I care deeply about Aspen Hill and the quality of life and the character of the neighborhood.
In 2002 I joined the Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc., because I wanted to get more involved in the public affairs of the community. I did their website, and at the same time developed my own website to promote Aspen Hill, listing the stores and professional offices, linking to the online resources of all of the organizations I could find, including the public schools and various State and local government sites. I am on the Civic Association's Board of Directors.
Also in 2002 I began to work with a group called "the Mid-County Neighborhood Initiative", which at the time was part of then-Lieutenant-Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's "Hot Spots" initiative. Funded in part by the Governor's Office of Crime Control and Prevention, the Governor's Office for Children, Youth, and Families, and partially funded by Montgomery County's equivalent offices through the Montgomery County Collaboration Council on Children, Youth and Familes. The idea was to mobilize community activists to orchestrate the residents of crime-plagued communities to rise to their own defense. I wound up working with the "community-policing workgroup". The community-policing workgroup now is operated as part of the Collaborative Supervision and Focused Enforcement ("CSAFE") program since the beginning of the present administration of Governor Ehrlich.
I've dedicated part of my Aspen Hill website, and mailing list capabilities, towards that community-policing workgroup's ends of reducing crime in Aspen Hill and in surrounding communities. We've worked for four years and we've actually done some good things. This includes working cooperatively to get PEPCO to clean up an overgrown woodlot near 7-11 and K-mart which had become a lair of robbers and homeless; now it's a safety-fenced but quite attractive park-like area which is easily kept under surveillance from edge to edge.
We have also worked with the County and with larger organizations such as the Maryland/National-Capital Parks and Planning Commission, to clean up North Gate Park in Aspen Hill. Thanks to the efforts of the Parks, the County, and a lot of neighborhood volunteers as well as people sentenced to community-service hours, we've cleaned up North Gate Park and have almost turned it from an overgrown hiding place for robbers and dopers into a family-friendly park. Our ongoing focus on this greenspace renovation and upgrade is capped annually by a National Night Out event, which has drawn hundreds of residents as well as officials from dozens of agencies who were able to bring information about their resources and missions to the people who those agencies are meant to serve. We'll be having another one this year.
We also work with the Anti-Gang Programs in the area by promoting after-school and summer-school programs for at-risk youth.
If elected, I will maintain my focus on funding useful and long-term projects such as these which will help us revitalize the neighborhood, provide more opportunities for our disadvantaged citizens, and prevent violence and dangerous places. I will also focus on funding effective job-skills and training programs for adolescents and young adults, under the theory that if you give someone a hand up, you won't have to give them hand-outs. Further, someone with good skills will be too busy making money to do street crime. Additionally, I will press for special funding for special teams who can be dedicated to high-crime areas, working on their own rather than responding to dispatcher calls, as an effective means of suppressing violence and crimes against property.