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Help Our Candidates Win
The candidates endorsed by the Montgomery County Group need you to help them win. Pick a candidate (or two) from the list below, get in touch with their campaign and offer to help. If you don't have much time, putting up a lawn sign and telling your friends and co-workers about your candidate can go a long way. We don't make big campaign contributions, but the power of our members who are committed to protecting the environment is important.
The primary elections are on September 14, and the general election is on November 2.
List of House and Senate Candidates Endorsed by Sierra Club
14 - Karen Montgomery - Senator
14 - Anne Kaiser - Delegate
14 - Eric Luedtke - Delegate - http://ericformaryland.com/
14 - Craig Zucker - Delegate - http://www.craigzucker.com/
15 - Rob Garagiola - Senator
15 - Kathleen Dumais - Delegate - http://kathleendumais.net
15 - Brian Feldman - Delegate
15 - Aruna Miller - Delegate - http://www.arunamiller.com/
16 - Brian Frosh - Senator - http://www.brianfrosh.com/
16 - Bill Frick - Delegate
16 - Susan Lee - Delegate - http://www.mddelegatesusanlee.com/
16 - Ariana Kelly - Delegate - http://www.kellyfordelegate.com/
17 - Cheryl Kagan - Senator - http://www.cherylkagan.org/
17 - Luiz Simmons - Delegate
18 - Al Carr - Delegate - http://www.alcarr.org/
18 - Ana Sol Gutierrez - Delegate
19 - Jay Hutchins - Delegate
20 - Jamie Raskin - Senator - http://jamieraskin.com/
20 - Tom Hucker - Delegate - http://www.delegatehucker.com/
20 - Heather Mizeur - Delegate - http://www.heathermizeur.com/
20 - Sheila Hixson - Delegate
39 - Saqib Ali - Senator - http://www.saqibali.org/about.htm
39 - Kirill Resnik - Delegate - http://www.reznikformaryland.com/
Repower America
Repower at Home, a project of the Alliance for Climate Protection, is dedicated to empowering communities to save energy. We provide tools to educate communities about energy waste, and inspire them to take action to eliminate that waste. We measure the collective savings of these actions with easy-to-use web tools, and present them as a powerful symbol of Americans' personal commitment to a cleaner future.
Repower at Home is asking Montgomery County Sierra Club members to join us by bringing this innovative approach to the climate crisis to your communities.
Why Energy Efficiency?
Tools for Success
Repower at Home has all the tools you need to launch an energy-saving team in your workplace, school, place of worship, or other community venue. We offer flexible content to fit your community's needs and an accessible field team to guide your growth. Our user-friendly web features will support your team as you reach out, hold events, and track your progress towards your team's goals.
To learn how you can get involved, contact our local field organizer, Ed at Ed.Stierli@climateprotect.org.
County's New Stormwater Codes
On July 27, 2010, the County Council unanimously approved a new stormwater law that for the first time requires builders to use "Environmental Site Design" (ESD) techniques like green roofs, green walls, street-side rain gardens, and cisterns. The essence of ESD is harvesting rainwater on-site as a resource through vegetation, reuse and landscaping. The law conforms Montgomery's code to the Stormwater Management Act of 2007; it ranks with the most progressive stormwater codes in the country, including those of Portland (OR); Seattle and Philadelphia.
What Portland, Seattle and Philly have already shown, is that ESD practices (also termed "green infrastructure") are good for our streams, our pocketbooks and "bottom lines." The new ESD code continues Montgomery's long tradition of requiring new development and redevelopment projects to address the same stormwater standards, while allowing flexibility for projects that show they have significant site constraints.
Stakeholders, at the behest of the Council's Transportation and Environment Committee in July, negotiated over changes to the stormwater bill. The Stormwater Partners won a tightening of a provision that would have exempted higher density projects from ESD. (At Eastern Village and elsewhere, ESD techniques fit beautifully with dense projects.). Since Montgomery County is nearly built-out, it's crucial that redevelopment projects use ESD in order to effect stream restoration over the long term.
Developers won a set of grandfathering provisions, enabling projects that got preliminary approval before May 4, 2010, to be eligible for waivers from ESD (these projects, instead, must adhere to the 2000 requirements.
Next Steps: Protecting Forests. We now are turning to the strengthening of Montgomery's Forest Conservation Law, led by Ginny Barnes and Caren Madsen who co-founded Conservation Montgomery. Protecting forests is Step One for ESD in "greenfields;" most prototype ESD projects, including Pembroke, have protected roughly half of the site as woodlands.
Uniting a Region Divided
In 1999 the Brookings Institute issued a scathing report about the racial and economic divisions in the Washington, DC Metro area. "A Region Divided: The State of Growth in Greater Washington DC" showed how jobs and prosperity are drawn to the western part of the region, notably Fairfax and Montgomery counties, leaving the eastern part underdeveloped.
Sierra Club members should care because this division means increasing sprawl—with the environmental fragmentation and degradation that entails—to the west, rather than revitalization of urban infill to the east. It also means more time spent in cars and away from families on the clogged roads that have become our daily life. Because the Metro's eastern branches are underused, more of these trips are by car, increasing oil dependency, global warming emissions, and local pollution.
Since 1999, analyses by the Metropolitan Council of Governance (COG) and the Maryland Politics Blog reveal, the situation has only gotten worse. To help rectify this situation the Sierra Club's Sustainable Metro DC Campaign has announced the "Uniting a Region Divided" initiative to draw attention to the festering problem and begin to search for solutions. A fuller statement is available on the Sustainable Metro DC website.
The first steps of the initiative are to support Governor O'Malley's recently announced Transit Oriented Development initiative, particularly development around three Metro stations in Prince George's county and Wheaton station in Montgomery County. We will also participate vigorously in the development of a Regional Sustainability Plan being spearheaded by COG by highlighting regional inequities and pushing for balanced, transit-oriented growth.
To volunteer for the "Uniting a Region Divided" initiative, contact Ethan Goffman at ethan.goffman@marylandsierraclub.org.
