In This Months Business Monthly

When my family moved into the Bryant Woods neighborhood in Columbia in the summer of 1968 there were model homes on our cul de sac making it a regular stop for the Columbia tour buses. There was 7-11 store nearby with a snack bar but the real action was up at the Wilde Lake Village Center where, in addition to a grocery store, there was a butcher, a bookstore, a cheese shop, a pharmacy with a soda fountain, a women’s clothing store and a record store. The village center was the social and commercial hub of the community. One of the highlights of the holiday season was when the village center would host an open house. As Columbia residents visited the different stores, each merchant provided some type of holiday fare. The punch that Columbia Bank and Trust ladled out was particularly popular.

For some residents of Columbia, this was the embodiment of the Jim Rouse vision.

Only it wasn't.

In the late sixties, Columbia was still a small town with a population of less than 10,000. A forlorn silo stood where The Mall is today.

It didn't last long. The true Rouse vision was to build a city ten times that size. By the beginning of the seventies residents of the new city began to get new places to gather. Oakland Mills village center came online in 1969 and Harper's Choice got their own village center in 1971. Wilde Lake was no longer something unique, it was simply one of three.

The biggest change for Wilde Lake though came in 1972 when that lonely silo was replaced with a regional mall. The bookstore and clothing store moved out of Wilde Lake and into The Mall. The slow decline of the centers fortunes had begun. By the mid seventies memories of those early year holiday open house nights had already begun to fade.

You can read this months column here.

In This Months Business Monthly

The Columbia Council is the red headed step child of loco politics. Even though the elected council members serve as the board of directors of a corporation with an annual operating budget of $60 million and 1,300 employees, very few people pay much attention to its governance.

The system itself is at least partially to blame. Election rules and procedures are inconsistent among the 10 Columbia villages and not all who pay the CA lien are even eligible to vote, including the majority of the commercial property owners.

Voter apathy is also to blame. Even seemingly contentious citywide issues such as the future of Symphony Woods park barely register a blip on most Columbia residents radar. On the other hand, try and take away a neighborhood tot lot or swimming pool and suddenly people start to pay attention, though by that time it may already be too late.

It’s not too late now. If you live in Columbia please get informed and vote on April 20^th or, at the very least, get your hands on an absentee ballot. If you know someone who lives in Columbia, particularly the villages of River Hill, Oakland Mills, Wilde Lake and Long Reach, please encourage them to pay attention and participate. 

A healthy and forward looking Columbia is in the best interests of everyone who lives in HoCo.

You can find this month’s column here.

Loco Blogs Out of Touch?

The Sun has launched a new mobile version of its digital content called touch. The software automatically detects the mobile device being used and presents the optimal format for that device. It’s clean and simple but the content differs slightly from their desktop version. Notably, there are no links to loco blogs, at least not so far.

I hope this is only temporary. The Sun always has been blog friendly with its daily digest of links to select posts and its annual Mobbie awards for loco bloggers. As a result the Baltimore media giant has become the top referral site for To2C, accounting for over 1,000 visits a month. I suspect this may also be true for other loco blogs they frequently highlight as well, such as HowChow, HoCo Rising and Well and Wise. I'll bet a good deal of traffic goes the other way too from loco blog posts with links to stories in The Sun.

The number of readers accessing digital content from mobile devices has been steadily increasing with the proliferation of smart phones and tablets. Out of 10,000 visits to To2C in the last 30 days, 1,100 were from mobile devices, one thousand of which were made using an iPad.

In This Months Business Monthly

I’d be lying if I said I wasn't flattered when someone suggests I should run for elected office. I take it as a compliment but that’s about as far as I take it. Though I find the prospect of governing intriguing, the thought of running a campaign and being a public “servant” is far less appealing.

I’m think I’d prefer to be anointed or to slide into office sideways sort of like Laura Neuman did in Anne Arundel County. She only needed four votes to become county exec and now that she’s in she’s not beholden to anyone. Perfect.

That’s not likely to happen in HoCo. I just can’t see our elected officials behaving as badly as John Leopold. We tend vet our bad apples on the school board first, giving them the boot when they act like jerks.

You can read this months column here.

In This Months Business Monthly

January was a rough month for me, both personally and in business. As such I gave little thought to the monthly deadline for my column. When Mark Smith dropped me a note telling me he needed the column even sooner than usual because he was headed out of town I snapped.

“I quit.”

Truthfully, I had been contemplating giving up the column for the last six months or so. Each month it seemed it was getting harder and harder to pull off. More often than not I was not happy with the end result. I was on the edge so when Mark, in his role of editor in chief chastised me, I snapped.

“I quit.”

On the surface it seemed such an easy solution. Just below the surface it felt so very wrong. Quitting in a huff is no way to exit a twenty plus year relationship. Ironically, the act of quitting provided me the inspiration to stay on. I banged out another column.

I didn't quit.

You can find this month’s column here.

In This Months Business Monthly

When I sat down to write my column this month I had planned to dive into the controversy over the legislative initiative to change way the Columbia Association is defined under state law. The change would redefine the organization as a “nonprofit community service corporation” as opposed to a homeowners association.

This seemingly innocuous move, intended to better match up with CA’s unique structure (largest HOA in the country), was immediately pounced upon by the Alliance for a Better Columbia as a nefarious attempt to subvert community control. ABC responded to this move with its own legislative initiative which would effectively make governance of CA even more unwieldy than it already is.

It’s a good story with a very small audience that actually pays attention to this sort of thing. After banging out a paragraph or two I found myself struggling to make the subject at least mildly entertaining to those less informed. With an early deadline because of the Christmas holiday, it was more of a challenge than I was prepared to take on, so I dropped back and punted for another topic.

I wrote about movie theaters instead.

This is the time of year when theaters are buzzing with the biggest films of the year. The dreary weather drives us indoors and movies provide a great escape from doldrums of winter. The only problem is the movie theaters themselves.

I've decided I will no longer patronize the movie theaters You can find out why by checking out this months column here.

Post Proposes DC Annex Columbia

In a parting gesture to the citizens of the District of Columbia, retiring Senator Joseph Leiberman has introduced a bill in the Senate to make DC our 51^st state called New Columbia. The bill would redraw the existing boundaries of the city by carving out The Mall, most federal government buildings and monuments from the proposed state.

Today, in the Style section of The Washington Post, Monica Hesse and Dan Zak have shared their own thoughts for redrawing the capital city’s lines. Number one on their list was making our Columbia part of their Columbia.

1. To eliminate confusion, the town of Columbia, Md., shall become part of New Columbia but be known as Old Columbia.

In case you might mistake this for anything other than satire, consider that one of their other suggestions was to make Georgetown part of Connecticut.

Still, it’s always nice to be number one.

The Sun for Sale?

As the Tribune Company, parent company of The Baltimore Sun, prepares to exit bankruptcy it is exploring the possibility of selling some of its newspaper assets, including Baltimore’s major newspaper. According to this story by Edmund Lee and Serena Saitto in Bloomberg, the company believes a sale of some of its papers “would bring an influx of cash to the company after four years of bankruptcy.”

“The owners may hold onto the larger newspapers, such as the ones in Los Angeles and Chicago, and look to sell the smaller titles more immediately, said Reed Phillips, managing partner of investment bank DeSilva & Phillips LLC.”

That would seem to include Baltimore.

The Abell Foundation  has previously expressed an interest in buying The Sun. According to this story by Gary Haber in The Baltimore Business Journal the foundation expressed an interest in buying the paper before the Tribune company sought protection of the bankruptcy courts.

“If the Abell Foundation were to buy the Sun, it would be a homecoming of sorts for the newspaper. Arunah Sheperdson Abell founded the Sun in 1837. It was owned by the A.S. Abell Co., until 1986 when it was sold to Times-Mirror Co. in 1986 in a deal that included the Baltimore Evening Sun and other media properties.”

What goes around comes around.

In This Months Business Monthly

I first began writing a column in The Business Monthly in the very first issue back in the earlier nineties. We were in the midst of an earlier recession and that first column focused on the changed landscape of HoCo loco commercial development. Almost everyone in the business was handing at least one of their properties back to a lender. For the up and comer developers like Peter Issel, Chris Kurz, Pete McGill and Fred Glassberg, the down turn took them down.

That’s what I should have written this month.

Instead I banged out a pretty weak effort at the absolute latest deadline of deadlines. I wrote about how next year, 2013, nothing much is going to happen except building towards 2014. 2014 is when everything happens: Whole Foods, the Metropolitan, Mall expansion and the gubernatorial election.

I’m not proud of it.

A better story would have included some historical perspective like the story of the office building that the county government owns in Columbia Gateway, 6751 Columbia Gateway Drive. It was built by Peter Issel in 1990 when the Gateway Corporate Park was the hottest business campus between DC and Baltimore.

And then, just as the building was completed, that no longer meant anything. Even a great building in a great location is powerless against a retrenching economy. That’s the greatest risk in the development business and a highly leveraged developer doesn't stand a chance when financing constricts.

And perhaps that would help create some appreciation for the exposure that at least at five developers are now taking on as they begin the creation of a real Columbia downtown. They have the right product and location but other forces, beyond their control, could alter their outcomes. I might have even thrown in something about another term limited county exec back in the nineties who had gubernatorial aspirations .

Unfortunately, that’s not the column I wrote. Now that I've warned you, if you still care to, you can find this month’s column here.

Lindsey’s Last Day

Lindsey McPherson, a writer for Explore Howard who covered the HoCo loco politico scene, is leaving the HoCo beat. She has taken a new position covering Congress for Tax Analysts.

During her brief stint in HoCo we were fortunate to have her as a guest on our podcast not once but twice.

She will be missed. Her last day is today.

Good luck Lindsey.

In This Months Business Monthly

It has long been said that discussions of religion and politics have no place in polite conversation. That advice obviously does not apply to Facebook. With a neck and neck presidential election coming down to the wire, status updates attacking both candidates have increased in frequency.

What do people who post these things expect to happen?

Change minds?

Maybe. According to this article by Will Oremus in Slate, a Pew Internet survey “found that nearly half of Democrats who use social networking sites say those sites are important to them in keeping up with political news. About one in three Republican social-network users say the same.”

“Here’s the shocker: A few people even report changing their minds about an issue based on their friends’ political posts. They’re in the minority, to be sure: just 16 percent overall. Among self-described liberals, though, that number rises to 24 percent. And 39 percent of liberals say that political posts have motivated them to get more involved in an issue. (The figure is 24 percent for conservatives and 21 percent for moderates.)”

Great! As if these people needed further encouragement.

With friends like these…

You can find this month’s column here.

Fun Facebook Figures

While doing some research for my Business Monthly column tonight, I ran across a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center just before Facebook went public this summer. The highlights:

• Average number of friends: 229
• Percentage of friends that were high school acquaintances: 22%
• Percentage of friend requests that are accepted: 80%
• 63% of Facebook users have unfriended someone in the last year, up from 56% the year before.

I happen think the unfriending trend is directly related to the increase in nasty political status updates, which also happens to be the main theme of my column.

I also ran across this post from earlier this month by Jennifer Moire on the AllFacebook blog in which she discloses that “Facebook identified which states were buzzing about which candidates using its “Talk Meter” tool.”

The top five states “buzzing” for Romney are: 1) Utah; 2) Washington, DC; 3) Florida; 4) Massachusetts; 5) North Carolina.

The top buzz states for Obama are: 1) Washington, DC; 2) North Carolina; 3) Mississippi; 4) Louisiana; 5) Georgia.

I think some folks in DC would take umbrage with Jennifer labeling Washington DC as a state but there you go...

Some readers may have noted the absence of my column in last months paper. For the first time in a very long time, I sat that one out. Believe it or not, I couldn’t think of anything to say.

It happens.

In This Months Business Monthly

I decided to attend Ken Ulman’s community forum last month not because I had a particular gripe. I was just curious about what other people’s gripes were. Mama Wordbones sometimes has a hard time understanding that. She tends to view these exercises as a colossal waste of time.

On the other hand, I had nothing better to do that Monday night. I also knew that, at a minimum, I’d run into some people I know. As it turns out, I inadvertently grabbed an open seat next to Howard Johnson, president of the Greater Elkridge Community Association and one seat away from Marc Norman. Despite our opposing views on the intermodal issue Howard was very cordial. Marc on the other hand said I looked like crap. Marc is such an eloquent man.

I actually sat down the second time I entered the room. No sooner had I arrived in the meeting the first time than I realized I’d left my glasses in the car. At this point in my life I’m pretty much useless without my glasses. It’s not like I’m blind or anything but taking notes without my glasses is an extremely slow and frustrating process. I opted to go back to the car to retrieve my spectacles.

Ken’s meeting was being held in the Robinson Nature Center in Columbia. For those who have yet to visit, the nature center is a showcase for environmentally sensitive development. This means that the automobile is tolerated rather than accommodated with a parking lot that is tucked up and away from the building instead of being right next to it. The point being that walk to my car and back was not exactly a short one.

I don’t think I missed much. When I first arrived some guy was complaining about amount of money spent on defense. I’m not talking about a local issue here, like say defending against stink bugs. He was talking about the federal budget. I guess he felt getting any elected officials ear was better than nothing.

When I returned with my errant glasses another person was at the microphone complaining about speed cams. At least that was within the execs sphere of influence.

All in all, the concerns of the HoCo petitioners were predictably mundane but I guess that’s what is to be expected in the second best place to live in America.

You can read this month’s column here.

In This Months Business Monthly

When I sat down to write this month’s column for The Business Monthly, the prospects for a second special session of the General Assembly as early as next week to ram through new gambling legislation looked pretty good. That may no long be the case. According to this report by John Wagner in The Washington Post, the guv has decided “that is not a realistic timeframe and wants to spend some more time seeing where House members stand, said the source, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue.”

The delay is being at least partially attributed to last Friday’s stormus interuptus. As of this morning at least 30,000 homes in Maryland are still without power.

That is not to say the guvs attempts to expand gambling in the state are over. He just needs a little more time to twist some arms. According to this story by Annie Linskey in The Sun, Governor O’Malley “intends to announce Friday that he will continue trying to hammer out a deal to expand Maryland's gambling program, according to an official close to the governor.”

It’s only a matter of time. Just like four years ago, voters are being told that expanding gambling will help our schools, stave off tax future increases, and cure the common cold. 

In other words, it’s appears to be only a matter of when, not if.

You can read this month’s column here.

In This Months Business Monthy

It was during a recent walk with Mama Wordbones that I began contemplating the fate of the poor mailbox. As we crossed through an established neighborhood in Ellicott City I noticed that many of the homeowners had landscaped around their mailboxes. Some had flowers and shrubs while others were a bit more elaborate.

“That’s something you won’t see in Columbia,” I said in reference to the planned communities cluster mailboxes.

She was a bit surprised to find out that even single family homes in Columbia are serviced by these communal mail receptacles.

“I don’t think I’d like that,” she said

It’s almost irrelevant anymore. The mailbox is not the conduit to the larger world that it once was. It’s place in our content delivery hierarchy has slipped to a lower tier. It is conceivable that, in my lifetime, I will witness the phasing out of regular delivery of mail by an agency of the federal government.

I’d be okay with that. Providing mail service to every single household in the United States is a very expensive proposition. The USPS has over 574,000 employees, operates 31,000 postal facilities, and owns over 218,000 vehicles. It last reported net revenue in 2006. Since then the losses have been in the billions.

The argument for keeping the USPS is that it reaches every single home in the country, urban, rural, rich, poor and everyone in between. Not everyone has broadband but everyone, except perhaps the homeless, has a mailing address.

Still, at the rate these USPS losses are accumulating, we might be better off giving everyone a 4G iPad.

You can read this month’s column here.

In This Months Business Monthly

As part of the research for my column this month I did a search of “Allen Dyer” to see how many times he was mentioned on my blog. It resulted in forty six posts since 2006.

I’ve had a long run with Mr. Dyer. I even made him the subject of a To2C Aprils Fools Day post. It was the best April Fools post I’ve done so far. It even fooled the working press, albeit momentarily.

As much as I dislike the guy I’ve enjoyed writing about him. He is one of those rare polarizing figures that make the loco politico stuff all the more interesting…and admittedly a bit fun.

Though I’m happy to see him off the school board, I miss having him as a target. No doubt he'll continue to try and stir things up but his antics from here on out will have lost some luster commensurate with his reduction in rank. He won’t be as interesting anymore. I’ll miss that.

I haven’t written much about Delegate Frank Turner but what I have written would not be mistaken for flattery. I’m not a fan. On the other hand, Frank holds a pretty key spot in the upcoming special session to raise our taxes. As chair of the Finance Resource Committee Subcommittee he’ll be in the thick of the battle over the expansion of gaming, the cure for all our fiscal ills.

When I spoke with Frank at Ken Ulman’s Maple Lawn fundraiser he told me that he didn’t have time to read the blogs. It’s okay. He probably wouldn't like what he sees here any more than he’ll like what I wrote about him in this months Business Monthly.

In This Months Business Monthly

Returning to Columbia from DC on Route 29 last weekend, I took note of the highway sign just before the Broken Land Parkway exit. It read "Columbia Town Center."

That won’t sit well with some folks.

I suspect that the nascent Downtown Columbia Partnership will soon lobby for a sign change. They prefer calling the redevelopment area “Downtown Columbia.” Last month, when Ken Ulman tapped Mark Thompson to lead the redevelopment process in Columbia's urban core, the flag he stuck in the ground said “downtown,” not “town center.”

Town Center is out. Downtown is in. Howard Hughes has already rebranded their Columbia website.

So what’s in a name?

It depends on your perspective. For me downtown conjures up major league stadiums, buildings over fourteen stories tall, Chinatown, Little Italy and a certain amount of chaos. Town Center, on the other hand brings to mind open space, tree lined streets with wide sidewalks, convenient parking and relative safety.

The "downtowners" see this differently. In this post on HoCo Rising, Tom Coale notes the current high office vacancy rate around The Mall as evidence of a perception problem. He wonders what Don Draper, from the TV series Mad Men, would do with this.

“I bet one of the first things he would say to all of us in Columbia is "Stop calling the center of Columbia 'Town Center.'  It's 'Downtown.'  You want people to imagine bustling streets, foot traffic, heck, maybe even hot dog carts.  'Town Center' sounds like some bullseye serving no other purpose than providing a geographic reference point.  'Downtown' sounds like a place of arrival."

So there you have it. You can find this months column here.

In This Months Business Monthly

This month’s column started with a post I wrote last month about my new iPad. Rereading that post now, I realize that this was only the tip of the iceberg of my technological travails. By the time it was over I had a whole columns worth of material.

Don’t misunderstand this rant; I think Apple makes great products. Apple devices are elegant. You just don’t say that about many consumer products.

And they are becoming embedded in the business world, across all disciplines, at a breakneck pace. In the third quarter of 2011, Apple sold more iPads than Macs for the first time; 4.19 million in iPads, $3.9 million Macs.

That’s a lot of hardware.

My only complaint is that they don’t play well with the other devices. Then again, maybe their aloof behavior is all part of the business strategy. When they tell us in their ads that their devices are “playful,” it simply means when playing with themselves.

So I give up.  My Droid X phone is nearing the end of its lifecycle. I will replace it with an iPhone.

You can read this months column here.

One Last Thing:

I just discovered that my BizMo colleague George Berkheimer wrote a nice little rundown of some of the loco blogs. Check it out here.

WAPO Blasts Guv on Teacher Pensions

The Washington Post editors laid into Governor Martin O’Malley and Senate President Mike Miller for their proposal to shift half of the costs of teacher pensions from the state to the counties. They headlined the editorial “The Buck Stops Nowhere.”

The paper acknowledges the problem, calling the states current system for funding teacher pensions as being “rife with perverse incentives.”

“Maryland’s scheme is the product of decades of improvisation, fiscal mismanagement and political pandering. Not surprisingly, it is virtually unique among states — and almost uniquely senseless.”

It’s really worth reading if you have any interest at all in how the state is being run and by whom. I also note that this opinion is coming from The Washington Post, what some might consider a bastion of Democratic ideology.

That’s not to say that the Dems are all lined up behind their governor either, notably a few county executives, including our own. Ken Ulman was front and center in this article by Michael Dresser in The Sun, complete with a shot of him gripping the lectern as he addressed the press in Annapolis.

"This puts a potentially devastating squeeze on local government," said Howard County Executive Ken Ulman, a Democrat. "Find the $239 million somewhere else in the budget."

Lindsey McPherson in her Political Notebook column in Explore Howard, wrote the HoCo loco Dems  are “are standing behind Ulman.”

This one actually crosses party lines. If the guv and the Senate president have their way, Howard County will take a $17 million hit on the roughly 40% of the county budget that doesn't go to the schools. That impacts everything from parks to police.

As the Post editorial notes ““The main problem with the governor’s plan is that it sticks counties with a heavy bill but gives them no power to control costs. After all, school boards, not counties, negotiate teachers’ contracts. And state law forbids counties from cutting funding for schools unless enrollment shrinks.”

Sheesh.

It’s a mess and needs to be fixed, that much all can agree on. To do so will require real leadership and political guts, to go for the big fix. That means all parties will need to share a little pain; the state, the counties and most importantly, the unions and the school boards. It may also require a reexamination of state law.

I wonder if anyone in Annapolis has the cojones to pull that off.

A Papers Route

When The Washington Post closed it’s HoCo office back in 2006 the media company was grappling with the harsh budget realities of declining advertising revenue and stagnant subscriber growth. Branch offices don’t come cheap.

Retrenching from the suburban beat even further, in December of 2008 The Baltimore Sun and the Post announced that they were going to begin sharing content rather than competing for stories on the same turf. For the Post this allowed them to pull back even further from the burbs. In the most recent example of this content sharing, the Post picked up this Jessica Anderson story from the Sun about the proposed HoCo growler legislation. In their "shared content" version, the Post editors dropped the HoCo loco angle. While Randy Marriner with Victoria Gastro Pub and David Venable with the Ellicott Mills Brewing Company were predominately featured in the original story, the HoCo loco innkeepers were edited out in the Post. It was as if they had planted the white flag at the HoCo border.

In the not so distant past, The Post and The Sun battled for readership in HoCo. HoCo readers and advertisers were once coveted by both papers. Now, it appears that the Post is ceding that ground. Last week in this story by Jeremy W. Peters in The New York Times, the reporter notes that the paper “serves a purely local print market, one that for decades had limited competition, and it has depended on local advertisers and subscribers who have since fled to the Web.”

Senior Post writer and editor Robert G. Kaiser put it even more succinctly:

“When I was managing editor of The Washington Post, everything we did was better than anyone in the business,” he said. “We had the best weather, the best comics, the best news report, the fullest news report. Today, there’s a competitor who does every element of what we do, and many of them do it better. We’ve lost our edge in some very profound and fundamental ways.”

So far, The Post has not taken the same route as The Sun with digital subscriptions. Subscribers to the print edition still receive free access to the digital Post, which includes a nice little app for the iPad. On the other hand, The Sun has taken greater initiative in embracing loco blogs to supplement its loco coverage while the Post has relegated the DC metro blogging community to deep within its website.

It will be interesting which of these different routes provide a road map for survival in the digital age.