the estimated $170,000 annual difference between those two borrowing levels is an average of under $10 per resident per year over 30 years.
Mayor and Council Compensation: We periodically appoint a resident task force to review Mayor and Council compensation and recommend changes. I thought the most recent resolution creating the task force fell short in not recognizing that the pay (this past year set at $12,176 for Councilmembers and $15,829 for Mayor) meant a large percentage of residents, including working people and single parents, couldn’t realistically contemplate running for office. Perhaps that level of pay made sense in the past, but today with Council jobs being full time or close to it, that’s no longer the case. While the low pay isn’t the only factor making it hard for less well-off residents to run for local office, keeping it there would help keep the Council dominated by better off homeowners who are retired or have highly paid jobs with flexible schedules.
The Council approved my suggestion for language in the resolution calling on the Task Force to review whether the low pay levels hindered less well-off residents from running. That in turn led to the Task Force recommending and the Council approving an increase in pay for Mayor and Council of $32,000 and $24,000 respectively, plus some improvements in benefits. As seen in the just completed elections, the higher compensation in and of itself may not create a major change in the Council’s makeup. But my hope is that, especially when combined with the greater diversity we’re beginning to see in membership on resident committees (often a stepping stone to Council service), the implementation of the ARPA Navigators program (see below), and other strides on racial equity, we’ll see more economic diversity on the Council over time.
Racial Equity and Diversity: I’m pleased we adopted a policy requiring all official City actions to be viewed through a racial equity lens. We’ve made progress in implementing the policy, but I think it’s fair to say we have a way to go to reach a point where it’s fully integrated into all we do. Some of the steps we’ve taken, for which I actively worked, include the following:
Housing and Community Development: putting money in our Housing Reserve fund; starting to implement components of the Housing and Economic Development Strategic Plan such as the down payment assistance program and smaller projects which preserve and expand affordable units in the City; adjusting engagement for the New Hampshire Avenue Recreation Center project to enable more Black and Brown residents to have input into the project; and mitigating the Purple Line’s impacts on residents and businesses with an eye on preserving affordability.
Community programs and outreach: expansion of City recreation programs to serve more lower income residents; improvements in translation of City documents and meetings; ensuring that our recent resident survey was augmented by focus groups with a concentration on historically less engaged parts of our community; actively encouraging more diversity on resident committees; targeting City grant programs to initiatives which serve lower income residents and people of color; tree policies which include an emphasis on planting in under-served parts of the community; and directing significant portions of ARPA funding to low income residents.
Law Enforcement/Public Safety: for the hiring of our Police Chief, adopting a resolution detailing our community policing and racial equity principles, which led to the hiring of a new Chief committed to those ideas; and establishing and beginning to implement the recommendations of the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force.
Stormwater Mitigation: As noted above in the Climate Framework discussion, a growing area of concern is increased stormwater flow owing to more intense rainstorms as a result of climate change. This trend has been documented at the national level, and in recent years several portions of Takoma Park have been hit by especially intense rainstorms which have produced substantial damage to private property. While the increased impact on private property -- in many cases involving stormwater flow from one private property to another -- has been a feature of many recent storms, our existing stormwater management system wasn’t devised with that problem in mind. As a result I helped lead the push for the inclusion in last year’s budget of funding for a study to be conducted by an outside contractor to review stormwater problem areas in the City and recommend solutions. That process is now underway.
Takoma Junction Development: While I thought the project was worth pursuing initially, I ultimately came to the conclusion that its size and footprint, and what I saw as an insufficient amount of public space in the site plan put forward by NDC, meant that it wouldn’t appropriately meet the community’s needs. As a result, I voted against the plan in 2018, and then last year I joined the entire Council in voting for a resolution urging the County Planning Office to reject the proposal. During the more active periods of debate on the project I made the point on a number of occasions that the proposed development was neither a cure-all nor the end of Takoma Park as we know it. In the future I hope we can avoid imputing too much significance one way or the other to major projects, and find ways to collaborate on solutions that bring us together. With regard to both our relationship with NDC and to potential future developments at the Junction, there will have to be further discussions involving the community and the new Council.
Tree Ordinance and Urban Forest Policies: I was a member of the Council subgroup which recommended changes to the City’s Tree Ordinance and developed the tree canopy goals and urban forest policies approved by the Council. Previously we managed the forest largely via the tree removal permit process and modest City tree planting efforts. Among the key provisions I successfully fought for were a strong canopy goal; a commitment to plant more trees in “under-treed” areas of the City; limiting City plantings to native species with exceptions for non-native species adapted to our region due to climate change; easing the requirements for removal of trees which are damaging property; requiring City staff to take a longer term view on forest planning and to issue detailed annual reports; expanding City tree planting on private property with aid for lower income residents; expanding tree care education efforts; and requiring public meetings for removal applications involving more than 10 trees.
FUTURE CHALLENGES
On some issues, we haven’t made as much progress as I would have preferred, and we’ll need further analysis and discussion before we get more heavily into implementation. The slower movement has been mainly due to the press of other Council business, COVID challenges, and City staff changes. I hope the following issues will be among the areas the next Council tackles.
Major Plans. We approved the following key initiatives: the Racial Equity Policy, the Climate Change Framework, the Housing and Economic Development Strategic Plan, the Urban Forest Policy, the Task Force on Reimagining Public Safety, and the ARPA Spending Plan, with the Public Space Management Plan likely up soon. These plans lay out key principles and actions for the coming years, and with the exception of the Public Space Plan, the Council has been taking implementation steps on each of them. But there’s a lot more to do, and as I’ve said before, each plan should intersect with the others, which I’ve called the “unified field” approach. If we can proceed with that concept in mind, the plans can be mutually reinforcing over time.
Fiscal Issues. During my time on the Council, the budget process became more transparent due to Council and resident prodding. But I’d like to see further improvements, including potentially several property tax rate scenarios, such as a flat rate, Constant Yield rate, Constant Yield plus inflation, and a “wish list” rate which could fund various program increases. This approach would give residents and Councilmembers a better sense for the trade-offs at different tax rates. We also need better explanations of budget numbers to help clarify, for example, that we don’t have a deficit, though our unassigned reserves are lower than they ought to be. In addition, we need more clarity and consistency on the property re-assessment process. Based on responses from the State Department of Assessments and Taxation and their presentation to the Council -- which I and others asked for -- the process appears more random than official State policy would suggest. I’m hopeful that, with new leadership at the State level due to the recent elections, we’ll see some improvement there, and I’d like to see the City push in that area.
Affordability. It’s getting harder to afford to live in the City. Most causes of that trend lie outside our direct control -- housing prices are rising throughout the DC region. But we can ramp up our local efforts to promote more housing affordability using the housing strategic plan as a guide, especially its call for the City to partner more broadly with one or more foundations, non-profits or financial institutions. That approach can be especially important for creating missing middle and affordable housing units. We also have opportunities for developments with affordable housing at the former Washington Adventist Hospital site, at the Recreation Center, and elsewhere along New Hampshire Avenue. At the same time, holding the line on property taxes or potentially reducing them is crucial (with expanded credits for seniors and low income residents), as is using development opportunities to help expand the tax base.
We’ll have to coordinate on housing options with the County, which is responsible for any relevant zoning changes. And in that context we’ll have to look closely at the Thrive 2050 plan adopted recently by the County. I’m open to the idea in Thrive of allowing duplexes or smaller apartment buildings in single family areas. But I’m concerned that without a major infusion of County funds to ensure that new units of that type are affordable, we’d simply end up with more unaffordable units. That would help developers, but not low and middle income people interested in moving to or relocating within Takoma Park.
Finally, I think we’re also due to look into whether we should continue some functions the City currently handles, but which the County could take back, like policing, trash collection, and stormwater management. I tend to favor keeping those functions with the City, and I’m skeptical that sending them back to the County would result in major savings, in part because we’ve recently made significant progress in addressing the double taxation issue with the County. But I’d like to see us at least investigate possible options along those lines.
Community Engagement. We’ve been improving our efforts to connect with a broader cross-section of residents through measures like the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force; engagement with overlooked populations in the Recreation Center planning; expanding translation services; synchronizing our election with State elections; and increasing Mayor and Councilmember pay. But we need to do more. One relevant part of our ARPA plan is the Navigators program, which aims at identifying leaders in the City who can serve as ambassadors to communities where, due to language barriers or other factors, there has been less active involvement in public debates. We’re not too far down the road yet on designing that program, but it’s an initiative with a lot of promise for broadening our engagement activities.
Other Unfinished Business. This category includes reform of the code enforcement process, helping residents with developmental disabilities, responding to concerns about quality of life issues at the boundaries of commercial and residential areas, addressing food insecurity beyond COVID, and making progress on Vision Zero transportation safety measures.
Peter Kovar, Takoma Park Ward One City Councilmember, 2015 - 2022