County Councilmember Valerie Ervin to sponsor impeachment resolution
Posted by Thomas Nephew on July 28th, 2007
Via Takoma Park Impeach Bush & Cheney:
At a Wednesday evening Old Takoma Residents Association (OTRA) meeting, Montgomery County Councilmember Valerie Ervin said she would be happy to sponsor an impeachment resolution like the one Takoma Park passed on Monday.
She and her aides will be studying the Takoma Park impeachment resolution (.PDF file), which urges “our elected members of the Montgomery County Council, the Montgomery County Executive, the Maryland legislature and the Governor to consider and adopt similar resolutions.”
OTRA is a neighborhood group focused on local issues like planned development at the Takoma Metro station, the Purple Line, and the looming change in status of Washington Adventist Hospital, to name a few. It was my first meeting, and it was an education. Ms. Ervin sparred with opponents of the ICC, who challenged her (politely) to work to oppose that highway development project. She said she wouldn’t do that, that the decisions had already been made; she also seemed to deny the assertion, as I understood it, that ICC funding might dry up Purple Line funding.
Ms. Ervin was happier to talk about the Purple Line — she said young people like her son, who bikes to work, are concerned about the future of the planet, and that she wanted to try to get people out of their cars wherever possible. She said there’s been rapid progress lately; planners have apparently settled on a route that would take the line through a new library to be located in Silver Spring at Bonifant and Fenton, and that will not go through the Sligo Creek Park area. Some of the construction would likely tunnel under the Wayne/Flower intersection, atop a hill too steep for a light rail system to climb. She also said that DC planners and politicians had indicated they’d “take a look at” OTRA neighborhood objections to the current plans for mixed development at the Takoma Metro. Those plans unaccountably call for a large number of 2 car garage households at a mass transit location, possibly because that’s what the developer is most familiar with building.
At the end of the meeting, I finally had a chance to say why I’d come: to see if Ms. Ervin would sponsor an impeachment resolution like the one passed by Takoma Park. Suggesting that the vote on Monday showed a lot of her constituents were not only concerned about the future of the planet, but also about the future of our country’s political system, I asked if she’d consider sponsoring an impeachment bill like Takoma Park’s.
And she said she’d be happy to.
On general principles, I’d braced for some kind of disappointment, even though she’d taken one of our impeachment signs during the July 4th parade. After the meeting, her aide came over to ask me to send him a copy of the resolution; I offered her another lawn sign I’d brought along, and she agreed to Seth Grimes taking a picture of us with her holding it, commenting “I imagine this will be on YouTube.”
The lesson, I guess, is that sometimes you just need to show up.
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