About a year ago I wrote a Cambridge Matters about the high turnover of county government staff and lack of transparency in our county government. I asked if others had seen what I thought I was seeing and asked if anyone was willing to come together to see what might be done. 

The number of responses to that Cambridge Matters was overwhelming. Other people from across the County and across the political spectrum had seen what I was seeing and wanted to do something to make our county government work better. Over the past 12 months, this group has worked together to develop two proposed Charter Change Petitions that will need to be approved by approximately 5,000 registered voters each in order for us to place these petitions on the November 2022 ballot.

In future articles I will provide you with the petitions and with some of the questions that we have been asked and our answers. Today’s Cambridge Matters, however, is intended to give you background and a brief summary of why these petitions are being offered for consideration, signature, and vote in November.

First there was the research and discussion amongst the group that was to help us decide what was the best course of action. We looked at the current charter and its language and places where we thought changes could be made. We also looked at what we felt were the most critical issues that need to be addressed. The decision was made to move forward with two petitions. One is about transparency of county government and the other is about how the County Manager position is chosen and how it can better run the day-to-day operations of the county. There are other issues, that I will discuss in a future Cambridge Matters.

Next, we looked at what the law requires for citizens to get the petitions we were considering approved within the requirements of the law. We found that this is not an easy process and one that places a significant burden on the public to ensure compliance with the Maryland Constitution and Law. Out of that research came the Dorchester Citizens for Better Government, which is registered with the State Elections Board. We have a President/Chair and Treasurer, as required by the law and the ability to raise money for this effort so long as we file reports on monies raised and spent with the State Elections Board. Allen Nelson is our President/Chair and Ted Brooks is our Treasurer.

We hired a lawyer who is well versed in this kind of work to draft the proposed Charter changes. We then presented them to our local elections board for review and approval as to the form required by the law. The Director of the Dorchester Elections Board and their lawyer were given copies of the proposed petitions, and we have received a letter from their director acknowledging that the petitions meet the requirements as to form.

The Dorchester Citizens for Better Government is a non-partisan collaboration of residents of Dorchester County that are proposing these charter amendments principally to address the two problems mentioned above in the way the County Council conducts its business and chooses to govern. 

The first issue that we see that needs to be addressed is:

1. Transparency and Full Disclosure-

2. The proposed Charter Section 606 mandates that the County Council implement solutions to increase the ease by which citizens can participate in and understand more fully the Council decision-making process.

3. It requires County Council meetings to be on live CATV or live streamed on the internet.

4. It requires the Council to provide to the public the non-confidential documents that the County Council members receive that support the agenda items prior to Council meetings. 

The Council has voted down at least three requests to have meetings shown on TV or over the internet. The reported reasoning for these votes that I understand were 3-2 votes is that people can come to participate in the meetings in person or listen to them over the phone. Due to the size of the county, our group felt that making people drive long distances to the meetings at a cost to them is not reasonable. This was especially true during this time of Covid-19 where the County Council often met virtually. We are advised that there is already the equipment available in Council Chambers to show the meetings. In addition, listening over the phone is inadequate since the Council Members do not always identify who is speaking and phone connections are not always good.

In addition, the County Council several months ago was found to have violated the MD Open Meetings Act in their handling and reporting of closed sessions. The ability to develop the evidence to support the complaints about these violations was difficult to obtain given how meetings are currently conducted.

With regard to the need for non-confidential supporting documents that are already provided to the Council Members, we only know from the agenda what the topic will be, sometimes in broad terms, but currently are provided no details that would help in understanding the issue or problem and how it might impact us individually or as a community. 

As the issue of the County Manager position is more complicated and our proposed solutions are more detailed, I will leave it to my next Cambridge Matter to address this important issue and some other matters related to the County Charter.

Thanks for reading.

Judge Rideout is the former Chief Judge of the Alexandria, VA Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court (1989-2004). From 2004 until the present he has consulted in different states to support their efforts to improve their child welfare systems. From 2016 to early 2021, he was the Ward 1 Commissioner on the Cambridge City Council. Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for improving the lives of children in his and other communities.

 

As I was having my breakfast on Sunday morning, one of the headlines of the Washington Post caught my eye. It read “Cities look to halt deadly surge.” The article went on to talk about what cities around the country were experiencing with regard to increased killings and what some of them were doing to respond.

With police departments being strained for multiple reasons and Covid-19 continuing to have its impact on the mental health of communities,  interesting and innovative as well as old fashion ideas are being tried, and some are being successful.

I, of course, thought about our situation in Cambridge and other nearby cities. I understand that our police force is down to forty-six officers with two more planning to retire in the next few months and four new officers currently being trained. When accomplished, that will still put us below the level of police protection that we have had in past years. Causes include government competition for officers through salary increases and burn out of those that continue to serve the public during these challenging times.

The Post article also brought to mind that Moving Dorchester Forward that I mentioned in an earlier Cambridge Matters is planning a virtual community forum on February 1, 2022, from 7-9 p.m. to do a couple of things. First, we plan to hear from the community with speakers on a variety of important topics. As part of those conversations, we hope to have representatives of government, nonprofit, mental health, and community organizations share what they are doing to provide services in our community. We also plan to collect comments, questions, and ideas from those of you who attend and provide your thoughts in the Chat function that will be available.

Another part of this effort will be additional sessions in the following months that will look at ways that we as a community can begin to make a difference. This will not be a quick and easy fix, as the problems and challenges here are deep and long standing, but we need to start sometime. We think that time is now.

As part of the discussion about what the police around the country are trying to do, I saw that one of the major problems is the unwillingness of the community to come forward to report crimes such as what they saw when a killing occurred. Columbus, Ohio is planning a “citizen radio patrol” where residents can patrol their own neighborhoods and call-in information about crimes and concerning behavior to help the police.

People in many communities won’t report crimes because they do not trust the police that their reporting will remain confidential. They are also concerned about retaliation for making a report. That reminded me of a murder case that I was appointed to as a young lawyer.

My client, who was an inmate at the Lorton Penitentiary in Virginia, was charged with killing another inmate in the lunchroom of the facility in front of ninety other inmates. As it was a federal facility, the trial was in Federal Court in Alexandria. The judge ordered the facility to facilitate my meeting every one of those inmates in the lunchroom the day of the killing to talk about what they saw so that I could have the opportunity to provide a defense to my client. 

He was charged with a Capital Offense that subjected him to the death penalty. After talking with those inmates who would talk to me, I learned that not one of them saw what happened, and some did not even remember being present when the killing occurred. In a similar way, the residents of our neighborhoods where murders occur will not risk their lives to report what they saw. The only reason that some might do it would be if they were confident that they and their family would be protected and their information kept confidential. Looking at how that might be done here should be a priority.

I also saw people being reluctant to report and testify when I heard domestic violence cases as a judge. Too many victims would not testify against their abuser yet remained with them to be beaten again. Those victims need to have resources to allow them to escape their abuser, and most, if not all of them, do not have those resources available to them.

As these problems and challenges are multi-faceted, the solutions must  also be multi-faceted. Our city and county governments need to provide more resources to the police and in the community through some of the many ideas that were shared in the Post article that we know can work here. They are not just resources for the victims of crime. They are reading programs, after-school programs, and summer programs for the children in our community in order that they can be successful in their education. They are programs for children that are truant from school, in foster care, or have become involved in delinquent behavior. 

I urge you and your neighbors to listen in to the Community Conversation on February 1st and the follow-up sessions that will focus in more detail on how we as a community can advocate for solutions through government action and resources that we know are available as a result of the America Cares Act. 

A major player in finding the solutions that are needed is our local faith community. Our churches need to come together and develop plans and resources to help make a difference. Without them working together, solutions are just that much harder to find.

Attached is a flyer about the Community Conversation event on February 1st, 2022, from 7-9 p.m. Included are the links to join the event, to register, if you want, and to provide your thoughts and ideas before the virtual event. Please join us and be part of the solution.

Judge Rideout is the former Chief Judge of the Alexandria, VA Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court (1989-2004). From 2004 until the present he has consulted in different states to support their efforts to improve their child welfare systems. From 2016 to early 2021, he was the Ward 1 Commissioner on the Cambridge City Council. Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for improving the lives of children in his and other communities.

With a New Year and a new focus, I write to let my current readers know that Dave Wheelan of the Spy Newspapers has asked me to share my information and thoughts through his publication, which is read up and down the Eastern Shore. In addition, as I am past a year since being on the Cambridge City Council and my areas of community interest have shifted, I will be writing less about City and County government and more about the work of Moving Dorchester Forward (MDF) in which I am engaged with other members of our community.

To let my new readers understand what I am about and where my interests lie, I need to provide you with some of my history to understand my ideas and perspectives. So, today will include some introduction that my current readers already know. For everyone, however, I need to tell you about Moving Dorchester Forward (MDF) and what we are trying to do here in Dorchester County to improve outcomes for children and families in a number of aspects of their lives.

MDF is not a service provider but rather a group of citizens that are advocating for improved outcomes for children and families, improved and funded resources for programming and treatment of children, and greater engagement of our community in finding solutions for the many challenges that the children face and we as a community face with regard to our children now and in the years to come.

After 15 years on the Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court Bench (JDR) in Alexandria, Virginia, and another 15 years of consulting on Child Welfare issues in several states, I know that the ability of communities to address challenges for some of their youth is limited by available federal, state, and local government resources as well as how much non-governmental resources exist in the community. Solutions are also limited by the knowledge in the community about successful programs and by the interest of the community to undertake projects to address the needs of those children who are struggling.

I also know that a program that might work in one community may not work in another for any number of reasons but might work if modified to suit the needs and available resources in a community. As with politics, making change to improve lives is a local issue. The vast majority of the children are not “bad” children but are most often children having difficulty in school and in community or in relationships with other children; or they are children, through no fault of their own, that are living in troubled families and/or have substance abuse or mental health issues of their own. They are children that need a new direction.

As I have mentioned to some people before, when I went on the bench in 1989, Alexandria, VA, was just starting to deal with the Crack Cocaine epidemic that engulfed the country and the many children in our community that became involved in the using and buying and selling of drugs. My court days were much longer and more intense than any day I experienced as a lawyer. My first response was to do what everyone else was doing – punish those who I found delinquent or transfer them to Circuit Court for trial as an adult.

I soon learned that punishment alone or sending a youth to adult court for trial was not the answer nor did it stem the tide of cases coming before me. I put too many children into detention homes with more experienced delinquents who then taught them how to be better delinquents or criminals.

With the help and guidance of others, I learned that effective programming and holding youth accountable with speedy trials and hands-on probation officers and services was part of the solution. The other part was identifying the behaviors of youth early and providing programs that prevented them moving into or moving deeper into the juvenile justice system. Our juvenile system became proactive, in the right sense of the word, to address behavioral issues early while also responding after their bad behavior had violated the law.

The Challenge for Cambridge, Dorchester County, and, probably, much of the Eastern Shore is that rural communities have many of the same challenges as larger counties and cities, but there are few, if any, programs or resources to effectively address those problems. Most state resources often go to the more populous communities where the need is even greater; and in rural areas, the counties do not have adequate local taxable income to provide resources to address these issues in addition to providing all of the other resources required to effectively run local government. The other issue is that the longer a community waits to address problems in their youth population, the more costly and time consuming are the solutions.

Recently, a group has developed here in Dorchester County that we are calling “Moving Dorchester Forward” (MDF). It is focusing on education issues, mental health, court involved children, after school programs, and advocacy within the community. My area of focus is on court involved or court diverted children and advocacy. My plan for future articles is to give you some ideas of what I have seen from my experience that works along with what we are working on here.

My hope is that these articles can provide some understanding of the issues that children in all of our communities face where the juvenile court could become involved and ways that counties and cities here on the Eastern Shore alone or in collaboration with other nearby counties could begin to address these concerns proactively. Because I am not familiar with all that is happening in every county on the Eastern Shore, some good things may be happening about which I am not aware. If they are and you know about them, please provide me or the Spy publication and your local newspaper with information about what is happening where you live. We can learn from one another.

An example of how we can learn from one another comes from my experience from what became National Adoption Saturday that occurs in November every year on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Before it became a National Day, it started with Judge Mike Nash in Los Angeles.

He started it because of the challenge that he faced in the back up and delay in adoptions that his court was experiencing. His solution was to bring in a group of his fellow judges and volunteer attorneys that moved several hundred adoptions to completion on a Saturday.

I was involved in a project with Judge Nash and so went to his presentation about his initiative at a National Judicial Conference. I brought the idea back to Alexandria, and our court team adopted the idea that was led by our CASA program and our Department of Social Services. They made it happen. From there it spread through Virginia. At the same time judges from all over the country were adopting the idea that became National Adoption Day. What was at first a problem that had a solution because of a Judge’s idea became a National Day of Celebration of the adoption of many children from all over the country who were in Foster Care.

Some topics that I plan to address include truancy, shelter care, effective and proactive solutions and programming, and how the community needs to become involved to both advocate for and provide resources that are not otherwise available or are limited. Based on all of the information that I have seen about mental health issues during the COVID – 19 Pandemic, every community and every school and many children are needing to address how to get help and locate where those resources are. Finding them is not easy and figuring out how they might be brought to your community or supported in your community, if they are already there, is critical.

Please share your ideas with me and with others in your community. We are losing too many children to poor educational outcomes, delinquency and later criminal behavior, and mental health and substance abuse matters that limit their ability to achieve a better life for themselves and cost us all in so many ways.

Thanks for reading.

Judge Rideout is the former Chief Judge of the Alexandria, VA Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court (1989-2004). From 2004 until the present he has consulted in different states to support their efforts to improve their child welfare systems. From 2016 to early 2021, he was the Ward 1 Commissioner on the Cambridge City Council. Throughout his career, he has been an advocate for improving the lives of children in his and other communities.