OCEAN CITY, Md- Leaders from Crisfield, Ocean City, Salisbury, Cambridge, Dover, and Rehoboth Beach met up to address shared challenges and goals at the annual meeting of the Mayor conference in Ocean City.
Rising Costs
Cities say project operations and costs are up across the board, Salisbury Mayor Jack Heath says operations costs for the city waste management plant jumped 400 percent, and project lead time for contractors is lead.
Mayor Heath says COVID-19 relief may have helped them absorb those costs but with that gone, the city will have to do some belt-tightening in its budget.
“Those ARPA Funds I won’t say they were misspent but we will need to have some belt-tightening and be very conservative with what we fund,” Heath said.
In Dover Mayor Robin Christiansen says their town is working to improve over 200 miles of piping and roads, with some piping having been discovered to be made of wood.
“We are working to make sure when we tear that up we lay the line, and the water is all being done at the same time,” Mayor Christiansen said.
In Cambridge, Mayor Steve Rideout says those issues are also preventing his city from being more proactive in deterring juvenile crime.
“Most of the lower eastern shore is Alice, Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed employs people who are receiving a government benefit, Cambridge is 57%, we don’t have the resources in our budgets to take care of these kinds of social welfare, children’s issues, Rideout said.
Juvenile Crime
Rideout says a key issue for all mayors has been juvenile crime but he is proposing a solution that has a greater role for his police departments and social services.
He says recent laws have limited police’s ability to arrest juveniles, and instead defer them into the Children in Need of Supervision System (CINS).
Rideout says he believes the state is not doing an adequate job tracking all data and is calling for local police departments to keep records of all children submitted into the system, the offense, and what state follow-up exists to make sure intervention is not being put on hold to help those children, something he is calling on all towns in Maryland to consider.
“What we’re doing in Cambridge with it is with the curfews are to immediately have a program available for the child or the family, identify what it is, and next day, two days later, get it to them and get somebody talking with the parent and the child so that they see that there’s an immediate response.”
Rideout says he believes those programs also need a funding source, saying he wants Maryland to shift to a system similar to Virginia, where instead of municipalities competing for limited grants, the funds are set aside as part of discretionary spending.
“If we have these problems and we have Baltimore City, Baltimore County and Prince George’s County all looking for that money it is not going to us, and then we have the same problems and no funding,” Rideout says.
Mayors in Maryland also called for the repeal of a separate Juvenile crime law that prevents police from interviewing suspects, or witnesses under 13 years of age.
“This juvenile justice must be addressed because we have the real crooks, the 18 or in some cases 17-year-olds, recruiting 13-year-olds to do their dirty work because they know they cannot be prosecuted or talked to by police,” Mayor Heath said.
Hiring Issues
Of all the Mayors present, only Ocean City Rick Meehan could say that his department was fully staffed, however, he said his department looks to hire hundreds of season officers and this year was only able to hire just shy of 30.
“We are in a very lucky and blessed position, and we are seeing some hiring issues in some of our other particularly seasonal departments of lifeguards, in particular, some of our public works department, some of our other departments,” Meehan said.
“We have instituted a 25,000 hiring bonus, and pension and we are still 11 officers short,” Heath said.
In Rehoboth Beach Mayor Stan Mills said his 911 operator center is having a shortage, and they can no longer turn to their traditional pool of workers to help fill it.
“Used to be we could get someone from our EMS because that was volunteer, now those are paid positions and folks do not want to shift, across the board hiring and pay is not keeping up we are having people poached into private,” Mills said.
Impact
In attendance at the event was State Senator Mary Beth Carozza, who tells 47abc that the regional approach to issues and governing makes the solutions an easier sell to the Democratic Majority in Annapolis.
“When we have this approach, of regional leaders and consistent asks, on infrastructure, law enforcement, juvenile crime, we can be more successful in delivering on those priorities,” Carozza said.
