Drew Morrison recently announced his candidacy for the MoCo Council District 1 seat being vacated by Andrew Friedson, who is term-limited and running for County Executive. On their face, Mr. Morrison’s credentials and experience seem impressive, but there is a notable lack of specifics to his claims of accomplishments. This may be indicative of underlying issues which can be glossed over by a high level recitation of past work. He also cited a high recommendation from former Councilmember Roger Berliner, for whom he was a senior staffer. As a decades-long District 1 resident, I can say that many constituents found Mr. Berliner’s tenure compromised by conflicts of interest, lack of interest in our views and needs, and problematic, overly-close connections to real estate development interests. My neighborhood initiated the term-limits referendum for Council seats following the Westbard redevelopment conflict. We would like to know more about Mr. Morrison but it is not yet the season when candidates are actively campaigning and appearing in media-covered events. In the public interest, perhaps Clean Slate MoCo could scoop other local media and do an early profile on him. Below, I raise a few issues you might want to explore. I wrote this as a message to local activist-colleagues who noted Mr. Morrison’s announced candidacy, and attractive but skimpy self-presentation.
Morrison’s resume is impressive on its face but bears more consideration with local history in mind. He lists as one of his major foci, opposing policies of the Trump administration. While I also oppose many of those policies, I don’t want our LOCAL representative to be overly focused on a national political agenda. I want him or her informed and advocating on our behalf to reflect their constituents’ needs and preferences on local issues not addressed by any other level of elected government, not on a progressive, state and national social/political agenda. Our district is not primarily a stepping stone to higher office or wider exposure.
Morrison’s press release also stresses his expertise and leadership position on major transportation projects, but he doesn’t specify which ones. Keep in mind two major, local transportation projects going on long enough that he likely played a role (we’d like to find out), which have become costly, major transportation debacles.
- the Purple Line is a local light rail project conceived about a dozen years ago which has been mismanaged by local, state and federal transportation officials and bureaucrats, consultants and contractors since its inception. Government officials created so many contradictory and constantly changing requirements and confusion, that the original contractor resigned from what should have been a lucrative project after suffering millions in losses and becoming embroiled in lawsuits and finger-pointing. I think that a successor contractor also resigned. The project is now years behind schedule and $-billions over budget.
- The multi-modal transportation hub in Silver Spring was supposed to link commuter rail, Metrorail and Metrobus lines. Conceived more than a dozen years ago and worked on for many years, it also experienced constantly changing specifications, poor communication with the prime contractor on the impossible-to-follow layers of contradictory design and engineering changes, such as for the composition of the concrete and use of rebar, and lack of prompt decision making by state and MoCo county officials that created costly delays and confusion for the contractor. Much of the concrete proved to be defective, requiring costly demolition and reconstruction, years of delay and $-millions in cost overruns. The prime contractor was a reputable, local, family-owned company in business for generations. There were lawsuits and countersuits, with the contractor claiming in court documents that the state and local officials were constantly undermining each other and vying for control, changing the design specifications repeatedly and making prompt, efficient, and accurate work impossible for the contractor.
If Morrison was involved with these projects, this is not a great track record for a transportation planner, contractor and consultant.
Morrison also served as a senior staffer for Roger Berliner. For anyone with a memory, this, too is not a great pedigree. Berliner was instrumental in pushing through the waivers and exceptions that enabled the developers of Westbard to construct a project of overblown scale and density despite years of community opposition including lawsuits, and to circumvent legal requirements to first complete a host of locally and state mandated impact studies, including environmental, traffic, parking, water and sewer, storm water and local school capacity, and others. Berliner even turned a blind eye to replacement of the Little Falls Library with an apartment building that supposedly would reinstall a library on the ground floor. Community opposition was so vehement that the Council withdrew endorsement of that aspect of the Westbard redevelopment. Coming from a commercial real estate and development background myself, I personally confronted Berliner at a community meeting about some of the most egregious elements of the Westbard project, and to my face he attempted to mislead me and paper over the problems with denials, but I called him on it, joined by other community members. He stormed out of the meeting when he couldn’t slide by. Berliner’s catering to developers in collusion with the rest of the Council and the Planning Dept. had gone on for years and came to a head, first in the Clarksburg development scandal, and then with the Westbard project. It resulted in the successful public referendum instituting term limits on the County Council to disrupt the deepening influence of developers on long-serving members of the Council.
As a Berliner senior staffer, did Morrison have involvement in these issues, some of the most consequential for our local communities in recent years? If not, what did he work on?
Finally, Morrison says he lives in the community. We just went through a highly contentious, protracted battle with the Council in our opposition, first to the Attainable Housing initiative, quickly followed by ZTA 25-02. These proposals got wide publicity and went through a string of well-attended public meetings. I don’t remember hearing Morrison identify himself with his record of local service for credibility, testifying one way or the other at the hearings or the online meetings held by Friedson and Fani-González. Where was he, and what is his position on these important proposals that will impact our neighborhoods for years to come?
I would like to hear his answers, before being persuaded by a resume that seems long on gloss and short on specifics. Given our experience with Friedson NOT being an advocate for community consensus in District 1, I think we’d like to have a better idea as to what we’d be getting before we give someone our support.
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