Wednesday, February 29, 2012
If the Maryland House bill is passed, College Park would be required to maintain all images captured by speed cameras, and make them available to the public.
The College Park City Council was unanimous Tuesday night in its opposition to a Maryland House bill that would amend existing speed camera regulations, stating it would cause privacy issues and an unnecessary burden to local jurisdictions. Among several new provisions, House Bill 1044 would require local jurisdictions to keep and make public the records of all speed camera photos, whether or not a citation is issued. “If someone is stalking you, they can request these records and find out at what times you drive past these cameras,” said the city’s Department of Public Services Director Bob Ryan. “Keeping these records is irrelevant to public safety. It just creates an additional burden to the government.” The city currently stores …
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
College Park City Council will consider supporting an amendment to overturn the 2010 SCOTUS decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. City Councilman Patrick Wojahn (Dist. 1) shares more in a letter to the editor.
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Tuesday, January 24, 2012
This Tuesday, the College Park City Council will be considering a resolution to support a Constitutional Amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. This case, decided in January 2010, held that the First Amendment prevents any government in the United States from restricting the ability of corporations to spend “soft money” on campaigns, or to independently use their funds to influence an election. The Supreme Court held that corporations, like individuals, have the right to free speech, and can use their accumulated funds to influence elections as their directors and shareholders see fit, so long as they do not do so in coordination with an actual campaign. The impact of this …
Monday, January 2, 2012
The website "Klout" measures the influence we have on others through social media.
Councilman Marcus Afzali (Dist. 4) has a little more than half the influence through social media networks as County Executive Rushern Baker, according to the website Klout. University of Maryland President Wallace Loh is one point higher than Baker, according to the site. Klout measures how much influence a person has on others via social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, in which topics they are most influencial, and who is being impacted. Patch did a run down of some local officials and Prince George's County officials and agencies to find out what their Twitter Klout scores are. Here are the results: Name Agency Klout Score Rushern Baker County Executive 43 County Council Media County Council 16 Derrick L. Davis County Council 21 …
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Absentee and provisional ballots swung the vote count in favor of Fazlul Kabir, who beat incumbent Christine Nagle by two votes.
“There’s only one thing worse than being a politician — an ex-politician,” Chuck Smolka joked with former College Park Councilwoman Maxine Gross. “How about a reformed politician?” Gross joked back. The two election supervisors were in the midst of counting votes from Tuesday’s District 1 race, and in the presence of an almost-new politician. “It’s like a drama,” Fazlul Kabir said of the experience late Wednesday afternoon, watching the Board of Election Supervisors count the votes from the District 1 council election. After several recounts, it was decided Kabir beat incumbent Christine Nagle, 306 to 304 votes. It was a flip-flop from the unofficial vote count the night before, when absentee and provisional ballots were not factored. As …
Ken Montville
8:08 am on Thursday, March 1, 2012
This comes under the "cry me a river" category. If speed cameras were about public safety, they would be "hunter's cap" orange so people could see them and slow down. But that would mean a loss in revenue. Speed cameras are purely a revenue source with a by-product being a general slowing of traffic or public safety. The big headline in my version of The Gazette trumpeted the amount of revenue … more ›