The John Leopold Show

All John Leopold, all the time in the Capital this week:

Bonus Money : The Capital had this story on Sunday, where Leopold handed out thousands in bonuses to Owens appointees dispatched during the transition. The fact that he only gave the money to some employees, most of which made good money and are now making good money elsewhere, is suspect. Today's Capital noted this in their editorial:

While we expect new leaders to assemble their own team, we don't expect them to send off the old guard with bonus checks. So it troubles us that seven holdovers from the Janet Owens administration got as much as $12,000 each when they were replaced by Mr. Leopold.

The $62,000 itself doesn't bother us much - that's a paltry sum in a $1 billion budget. But this makes no sense, in principle. There is nothing in the law that requires a county executive to authorize anything more than a pension and a payment for unused vacation time. There's no expectation of anything else...

...The decision is out of character for the frugal Mr. Leopold, whose early spending reductions are no larger than this $62,000. We doubt this is part of a pattern, but the county executive has to be careful to send a consistent message.

That makes a couple of assumptions, the first of which is that John Leopold is consistent. If anything is consistent, it's that's he's only out for himself.

7.9 cents a day: Leopold has also proposed a tax credit for senior homeowners at the whopping sum of $29 per year. Not a month, but a year. The article notes that under the proposed program roughly 2,800 homeowners would qualify; that means that the cost to the county is a whopping $81,200.

This was a major campaign platform of Leopold's both during the primary and general election campaigns. It is insulting to think that Leopold ran on a platform to provide tax relief for senior citizens, but the the total cost amount of the tax credit is aggregately less than the salary of the County Executive. Why can't Leopold propose a plan that saves the same homeowners $29 a month instead? That plan would cost the county only $974,400 a year and can easily be absorbed by the County budget.

lllegal Builders: Here is a good news/bad news scenario. Leopold is going to crack down on illegal home building in the county. Which is good. Home sites and construction needs to be properly permitted. However, at no point have I seen from Leopold a proposal to fix the permitting system. Half of the reason that homes get built without the proper permits is because the permitting system is damaged and needs to be reevaluated form the ground up. Leopold seems more concerned with punishing violators than he does with fixing the cause of the problem in the first place.

There is systemic consistency here in that the Leopold administration has several key features:

• Breaking campaign promises (the security detail, tax cuts for seniors);
• Failing to fix the problem (Leopold's school board bill, enforcement of building permits without a corresponding evaluation of the permitting process); and,
  
• General support of Big Government (smoking ban proposal, Climate protocols, etc).
  

Once again, why have a Democrat as County Executive when you can have John Leopold instead?