Private School Vouchers?
By David Arthur Photos by David ArthurAlong with conservative economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, who envisioned a system where the government’s plan to finance education was separate from the government’s plan to operate schools, I rise in favor of public assistance to private education—a voucher system.
Accordingly, it’s fitting to point out that in a 2011 report (Grover J.Whitehurst’s “The Education Choice and Competition Index: Background and Results, 2011”) the Brookings Institution—a think tank that generally favors government solutions to social issues—found that “a number of studies indicate that public schools tend to improve when they are exposed to choice and competition.”
In short, vouchers promote school systems; they do not inhibit them—and I’d like to review a number of commonly held myths whose debunking proves this point.
Generally, the top two myths are: Vouchers take money from the public school program and vouchers exclude the disadvantaged and children with disabilities.
As to the first objection, it is generally the case that vouchers actually save school systems money. For example, Frederick County spends approximately $12,500 per student in its school system. But since private schools generally cost less than public schools, vouchers can represent much less expense to the taxpayer per student—often in the range of $6,000-$8,000.
As pointed out in one extensive study in the matter—Susan Aud’s “Education by the Numbers: The Fiscal Effects of School Choice Programs, 1990-2006”—where vouchers are used, the savings to states and local districts can be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Furthermore, as to the second objection, Jay Greene and Greg Foster’s “Vouchers for Special Education Students: an Evaluation of Florida’s McKay Scholarship Program” speaks to the public school system’s large and costly special education services—and finds greater user satisfaction in the private one.
The Brookings Institution’s study, however, highlights the kind of resistance that voucher programs—despite their apparent desirability—typically encounter.
Where vouchers or other school choice options are promoted, it reports, “barriers to choice are typically imposed bureaucratically or legislatively.”
The report continues, “Top-down federal control imposes significant regulatory burdens on schools [and] is inflexible and far removed from the consumers and providers of education services—and has to-date had only relatively small effects on raising student achievement. Local and state control, in contrast, is often undermined by special interests that control school bureaucracies.”
It’s a finding that The Foundation for Education Choice, a pro voucher group founded in 1996 by Friedman and his wife, Rose, would agree with.
“Not a single empirical study has ever found that outcomes at American public schools got worse when exposed to school choice programs,” the group asserts, “and numerous studies have found that they improve over time.”
And although such claims may seem counter-intuitive, the reasons behind them are plausible.
As noted above, vouchers apparently save money and seem to provide better special education services. Vouchers also empower parents to pick educational settings for their children that they believe will better meet their needs.
Finally, it’s arguably true that competition always provides for better service.
Thus when any organization—public or private—develops a monopoly, the outcome is likely never increased, efficient or superior service, but, rather, poor, inflexible and decreased service.
Walt Disney once summed the principle up rather handily, “I have been up against tough competition all my life,” he said. “I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.
Yes or Nyet!
I am against private school vouchers because public funds must be used to ensure every child has the opportunity to attend a great public school. Public funds should not be used to fund private schools that are relatively unaccountable to the public.
Instead, public funds should be used to improve our neighborhood public schools. Quality public schools are magnets that bring diverse communities together and attract businesses to our community. For more than 100 years, Americans across the political spectrum have agreed that public schools are opportunity-levelers. Public schools give all children an opportunity to obtain the academic and social skills they need to be successful. Neighborhood public schools bring children of every ethnic, social and economic background together into a sub-community that might not otherwise interact in such a meaningful way.
A voucher is one more tool in the increasing balkanization of America.
Instead of using public funds to ensure every child has access to a great public school, vouchers use taxes to help finance decisions to opt out of public schools. Vouchers divert money from community schools—where all are welcome—to schools based on a specific religion, philosophical approach or other qualifier. Private schools can exclude students with special needs or deny them access, based on any number of variables. Private schools can also throw out students who do not fit their mold. Public schools cannot. Private schools are a legitimate family choice, but not a choice that should be subsidized by the taxpayer—particularly in a county like Frederick, where there are fine public schools available.
The few communities where vouchers have gained some traction are those where the public schools have failed and some high schools can legitimately be called “drop-out factories.” Even in these school systems, there is no definitive evidence that vouchers improve student performance. In fact, by diverting resources, vouchers actually hurt the students who remain in the public schools.
In Frederick County there is no need to consider private school vouchers. We have a highly functioning, nationally respected public school system that already offers choices to families. In addition to the traditional option of great neighborhood schools, families can send their children to gifted and talented programs in elementary school.
The Frederick County Public School system also offers a charter school based on the Montessori Method of instruction, and our high schools offer a variety of focus areas open to out-of-district students. This includes a visual and performing arts emphasis at Governor Thomas Johnson High School, a teaching academy at Brunswick High School and a highly regarded international baccalaureate program at Urbana High School.
Plus, FCPS offers outstanding programs in trades and business education at its Career and Technical Center. All these options are open to every student, including those with special education needs—and without any consideration of the family’s ability to pay.
We do not need to fund two education systems in Frederick, one public and one private, one accountable to the taxpayer and one not; instead, we need to focus our public funds on improving an already first-class system.
Read MoreEscaping the Holocaust
By Adrienne LawrencePhotos by Bill Millios
A survivor’s legacy through tapestry
When Esther Nisenthal was 15 years old, she decided that she simply wasn’t going to follow the Nazis’ orders to report to a train station with her family. That was October 15, 1942.
She and her 13-year-old sister, Mania, escaped the concentration camps and survived largely by determination and fortitude. They went to family friends for help, but were protected for only two days. After that, they lived in the woods and traveled to nearby towns looking for work. While in the woods, Esther came up with a plan. They needed to create a new background story. They would no longer be Jewish; they both took Catholic names and would be from Poland. She and her sister also pretended to no longer understand German, only Polish. It was a ruse they thought would deflect at least casual Nazi inquisitiveness.
Their stories are documented in 33 tapestries handcrafted by Esther over the years. A few will be on display at 4:30 p.m on April 22 at the Delaplaine Visual Arts and Education Center in downtown Frederick during an event featuring a 30-minute documentary on Nisenthal’s life.
It was after Esther moved to the United States, married—becoming Esther Nisenthal Krinitz—and started a family that she decided to make a tapestry to show her daughters what her childhood home looked like. Both daughters, Bernice and Helene, loved hearing their mother’s heroic tales as they understood the significance of the Holocaust and World War II through her stories. But they never saw pictures of their mother’s home. There simply weren’t any.
“I was always very captivated by her stories,” daughter Bernice Steinhardt says. “And to see them visualized that way, just added a whole other dimension. It was pretty stunning, the first pictures that she created.”
The Krinitzs raised their daughters in Brooklyn, New York, but Steinhardt now lives in Chevy Chase with her husband—and her sister Helene McQuade lives in Pine Plains, New York, also with her husband.
In 1983, Krinitz and her husband, Max, moved to Frederick to be closer to Steinhardt and her children. When they came to Frederick, they also moved Esther’s clothing and alteration business to North Market Street.
“My parents were very happy living in Frederick,” Steinhardt says. “It was a very warm and welcoming place.”
Both lived out the rest of their days in Frederick. Max died in 1998 and Esther died in 2001.
Though Krinitz took a 10-year break after she made the first tapestries, her daughters think she really found her voice through the art form.
“She always really wanted to write a book, or leave some permanent record,” McQuade says. “She really wanted to memorialize her family for us—for me and my sister. She was frustrated because of her language barrier.”
Krinitz’s first language was German, but she also spoke Polish, and was self-taught in English. But she didn’t know how to write well in her new language.
“She wasn’t able to express herself in writing,” McQuade explains.. “She was frustrated by that. And so when she discovered that she could tell her story through these fabric works of art, they just poured out of her.”
It’s an outpouring that apparently not only benefitted Krinitz’s family, but, arguably, anyone who views them.
While in Frederick, Krinitz spoke with schoolchildren and adult audiences about her experiences. She died before much acclaim came, but at least not before getting a taste of it when she saw her work as part of a small show.
There was also talk of a Disney, feature film about her life, but it didn’t work out. The initial recorded interviews with her by filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan however, provided a basis for the documentary—released in 2011—that the Delaplaine will be showing.
In 2003, Krinitz’s daughters created the nonprofit “Art and Remembrance”— a vehicle to care for and organize the tapestries’ travels. The nonprofit aims to use the power of art and personal narrative to, as the organization’s website has it, “illuminate the ravages of war, intolerance and social injustice on its victims.”
Steinhardt also wrote a book about her mother, and called it Memories of Survival. Translated into Japanese and Korean, Memories of Survival one year became required reading for a class of Japanese students—and many wrote to Steinhardt about their impressions.
Touched by these gestures and their seeming affirmation of the universality of the book’s story, Steinhardt says, “Having both the story and the visual representation of it is what helps underscore the universality of these scenes [in the tapestries].”
Not only, then, does Krinitz’s universal message of difficulty and survival apparently trans late across languages, it also, it seems, bridges generations.
“It’s accessible to audiences, not only of different cultures, but also of different ages,” Steinhardt says. “Kids get it.”
Read MoreHeart on his sleeve
By April Seager Photos by Bill MilliosHonoring A Family With an Armful of Ink
It took two—maybe three—minutes for Alfredo Maggi of Frederick to peel off the long sleeved, preppy-striped dress shirt he had on.
“To be honest, I show this tattoo to almost everyone I meet,” Maggi says, his right arm held out taut.
Dedicated to his parents—both deceased—Maggi’s tattoo stretches from shoulder to wrist. Picture by picture, the portable mural narrates a journey that started in the Caribbean and ended on Market Street, downtown.
“Cuba’s right there,” Maggi says, pointing to a puddle of ink near his elbow.
His father, Alfredo, and mother, Herminia—whose cameo appearance can be found on Maggi’s lower arm—both grew up in Cuba, though the couple actually met in the company of “Lady Liberty” in New York City. Eventually the Maggis migrated to Miami, whose visual shout-out is represented on Maggi’s “sleeve” by a tattooed reference to Miami’s Ocean Drive.
Then there’s the image of Saint Barbara, floating at the crest of Maggi’s arm. Bigger than Cuba and the Statue of Liberty combined, the tattoo inspires reverence and a little bit of terror, he says.
“Sometimes, growing up, I made fun of it,” Maggi adds, referring to the icon whose duplicate once hung in his home, shaping his childhood belief system. “A couple of times I had to pray to it.”
The Saint Barbara image is the needlework of Thomas Kenney of North Market Street’s Classic Electric Tattoo and Piercing, while the stained glass-like cityscapes elsewhere were created by Shane Acuff of Gus’s Tattoo Studio, also on North Market. Other artwork on Maggi’s limb was created by Gordon Staub of Time Bomb Tattoo—yet again of North Market Street.
Maggi says he decided to sit for three different, downtown tattoo artists as a way of spreading around the love he has for downtown Frederick.
“What makes Alfredo’s sleeve different is that it has artwork by so many different types of tattooers,” Kenney says. “There’s a real painterly style that…may not be what’s common in tattoos—[perhaps] a mimic of a portrait—and then there’s a more tattoo [-ish] style, which are the parts I did.”
Gazing through this party of styles are two realistic portraits by Staub. The tattoo artist’s skill became clear when Maggi—a fount of family lore—laid out the source photos Staub worked with. The snapshot of his mother was taken in 1972. She’s posing beside her husband, though Maggi chose to use another, older photo of his father.
“My dad and his brother flew to New York on Eastern Airlines in 1956,” he explains, showing a black-and-white image of two young men in suits holding messy piles of snow. “They’re sitting on top of a roof in Brooklyn. They were from Cuba, so they’d never seen snow.
Memorial tattoos aren’t always this elaborate, nor are the emotions they represent so obvious, Acuff says.
“A lot of times [memorial tattoos will] be someone’s name, maybe a date—something small, like a flower,” Acuff explains. “But there can be no doubt that Alfredo’s is a memorial tattoo.”
Maggi’s sleeve wasn’t his first tattoo project, and, from all indications, it’s unlikely to be his last. Still, it might end up being his boldest.
“People I know were, like, ‘You got a sleeve this time,’” he says proudly. “No [B.S.], I got a sleeve. It took long enough….And the only way I’m going to lose it is if I lose my arm.”
Read More
Paying It Forward
For Every Child, “A Beautiful Game”
By Kelly Brooks Photos by Bill MilliosAs springtime blooms in Frederick, children across the county will be digging out their baseballs, Frisbees, basketballs, hula hoops and soccer balls, and headed for the nearest park. It’s a great way to enjoy an informal game of catch or a pickup game of one-on-one. But for kids who want to experience the camaraderie, competitiveness and sportsmanship of playing an organized team sport, they need more than a ball and a park. They also need money: The cost for fees, shoes, uniforms and equipment can really add up.
“Playing soccer in Frederick City’s recreation league can easily cost $125 per child,” says Jason Judd, a Frederick native, former candidate for mayor of the City of Frederick and father of two. For many families the fee isn’t unreasonable, but for some, such as the 11.8 percent of children in Frederick City who live below the poverty level, the costs can be prohibitive.
In the spring of 2010, Judd and his children would often play soccer in Baker Park. “Other kids would join us, but they weren’t kids who were part of the city’s program,” Judd says. “So we suspected there were kids in town who wanted to play, but couldn’t because the cost is more than they can afford.”
Judd made it his mission to make soccer accessible to kids who might not otherwise get to play, and he quickly inspired others to join the cause.
Bob Smith, recreation supervisor at Frederick City’s Department of Parks and Recreation, agreed to lower the recreational league’s fees, and Tony Checchia, owner of the Frederick Indoor Sports Center, agreed to sell his soccer equipment at a discounted price. Judd’s friends and family contributed nearly $400, and the Project Alive Program helped identify children from local public housing communities who wanted to play.
That first year, a dozen children were able to join the league.
“After the first season, we started looking ahead,” says Judd. “There were brothers and sisters and cousins and friends who had heard about it and wanted to play.”
The second year, the program doubled in size. It was named, “The Beautiful Game,” and the Frederick Alliance for Youth joined the cause as a financial sponsor. The first year that sponsors re-contributed a couple of larger checks came in, and The Beautiful Game helped 22 kids play soccer in 2011.
The program then began looking for ways to get the kids and families together, even outside of the soccer season. In August, the kids had a day of soccer camp with coaches from Saint Mary’s College. Also during the holiday season, the program held a soccer party at the Frederick Indoor Sports Center, complete with “40 kids, pizza and soda, and more craziness on the soccer field,” says Judd.
In the program’s third season, it grew again to help 35 children.
“I think it’ll keep growing,” says Judd. “My hope is we can help more kids who want to play.”
To get involved email Jason Judd at jasoncjudd@gmail.com
Just $30 gets another kid playing–it covers the city’s fees, a ball, and shin guards.
To Donate:
The Beautiful Game
c/o Frederick Alliance for Youth
1150 Orchard Terrace
Frederick, MD 21703
The Real Impact of Usage Fees
Deep Impact: Unpacking Frederick City’s Impact Fee Debate
By Sean Jester Photos by Bill MilliosLast year, when local entrepreneur Hilda Staples—co-owner of Frederick’s Volt restaurant—was getting ready to open a gourmet market and restaurant in Frederick’s long-dormant Carmack Jay’s building on North Market Street, she was served up a surprise along with her city permits: an assessment of $205,000 in “impact fees.” It was for the additional water and sewage lines needed for a project that size.
Staples knew she’d have to pay some kind of impact fee—she paid one when opening Volt in 2008—but was aghast at the steep amount for the Carmack Jay’s project. In the end, the $205,000 fee was just too high to proceed, and Staples, along with her partners, decided to move on to other prospects in Chevy Chase and Washington, DC.
Then, shortly after the project was abandoned, The Washington Post ran an article documenting the mishap and Staples’ frustration over the high impact fee—a frustration aggravated by the fact that she thought such fees may actually be hampering business development in an area in dire need of revitalization.
“The only reason [the impact fee issue] gained any traction was because the Carmack Jay’s building had been sitting there vacant for 10 years and The Washington Post wrote an article after we decided to move on,” Staples says. “Right after that, I started getting phone calls from the aldermen, and the Frederick News-Post started to cover it. But this didn’t happen overnight. I had been fighting it for six months before The Washington Post article.”
The adverse publicity worked wonders—though not for Staples, who had returned her investors’ money and moved on to other projects— as Frederick City aldermen and city Engineer Zack Kershner quickly instituted changes that spread impact fee payments over four years, instead as one payment up-front.
But the public hasn’t moved on in the matter, and it’s not too late to ask some questions about these dull-sounding fees, imposed in the public’s name, that may actually be stifling development in stagnant downtown areas and de-incentivizing those willing to stimulate it. The first question, of course, would be: What the heck is an impact fee?
The Origin of the Impact Fee
As Frederick City grows and develops, it underwrites its infrastructure needs—including its water and sewer upgrades—through approved bond offerings to the public. According to a December 30, 2011 Frederick (County) Gazette article, “over the past 10 years, the city has borrowed $134 million to increase water and sewer capacity to accommodate growth.”
Breaking down that amount, Kershner, who tells the Gorilla that the average interest rate on such bonds is about four percent, explains that $82 million of the total went toward the construction of the city’s New Design Road water treatment plant and other necessary improvements there, and $38 million went toward debt-service. The remainder— $14 million—was spent on additional sewer treatment capacity at the Ballenger- McKinney wastewater treatment plant.
“We’ve collected $29 million in impact fees since 2003,” Kershner adds. “Some of these fees pay for old debt service on previous expansions.”
The impact fees, which are paid by commercial and residential builders, pay back the expenditures that the city borrowed to fund the development. The fees are part of the city’s “enterprise fund,” which in addition to paying for water and sewer improvements, includes funds for the airport, the Clustered Spires golf course, community development, dangerous substance control, parking, storm water treatment, and the Weinberg Center for the Arts.
When asked if the money raised in impact fees goes to anything else—the general fund or toward balancing the budget—Alderman Karen Young insists, “All the money raised through fees for water and sewage go directly toward paying those expenses. That money doesn’t subsidize anything else. There’s a firewall around that fund.”
It’s a response that appears backed up by Frederick City Resolution No. 12-01, which states, “All enterprise funds should be fully selfsupporting and provide their own system improvement and expansion needs….The goal of each fund is to budget for, and pay their fair share of public utility and public service costs or fees. Each fund is to be treated as though it were a private customer or taxpayer to properly provide for payments between funds.”
But when the $134 million debt is paid off, will impact fees go away?
“I’ve lost my ability to predict the future,” Alderman Shelley Aloi replies. “There are a lot of ‘what if ’s’ to that question: If there’s no more growth and everything is satisfied, and if there’s no more debt….But Frederick is projected to grow over the next several decades. So, there would be a continual need for additional water and sewer [service].”
So, is there an alternative to impact fees?
Aloi says the only alternative is raising monthly water and sewage rates for every user in the system. She boils the issue down to this. “Do I go to the lady on the corner and say, your fees are going up because we have to accommodate a new user? How do you balance that?”
Aloi says that water and sewage impact fees were born out of the city’s role in the development of Route 40’s Golden Mile during the 1970’s and 1980’s.
“The Golden Mile was called a ‘special taxing district,’ where infrastructure was being put in place, and the idea was to mitigate that impact,” Aloi says, adding that the city’s recurring water shortage situation also factors into the question. “Over the decades there was a progression of that kind of idea, [which evolved into the impact fees of today].
“If you look at the region, historically there have been water issues,” she adds. “In the 1990’s we had a moratorium on water [usage increases] because there wasn’t enough to supply the users who were here. Then there was the Potomac River Water Service Agreement, where we draw water out of the Potomac. [It required] a huge amount of money to install a pipeline all the way to the Potomac. So is water limited? In some respects, yes. Do we have enough for unlimited growth, forever? Absolutely not.”
A Change in Methodology?
Prior to the city’s recent changes to the payment structure and its on-going revaluation of impact fee calculations, Kershner says the city determined impact fees according to the number of water fixtures a new business would need, adjusted for various use types. It was this calculation that resulted in the high impact fee assessment for the Carmack Jay’s project, as restaurants such as this typically have many more water and sewage lines.
But Aloi, Young and Kershner all say that changes to the impact fee calculation were already underway by the time Staples made a media case of the matter.
“The Carmack Jay’s redevelopment project helped spur discussions about an optional payment plan for impact fees,” Kershner says, “which was ultimately adopted into the current ordinance.”
And any new methodology for determining that fee should help business formation, Young thinks.
“We had an impact fee arrangement that was faulty from two perspectives,” she says. “One was that whoever was developing a property had to pay an impact fee up front, which is an inordinate burden on the investment. The second was the methodology. It counted fixtures as opposed to developing a formula on water usage.”
Young partially blames the economic downturn for the higher impact fees, saying, “The more users you have, the more you [can] lessen your fees, and that’s what was assumed when this water contract was negotiated prior to the recession. There were assumptions that Frederick was going to grow by x-percent a year. That didn’t happen [due to the recession], but we already bought the capacity. So, you had to spread it among the users.”
As for the impact fee-calculation methodology, as of press time the aldermen were waiting for finalized projections from Kershner as to how impact fees can be raised or lowered based on water usage, instead of number of fixtures. There are some sticking points to the effort, however.
“With the [currently] proposed changes, the city would have collected $200,000 less in impact fees for commercial properties in 2011”, Kershner said in a December 29th, Frederick News-Post article.
This worries Alderwoman Kelly Russell, who said in the same article, “This could potentially cause us to be collecting less and less and less upfront and yet we still have expenses to pay.”
Aloi says the final projections will be vital to making a decision.
“We’ve been given a proposal where the fee will be eliminated up front altogether,” Aloi says of one consideration. “We’ll see how much water is being used and then come up with a fee amount. My concern is that I don’t want it to be higher than it is now.”
Are Impact Fees Hurting Business Development?
Considering the Carmack Jay’s case, are they?
Aloi considers the question and offers a qualified answer to what is, essentially, speculation about the “necessary evil” of impact fees.
“I’m sure there are quite a few folks who look at the impact fee and [then decide not to do business in Frederick],” Aloi says. “I would say the ramifications of an impact fee are further-reaching than we probably know.”
Young agrees, saying. “I wouldn’t say impact fees ‘hurt’ development, I would say ‘deter.’ It’s very hard to quantify lost opportunity.”
When asked if she would consider cutting or writing off impact fees for businesses looking to develop blighted or longvacant properties, such as Carmack Jay’s, Young, however, balks at the idea, saying she prefers other kinds of incentives to those affecting impact fees.
“Blighted and vacant properties are a problem that we’re well aware of,” she adds. “But there are other, [more suitable] tax incentives, like property tax [credits], that won’t take away revenue [for paying back enterprise fund bonds]. Impact fees are totally different; they are fixed costs. People need to realize that someone has to pay for water and sewer.”
Young believes that, although impact fees can be a burden for businesses, Frederick nevertheless remains alluring to developers.
“If you look at the market [here], and see the attractive demographics that Frederick has, its access to highways and equal distance from Washington and Baltimore, its robust businesses and the growth we’ve experienced and are projected to have, I think those are far larger factors [influencing growth] than impact fees. That’s not to downgrade the importance of impact fees, but we don’t see them as the key driving variable.”
Young says Frederick’s water and sewage impact fees, which are lower than those in Frederick County, are competitive when compared to other jurisdictions. As of 2010, Frederick City ranked 9th out of 29 Maryland jurisdictions in impact fees for new homes.
“We’re in the middle of the road, a little above our peers,” said Josh Russin, executive assistant to Randy McClement, in an October 14, 2011 News-Post article. The story went on to say that impact fees for new homes in Frederick City are $2,600 above the state average, but $130 below the county’s fee, which, according to Kershner, is based on a proposed project’s number of fixtures.
However, Michael Marschner, special projects manager for Frederick County, says the county—in determining its impact fees—uses a “capacity-adjustment” factor that classifies different uses for fixtures and assigns a value to each one to generate usage projections. But like Frederick City, Frederick County also is in the process of reviewing its water and sewer fee structure and payment plans.
So, what was so special about the Carmack Jay’s situation? Why did it attract so much attention?
“I think it was a combination of issues,” says Young. “You had an interested party [Staples] that was savvy when it comes to public relations, and they were able to get media attention and align citizens behind them. And you’ve got a neighborhood that really wants to see some development on that property after years of vacancy.”
But Aloi and Young explain that impact fees only affect business that build new structures or add water fixtures, which favors projects that take over existing properties without making changes.
Staples, who also co-owns Lunchbox, a sandwich shop recently opened on Carroll Creek, didn’t have to pay an impact fee when she took over that business’s property—formerly the site of the La Dolce Vida café.
“It was great,” says Staples of her Lunchbox experience. “It’s a great deal if someone else does the work and you walk in after.”
But Staples, who is also developing the East Street Diner in downtown Frederick, which formerly was a Nissan showroom, was required to pay an impact fee there—though one adjusted to an upfront payment of one-quarter the total because the city is still determining its new fee structure. She also will receive future credits towards payments she’s made should any new fee structure lower her cost.
Staples, however, still sees Frederick’s fee climate as contrasting starkly with those of her other projects in Chevy Chase and Washington, DC.
“Impact fees don’t exist in the other locations where I am building,” she says. “Even when I only paid a quarter of the fee upfront [for the East Street Diner], it was still [disturbing] because, if we opened anywhere else, those fees wouldn’t exist. They might have other fees, but nothing upfront like these impact fees.” Meanwhile, Jason Miller, coowner of the Wine Kitchen, located next door to Lunchbox on Carroll Creek, paid his entire impact fee upfront, just missing the opportunity to pay it in four installments.
“If [the city is] willing to give me my money back, I’d certainly make payments,” Miller says in a Your4State.com November 2, 2011 interview.
Although Staples has been more fortunate than Miller in being able to spread out her diner impact fee over four payments, she, however, is still critical of what she sees as the city’s lack of transparency regarding impact fee amounts.
“The problem with impact fees for a new, independent business is that you don’t realize they exist until you’re way into [the process],” she says. “By the time you get to the permit stage, you’ve already signed your lease and spent money on an architect. [Then], in order to get the permit, you’ve got to pay that [impact fee]. And if you try to go back and make changes to lower the impact fee, you lose a lot of time and money.”
Young understands Staples’ frustrations and says the city is working to improve the process.
“We’re supposed to tell them upfront. That’s something we’re working on, and something I’ve advocated for,” Young says. “We need to expedite the process so people move through [applications and permits processes] quickly. Businesses need predictability. They need to know what hoops they need to jump through, what fees they need to pay and when they need to pay them. This is part of a concerted effort to make business growth in the city more [efficient]. I know we’ve got a way to go on that, and I know we’ll probably never be perfect, but improvement is always the goal.”
Staples agrees. “I think they’ve taken huge steps from where they were. The aldermen really pushed it and were instrumental in making this happen. It’s really going to help business in Frederick.”
Read More
Burnin’ Down The Waste
Trash Talk
By Kelly Brooks Photos by Bill MilliosUnderstanding the Incinerator Wars
“No Incinerator!” scream the signs. If you live or work in Frederick County, you’ve seen them in windows, on lawns and in cars for years. You can’t help but notice them.
When you see them, maybe you cringe from the vision of soaring incinerator smokestacks spewing a black, smoky, noxious sludge of particulates, carcinogens, and climate-altering acids. Or maybe you roll your eyes imagining the “tree-hugging, peace-loving, Common Market-shopping” conservationist who might have posted it. If you’re like most people, though, you take a moment to acknowledge your concern for the environment, worry for a moment about how this will affect your taxes, wonder what the heck this incinerator debate is all about—and then forget about it and get on with your day.
But here’s the thing…
The Problem
It’s easy to walk away from a sign. It’s not so easy to walk away from the problem it represents. Every day, Frederick County businesses and residents throw away nearly 600 tons of waste, and we have to do something with it— put it in a landfill, burn it, recycle it, compost it, or just plain reduce how much we make in the first place.
It’s a tough decision, with far-reaching consequences for both the economy and the environment. The solution, in the eyes of the Frederick Board of County Commissioners, is building a Waste-to-Energy (WTE) incinerator, designed to produce electricity while getting rid of the county’s waste. The project is six years in the planning, with construction possibly getting underway by fall.
“When I first heard about this project in 2006, I thought, ‘Wow, we can get energy from our trash, and the trash goes away! Sounds like a win-win,’” says county resident and co-owner of PC Creative Group, Patrice Gallagher. “But now that I’ve learned more about the issue, I would just love to see our county step away from incineration.” Like many county residents, Gallagher believes the WTE incinerator technology is an expensive and outdated method, and she advocates for “a combination of more sustainable approaches” instead.
But there are others, like county resident, community activist and board of education employee Mary Posey, who believes waste-toenergy is the most sensible way—and perhaps the only viable way—to manage our county’s waste. Like Gallagher, Posey also changed her opinion as she learned more about the project. At first she supported it, then actively advocated against it, and is now firmly rooted in the belief that “this is a responsible thing for our county to do.”
As with many hot-button political issues, the waste management question is a polarizing one. The environmental stakes are high, the financial issues are complex, and even intelligent, educated citizens like Gallagher and Posey find themselves struggling to fully understand the issues involved.
What are the projected costs and benefits— financial, environmental, up-front, and hidden— of building such a facility? As Frederick commits to a WTE incinerator, what other opportunities must we forego? How do the costs and benefits of WTE compare to other options for waste management and energy generation?
These are serious questions, because no matter what we choose to do about our waste today, we’ll be living with the results for decades to come. But, as with most important questions, finding the answers is never simple.
What’s the Plan?
The proposed Frederick/Carroll County Renewable Waste-to-Energy facility is designed to incinerate 1,500 tons of recycled solid waste each day. The trash is burned at more than 2000 degrees F; the heat is used to produce steam; the steam turns a turbine generator, and voila— electricity!
With a net generation capacity of 45 megawatts, which can yield approximately 1.08 million kilowatt hours per day, it can produce enough power for 45,000 homes.
Plans are to build the facility at the McKinney Industrial Park, next to the county’s Ballenger- McKinney sewage treatment plant. The site is located south of town on Buckeystown Pike, just across the Monocacy River from the Monocacy National Battlefield.
The wastewater treatment plant turns sewage into two forms of environmentally safe waste: fluids, called “treated effluent,” and “treated sludge,” which is solid. Both can be used in the waste-to-energy process. The treated sludge can join the rest of the county’s garbage in the combustion grate, and this burning waste will heat the treated effluent to create steam, turning a turbine and generating electricity.
The garbage-in/energy-out equation lends the technology its descriptor, “waste-to-energy,” while the method of creating that energy— burning waste—technically also makes the plant an “incinerator.” But today’s WTE incinerators are different than those of yesteryear: more efficient, with integrated pollution controls, and, most notably, they actually produce electricity while getting rid of waste.
How Did We Get Here?
The idea of building a WTE incinerator first came up in the 1980s, says Michael Marschner, Frederick County special projects manager. At that time, though, landfills were loosely regulated and land was plentiful, so WTE never got off the ground.
By the year 2000, however, conditions had changed. Land had become scarcer, and new environmental regulations made landfills more expensive to manage. That year, Frederick County learned that the landfill capacity at its Reichs Ford Road Sanitary Landfill would be exhausted by 2008, a full 10 years earlier than anticipated. Time was running out.
By 2004, Frederick had joined the Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority, a multi-county government agency that works with municipalities in planning and developing waste management systems. Member jurisdictions include Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Harford, Carroll, Howard, Frederick and Montgomery Counties and the City of Baltimore.
In 2005, the county began transporting waste to out-of-state landfills in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Knowing that transport was only a short-term solution, the county commissioners began working with the Authority to find a long-term solution to our waste management problem. They commissioned a report by R.W. Beck, a consulting firm that specializes in energy and waste technologies, and learned that among other things, the firm recommended the county implement single-stream recycling and develop a waste-to-energy disposal facility.
By 2006, Frederick county residents were adding their own voices to the debate. Sally Sorbello a life-long Frederick County resident, artist and owner of Sally’s Beadworks—and a volunteer with WasteNot! Frederick—started inviting the public to listen to well-known energy experts and toxicologists present on waste management issues in libraries, public buildings, and local colleges. Sorbello and other residents, including Gallagher, Posey (who later changed her position on the issue) and Caroline Eader a Frederick county resident and zero-waste activist (who recently moved to Boulder, Colorado) then started showing up at BOCC hearings and writing to the county commissioners on the issue.
“We designed and printed ‘No Incinerator’ signs that were placed in yards across the county; we put up a website; we went door-to-door at various points to educate fellow citizens,” says Gallagher.
“I’ve attended most of the meetings, and there’s been quite a few citizens coming out, both in support of it and against it,” says Gregory Brown, president of Waynesboro Construction Company and a Frederick County resident. He’s among those who believe WTE is a longterm, stable way to manage the county’s waste.
The Board of County Commissioners agreed, and in 2006, they committed to pursuing a WTE facility for the county’s waste management needs. Marschner has been leading the project ever since.
“I think the Authority, Mike Marschner, and others had a strong bias for this solution from the beginning,” says former county commissioner and current Director of Envision Frederick County Kai Hagen says. “Even the ‘request for proposals’ the county put out was clearly slanted toward incineration,” he says.
Charles Jenkins, who served on the BOCC with Hagen, disagrees. “None of us loved it, but, as county commissioners, we have the sobering job of solving a problem,” he says. “We spent five years looking for a better solution. But nothing better presented itself. We took the long-term view that waste-to-energy is the only viable solution to deal with our trash.”
In 2009, Frederick County contracted with the Authority to manage the facility, thereby “providing a very stable environmental solution that works hand-in-hand with waste reduction and recycling,” according to Authority Executive Director Chris Skaggs.
After a competitive bidding process, the Authority hired Wheelabrator Technologies of Hampton, New Hampshire to design, permitseek, construct, and operate the facility. That same year, Carroll County signed a Memorandum of Understanding to enter the project jointly with Frederick. With these partnerships firmly in place, the project moved out of the research phase and into an action stage.
Early last year the Maryland Department of the Environment received application materials for the project’s air and waste disposal permits, and officials expect that draft permits—which are preliminary permits that still allow residents to have a comment period before final permits are issued—will be issued in April or May. Barring any glitches—and there are several that could get in the way—groundbreaking for the facility could begin in the fall.
Weighing Our Options
Proponents of WTE incineration point to the realities of today’s waste management situation. Despite our current recycling and composting programs, Frederick County continues to generate tons of waste in excess of landfill limits every day. That waste has to go somewhere. Is it better to dump it in a an out-ofstate landfill or burn it to generate electricity?
But incineration opponents say that’s the wrong question to ask. The choice between a landfill and an incinerator, according to Hagen, “is like asking me whether I prefer arsenic or cyanide. I say, ‘Don’t drink the poison!’”
The alternative, these dissenters say, is to ask, “How can we reduce what goes to the landfill? How can we reduce waste, and increase reuse, recycling, and composting?”
And that’s a key question in the WTE debate: Will the amount of waste the county generates grow, remain the same, or decline over time? If we can’t reduce our future waste, incineration begins to make a lot of sense. But if we can, building a WTE facility seems like a big waste in and of itself.
Here’s the current waste situation: In 2009 Frederick County produced nearly 600 tons of waste per day. Of that, 41.6 percent was recycled. When other material, such as composted yard waste that didn’t make it to the landfill, is added, Frederick’s waste diversion rate reaches 46.6 percent.
What happens to the other 54.4 percent of our waste? Most of it is taken by tractor-trailer to landfills in Virginia and Pennsylvania. But by 2015, Frederick County will have exhausted its contract renewal options with its current transfer companies, and it’s likely that any waste we sent out of state after that will wind up as far away as the Carolinas or Georgia.
According to Marschner, the county “tries to take an integrated approach. We ask what we can do with each type of waste.” He points to the county’s curbside recycling program, the composting facility at Reichs Ford Road, and the fact that there’s always likely to be some waste that needs to be disposed of—either in a landfill or by incineration.
In 2008, the county again looked at its waste handling options, and enlisted the help of experts at RTI International, a nonprofit research and development organization located in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. These researchers used a computer-based model, developed in cooperation with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to compare Frederick County’s three waste management alternatives: transporting waste out of the state, opening a new in-county landfill, or building a waste-toenergy incinerator and disposing the resultant ash in a local landfill.
Options that weren’t weighed in the RTI study include strategy to reduce waste, increase recycling, and encourage composting.
“The fact is, our county government never invested in a serious professional study of alternatives to incineration; yet there was significant money spent to compare long-hauling our waste to incinerating it,” says Gallagher. “I have asked in hearings and letters to the editor and emails for a professional study of alternatives, but it has never happened.”
According to Jenkins, however, the BOCC had diligently looked into viable alternatives to long-hauling and WTE, including anaerobic digestion, a technology that is still relatively unexplored. It decided, however, it needed “a proven solution—not an experimental one that would make Frederick County a guinea pig.”
Skaggs notes that the BOCC also worked to enhance county recycling and composting programs.
“Many of these [conservationist] strategies are already being implemented,” he says, noting that county commissioners prohibited the disposal of yard waste in its landfill in 2006, instead accepting it at the recycling center for mulching and composting. In addition, he says, single-stream recycling was started in 2009, and today curbside recycling comes to 100 percent of the single-family households in Frederick County.
Then there’s the economic factor. The county’s 2009 agreement with the Authority, it’s contract with Wheelabrator and partnership with Carroll County were also driven by an expectation of cost savings for Frederick County taxpayers: The RTI report found that WTE incineration would be less expensive and more environmentally friendly than either in-county or out-of-state landfill options.
Environmental Impact of WTE
When compared to earlier model incinerators, today’s WTE facilities are designed with the environment in mind. For example, the air needed to feed the combustion process is drawn from inside the plant, ingeniously creating negative air pressure that helps keep particulates and odors within the structure. In addition, Teflon fabric filters catch more than 99.9 percent of the generated particulate matter.
After the waste has been burned and scrap metals are recovered for recycling, what remains is a mound of ash, equivalent to about 10 percent of the volume of the original waste. The ash is then taken to a landfill for use as waste cover.
But while proponents of WTE point out that the facility decreases the volume of waste destined for the landfill by 90 percent, opponents disagree. They argue that the after-combustion ash volumes may be as much as 30 percent of the original waste, and they point out that not all waste can be incinerated in the first place. According to Eader, approximately 10-15 percent is unburnable and removed before combustion.
So, what effect does this process have on the environment? According to the results of the RTI study, less than one might think.
Although landfills are better for the environment in terms of carbon dioxide biomass, hydrocarbons, and lead emissions, the study says that the WTE option boasts lower levels of total airborne particulates, nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, solid waste, sulfuric acid, iron, and phosphate. In many cases, these emissions even appeared as negative numbers in the report.
Why? The more energy generated by a WTE facility, the less is needed from coalburning plants. The swap from coal to WTE actually reduces overall emissions, the report says.
Surprisingly, however, other studies have shown exactly the opposite—that WTE increases overall emissions compared to using coal.
For example, an October 2011 report from the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project states that Maryland’s WTE incinerators emit more pollutants per unit of energy than do coal-fired power plants. In this study, WTE nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide, mercury and lead emissions appear much higher than those in the RTI report.
Of particular concern to WTE opponents are pollutants like mercury, which is harmful even in very tiny quantities and accumulates in the environment over time. Surprisingly, the RTI report projected that a Frederick County facility would have zero mercury emissions, although mercury pollution is among the chief concerns for opponents of the project.
But at Baltimore City’s, aging WTE incinerator, also run by Wheelabrator, mercury emissions have actually exceeded allowable limits twice—in 2009 and 2010—since its 1985 construction. According to the Maryland Department of the Environment, however, Wheelabrator was able to bring the facility back into compliance the same day the violations were discovered.
“We will work diligently to ensure the facility operates safely and dependably to meet local waste disposal and clean energy needs, while also delivering on our commitment to environmental compliance and community engagement,” says Linda Sapienza, director of community relations for Wheelabrator Technologies.
Impact: Economy
According to the RTI study, Frederick’s planned WTE incinerator will save county taxpayers 22 percent in operating costs over an out-of-state landfill and 1.8 percent over a local landfill during the course of the plant’s projected 30-year lifetime.
But the BOCC’s nod to WTE also relied heavily on another report that found that the project’s construction will create 615 jobs and have an economic benefit of more than $316 million during the construction phase, which is estimated to take about 3 years. Once in operation, the facility is expected then to create 51 jobs with total economic benefits of $11.8 million. This report, though prepared by the independent research and consulting firm Governmental Advisory A s s o c i a t e s , Inc., has come under fire from WTE opponents for being funded by Wheelabrator.
For the layperson, however—or even the average politician— these studies are difficult to understand. And there are some who disagree with their findings.
At a public meeting in February 2010, then- Frederick County Commissioner Kai Hagen was overheard by Carroll County resident and former Director of Audits for the U.S. Government Printing Office Bruce Holstein as saying he found WTE’s cost-benefit analysis confusing.
“I told Hagen, ‘I’m a retired accountant. I don’t know much about the incinerator, but I’ll look at the finances and let you know what I find,’” says Holstein.
Holstein asked the Authority for their data spreadsheets and set to work analyzing them. He discovered that, over the 30-year lifecycle of the project, it would cost the two counties a minimum of $20 million, and possibly up to $40 million more per year than they currently spend with landfilling options.
“The $20 million plan assumes the plant operates at full capacity from the very first day of operation and for every day over the next 30 years,” Holstein says. “I call that an overly optimistic assumption.” If the plant operates at less than full capacity, Holstein explains, it generates less energy to sell, and therefore becomes more expensive to operate.
In all of these analyses, financial estimates are projected over a 30-year period. To run such complex, long-range estimates requires a huge range of assumptions, Holstein points out: How will the population grow? What will the average recycling rate be? What will the price of electricity be? What will facilities upgrading cost? The answers to these questions can drastically affect the financial results.
The BOCC understands this, which is why it hired the Annapolis-based Municipal and Financial Services Group to do yet another study—this one to evaluate the financial model the county commissioners had been relying on. This 2010 study tested an entire range of variables such as interest rates and energy prices. But the group’s conclusion remained the same: that over a 30-year period, WTE incineration is less expensive than shipping to an out-of-state landfill.
Where Does Maryland Stand?
Today, more than 500 WTE incinerators are in operation worldwide. Most are located in Europe, and 87 were operating in the United States as of 2007. Maryland has three such facilities in use today: Baltimore’s 2,250 tons-perday plant, which opened in 1985; Montgomery County’s 12-year-old, 1,800-tons-per-day facility and Harford County’s 360 tons-per-day plant, which opened in 1988.
The Montgomery County plant is the most recent to open in the United States and, though a few existing plants have been expanded in the years since, no new facilities have been built since 1995.
But WTE is gaining momentum, and planning and construction for new facilities are underway.
Baltimore City, for example, recently broke ground for its planned, new WTE incinerator, this one owned and operated by Energy Answers of Albany, New York.
Furthermore, last year the Maryland legislature passed a Governor Martin O’Malley-proposed bill that classified waste-to-energy processes as a “Tier 1,” renewable resource, along with wind, solar, and biomass processes.
A resurgence in WTE notwithstanding, even if the new projects in Baltimore and Frederick/ Carroll Counties are built, the state’s incineration capacity will still only increase by 1.7 million tons per year. It’s a significant amount, but still far less than would be needed to absorb the 1.5 million and 1.9 million tons of waste, respectively, that Maryland currently sends to in-state and out-of-state landfills each year.
Trim Our Waste
Zero-waste advocates believe that building the WTE incinerator limits county options to deal with waste in other ways. After all, once the facility is built, it needs to be fed waste. Otherwise, the county won’t be able to recover the maximum amount of metal and electricity— and therefore revenue—to keep costs down.
“Let’s face it, the materials that create the ‘best burn’ are paper and plastic,” Gallagher says. “And by the contract, we are obligated to supply the materials to run this incinerator. So, is the county really going to maximize recycling efforts in the robust way that other communities do?”
According to Marshener, to make the maximum amount of electricity, Frederick County will need to provide about 828 tons of waste per day to the facility. A portion of that—150 tons—can be sludge from the adjacent wastewater treatment facility, with the remaining 678 tons coming from regular municipal solid waste. The Ballenger-McKinney plant, however, will only be able to generate an average of 130 tons of sludge per day, and the county produces less than 600 tons of waste per day.
It may sound like the facility is built with a lot of extra capacity, explains Marschner, but “waste-to-energy facilities are built not for today’s demand for waste management, but for tomorrow’s. We’re actually concerned we won’t have enough reserve capacity.”
Incinerator opponents point out that if we can reduce our waste in the first place, we won’t need the incinerator capacity. Communities that have embraced the zero-waste goal provide residents with three receptacles—one for recyclables, one for compostables and the third for the landfill. Because compostable materials make up 27 percent of U.S. waste, proponents say this three-bin system can make a big difference in how much goes to the landfill.
“You’ll have less to send to a landfill if you do this—even compared to the incinerator,” says Eader. “It brings jobs; it’s a lot less expensive; it’s really more environmentally friendly.”
While Eader and other zero-waste proponents are concerned that WTE reduces incentives to compost and recycle, WTE advocates point out that communities with WTE facilities actually have recycling rates higher than the national average.
But Frederick’s waste diversion rate (46.6 percent) is already well above the 33.8 percent national average. But for many zero-waste advocates, the question for Frederick isn’t whether it can do better than average; it’s whether it can do better than it’s doing right now.
Hagen believes Frederick can do considerably better, and he says he’s seen it happen in other communities— such as in Alameda County, California, where in 1990 he served on the county’s recycling initiative steering committee, drafting legislation to change its waste management approach.
“That year, our recycling rate was below 20 percent. Now they’re at more than 70 percent, and shooting for 80 percent and beyond,” Hagen says, adding that in 2011 San Francisco reached an al-time high waste diversion rate of 78 percent, while San Diego’s hit 68 percent. “If they can do it, we can do it. We shouldn’t consider them to be any smarter than we are.”
Marschner, however, is skeptical. Frederick is officially aiming to reach a waste diversion rate of 60 percent by 2025, he says, but “it would be unlikely [we’d] sustain that. In other municipalities, on a continuous basis, where every year you get the same recycling rate, it’s very unusual to get above 50 percent.”
What’s Next?
Once the Maryland Department of the Environment issues its draft permits for the joint WTE project sometime this spring, the public will be allowed a period for comment, and—reflecting those comments—the permitting process will advance, with official permits likely being issued this summer. The Authority will then have detailed information about permit requirements, modified construction costs, energy costs and current interest rates—and thus better cost-benefit figures for Frederick and Carroll BOCCs to base their final decision upon. “The vote allows the Commissioners to put the brakes on the project if they desire,” says Skaggs.
It’s a vote that has momentous implications for Carroll County, which has a new BOCC since the 2009 signing of the joint agreement— and one on which four of five were elected on an anti-incinerator platform. These members face a difficult decision because, if they choose to pull out of the project, Carroll County will face a $3 million penalty.
“We’re watching and listening to what the Carroll County commissioners are saying, but there’s been nothing formal,” says Marschner.
If, however, the Carroll County commissioners stick with the project, financing could be arranged as early as this summer, with the Authority issuing $527 million in revenue bonds to be sold on the open market.
“The Authority arranges the financing,” Marschner is quick to point out. “That’s their debt, not the county’s.”
Yet the county has contracted to pay the Authority over the life of the project, and it’s money that the Authority will use to pay back the bonds and interest. “Any politician who doesn’t understand that and calls themselves a fiscal conservative is an absolute fool,” says Eader. “Every penny is on the taxpayers of this county.”
After permitting, voting, and financing, the construction, which could begin this fall, might be complete by 2015, and the facility operational by that fall.
WTE incinerator opponents are hopeful that Carroll County will back out of the partnership. If that happens, however, it’s likely that Frederick will move forward with the project anyway, inviting another county to take Carroll County’s place.
According to Marschner, three area counties have already expressed an interest. A second option—though far less likely—would be for Wheelabrator to buy in, taking responsibility for filling in Carroll County’s lost waste input by hauling in waste from other municipalities for the next 30 years.
On the other hand, if Frederick County can’t find a suitable partner, but is still committed to WTE incinerator technology, it could consider building a smaller Frederick Countyonly facility.
Or, it could do what, according to Hagen, it should have done in the beginning: “Run away from this whole idea.” Instead, he says, the county could implement a “diverse and flexible” combination of strategies, policies, and practices focused on increased recycling and composting— maximizing our waste reduction.
“I’m all for more and more recycling. I agree with that 100 percent,” says Waynesboro’s Brown, who supports the WTE project. “But we have such a long way to go, and in the meantime we have to address this solid waste problem.”
Jenkins agrees. “The question we’re wrestling with is ‘What’s the best way to deal with that?’ We have to look for our own solutions and stop making our trash somebody else’s problem.”
Frederick County Commishioner David Gray and Frederick County Special Projects Manager, Mike Marshner joined a handful of other government representatives and officials from across the country for a tour of Europe’s Waste-to-Energy plants in the Spring of 2007. This tour was part of the ongoing investigation as to whether or not Frederick County should move forward with a Waste-to-Energy plant. These photographs were taken while on that tour.
Read Moregorilla-print
subscribe
Events Calendar
Support our Advertisers
