Lifeguard Removal Bill Beaten Back

On Monday, the County Council defeated one of the more bizarre pieces of legislation in recent memory. Councilman Reilly sponsored a bill, apparently at the behest of a local hotel owner, to remove the requirement that hotels with pools of a depth of 5 feet or less have a lifeguard. The smarmy rationale of the hotel owner, Steve Merchant was that, "having no lifeguards may have parents better monitoring their children." Yes, let's adopt a laissez faire attitude to the protection of tykes in water wings and see which ones make it to adulthood.

Mr. Reilly, dumbfounded that the bill got only his vote, offered, "my peers were concerned about protection in spite of the economic cost." Imagine that, the County Council, whose charge certainly includes public safety, is more concerned about children drowning in the local Motel 8 than they are about the hotel having to pay a high school student minimum wage to monitor the pool. Have they no sense of priorities?

Even more confounding, however, was Health Officer Fran Phillips' support of the bill. Her defense? “We don’t see a detriment to public health, as we will still monitor the pool’s operation.” Yes, because checking the pool weekly for high bacteria levels is in any way, shape, or form related to the capacity of children to drown in the absence of supervision. She also said, "most of the county’s six drownings last year were outside of pools." Perhaps that's because the pools had lifeguards and the law is working.

This is now at least the third time in the past year that the County's Health Department has underwhelmed me. The first two being their blame deflection game regarding the fly ash situation in Gambrills, and their persistent defensiveness in the face of the inadequacy of their waterway bacteria monitoring program.

Reilly Plays Games to Avoid Citizen Input

Rather than allow the public to sit in on meetings between members of the County Council and the County Executive's aides as they discuss the Annapolis Towne Centre at Parole project, the Council Chairman Ed Reilly has decided to violate the spirit of the law by adhering to its letter.

To get around the state's open meetings laws, which require that the public be allowed to attend meetings at which a Council quorum is present, Reilly intends to use his new chairmanship to ensure that no more than 3 of the 7 Councilmembers attend any given meeting. A strategy, he was apparently led to by the Executive. According to Matt Diehl, County spokesman, "The county executive told Councilman Reilly that the council's more than welcome to schedule meetings and, from what I can gather, suggested they do it in groups of twos and threes so it won't constitute a quorum."

"We're going to have a candid, open, long discussion, as opposed to the burning hours at the council meetings," remarked Reilly, raising some doubt as to the "candidness" and "openness" of the meetings that have been held on the topic to this point.

Predictably, and rightly, long-time critic of the project, Councilwoman Samorajczyk, was displeased with the measure. "The more I think about it, I'm not going to participate," she said. "My purpose was to have a public presentation so people would know what's happening."

One can't help but get the feeling that the County has given up the farm on this deal, and is likely to get very little, proportionally, like a proper stormwater management system, in return. Of course, with these back door dealings, we may never know until we see it completed.