Help us find Annie
Woodlawn's Bigots lose this round
The Baltimore County Zoning Commission finally rendered its decision on the long-overdue matter of the Darul Uloom school in Woodlawn. With a few ridiculous caveats--apparently meant as a sop to the neighbors who opposed the school--the county granted everything the school's operators will need.
Having sent written testimony in favor of the school's plan, I received a copy of the summary of the hearing and the decision. I'm almost sorry I blew off attending the hearing, because it must have been a real circus. For one thing, the changes proposed at the school property are nowhere near as radical as they have been represented to be. And for another, the opposing neighbors appear, collectively, to be dumber than a box of hammers.
THE OPPOSITION AND ITS CASE
Graystone Community Association - an association without a community
Among the objectors were people claiming to represent two community associations, each of them suspicious in its own unique way. The Graystone Community Association claims to represent more than 100 households in the immediate neighborhood. Neglecting the minor detail that there is no such community as "Graystone," a few soreheads in this neighborhood whose plat is officially recorded as "Broadacres" incorporated early last December. During the time interval conveniently created for them by the undue and potentially unethical influence of two local politicians. The Association's web site describes the neighborhood thus:
Where is this development and when was it built?
Graystone is located in Woodlawn and built about the 19xxs. Homes in this area include a mix of mid-size single family homes and attractive townhomes.
Aside from the fact that there's not a "townhome" within half a mile of the residence of the association President, the members were too stupid or too lazy to know when their own houses were built. A thirty-second check on the Web revealed that the association president's house was erected in 1956, along with much of the surrounding neighborhood.
The Woodlawn Community Education & Development Association
What exactly does this group do?
The other organization objecting calls itself the Woodlawn Community Education and Development Association, Inc. This outfit, a federal non-profit, was established in 2002, with the wife of a local Baptist preacher at its head. According to its corporate charter, this outfit was established for the following purpose:
"Establish a community based entity, formed to maintain a strong alliance between schools, police departments and our community. In addition, to strive to assure an active participative relationship with politicians through a focused, productive, educational and developmental agenda."
Now, having benefited from a privileged education at a public high school in a blue-collar neighborhood across town, it would be unfair of me to criticize the bad syntax of this statement of objectives, or to point out that it is a meaningless abstraction, so I will move on to other things. The officers of this corporation are listed as "V. Ross, D. Griffin, I. Zachary, C. Hayes, A. Truitt, M. Bowden and G. Jones," which makes them all but impossible to identify.
At the hearing, the preacher (husband of the Association president) spoke on their behalf. He "described his association as an umbrella organization representing a number of community groups on behalf of approximately 1,800 households." That number represents approximately ten percent of the total number of households in the entire community known as "Woodlawn," and one would think that with such high participation and lofty goals, you'd be constantly hearing of the good works done under the auspices of the Association.
(Here again, let's ignore my personal experience: I've lived in the area this association purports to represent for 32 years, and have not heretofore heard of it. This, in spite of the fact that I was a regular contributor for several years to a community newspaper here, and spent more than six years canvassing the area as a real estate salesman.) As far as I can see, the Association has no presence on the Worldwide Web, in an era when Joe Sixpack might have two or three websites of his own.
There is a scant record of the Association's works. The county school board minutes from June 2006 note:
Dr. Manuel Rodriguez, Assistant Superintendent, Southwest Area, recommended that Woodlawn High School auditorium be renamed to the "Woodlawn Community Education and Development Association (WCEDA), Inc. Community Auditorium." ...Ms. Shillman asked whether the funds for the auditorium had been donated by WCEDA, Inc. Dr. Rodriguez responded this group has applied for, and received a federal grant to renovate the auditorium.
Sure enough, Congressman Elijah Cummings managed to wangle a $65,000 federal grant for auditorium renovations. Exactly what role Rev. Ross' organization played in the process is not clear. But the Cummings "earmark" occurred in fiscal year 2004 [that's the year ending July 1, 2004], and according to a cached web page from the Association of School Business Officials of Maryland and the District of Columbia, a request for bids on the work was let only this year. That bid, number JMI-632-08 remains in limbo, the due date having passed on March 31st.
Later that same year (October, 2006) the Reverend Ross testified as an "expert" on the idea of a light rail line connecting Woodlawn and Dundalk, tentatively named the Red Line. As the Daily Record reported [emphasis added],
The expansion of light rail and bus services on state government's Red Line was addressed by Daniel Pontious, regional policy director of the Baltimore City-based Citizens Planning and Housing Association, and Rev. Ezio Ross, a Baltimore County clergyman who heads the Woodlawn Community Education and Development Association.
One of the major points made by both men is that transit projects need to be better coordinated with economic development. Both said they saw transit as a way to boost commerce by creating "town centers" and "urban villages."
"It can bring developers into an area by creating amenities," Ross said, following a 15-minute review of transit projects in cities such as Boston, Denver and Los Angeles.
Transit establishes routes, something vital to fostering trade, they noted.
"A sense of permanence is important to economic development," Pontious said.
The Red Line is expected to create a transit corridor starting in Woodlawn and running through Baltimore City and out to Dundalk on the eastern side of Baltimore County, the presenters said, although the state Department of Transportation Web site labels it a 10.5- mile project that will only go as far as Fells Point/Patterson Park. The portion to be addressed within the next few months by state and local leaders is a section that will run from Woodlawn to Canton, Pontious and Ross said.
The article went on to say that even this truncated route would cost between $525 million (for a surface rail line) and $2.6 BILLION for an underground line. And apparently nobody bothered to address the little complication posed by the fact that the route would probably not be allowed to run through the Leakin Park, owing to the same deed restriction that prevented I-70 from continuing eastward several decades ago, and resulted in the Interstate Highway to Nowhere, connecting Schroeder Street with Greene Street, a mere 45/100 of a mile distant, and through some of the most downtrodden housing in the city.
CONCLUSION: I still have no idea what the WCE&DA has been doing for the past five years, or what qualifies Rev. Ross as an expert on "development," since he is by profession (and presumably by education) a theologian.
The School's Proposal, and the arguments against it
The main part of the proposal was to create a dormitory to house 20 to 30 young male students. It was revealed only at the hearing that they'd be housed in the existing buildings, nearly all the changes would be invisible from the outside. A couple of neighbors made a great fuss over whether cars had been parked on the grass on this property. Bear in mind, it's slightly over an acre of land, and on a knoll overlooking the surrounding area, so while you can see whether or not there are cars parked, you can't tell where they are parked without trespassing on to the place.
Other neighbors contended they were worried that the tavern across the street and downhill from the school property would be a horrible temptation. Apparently this sub-group is so ignorant of Islam that they don't realize that alcohol consumption is strictly verboten to Muslims. And the bar is such a redneck joint that I can't imagine anyone looking remotely like a Middle Easterner, or even an American Jew, walking into the place and surviving. Not to mention that the students will all be between the ages of 12 and 20 years old. The protestors did note that police had to be called to break up brawls at the bar 21 times in the last six months of last year.
Still more protests focused on the miserable academic record and perpetual violence at the public high school about half a mile away. Nobody mentioned that there's a lot of parking-on-the-grass whenever the high school has a football game, and apparently nobody brought up the fact that this school is at the very bottom of the academic ranking in the county, despite the county's having dumped $13 million into it to graft a "pre-engineering magnet school" on to this otherwise ghettoized school, in the hope that the magnet school students would pull up the average numbers for the entire school. Which they didn't.
It was also revealed at the hearing that, in addition to the $628,500 the school's owners paid for the property being discussed, the man who will be its headmaster spent $380,000 on a new house built just across the street. Without enrolling a single student, this father-and-son team has invested more than a million dollars in a neighborhood where the average sale prices were below $150,000 before they nearly doubled during the short-lived boom experienced here in 2006.
The objectors weren't done yet, though. Besides the high school and the redneck bar, they noted that a commercial building across the street from the school houses a day school for what were described as "75 disruptive children." Now seeing that this bunch started out their opposition with the allegation that Darul Uloom would be yet another unwanted "group home" for the developmentally disabled, and that they subsequently brought up this day school, someone should have asked how many of them favored euthanizing problem children, since neither of these quite opposite alternatives satisfy them.
Yet somewhere along the line, they missed complaining about the "Adult Day Care" center for the elderly in another commercial property on the same intersection. Can you imagine the detrimental influence on young Muslim boys of seeing some Alzheimer's-addled geezer wheeling himself down the street, having escaped from day care? It boggles the mind.
For the county's part, they have managed to wipe away any public reference to the fact that the original hearing for Darul Uloom was pulled off the docket last October, due to the arguably unethical intervention of a state senator and a county councilman who is now under investigation for misusing his campaign fund as a personal bank account.
The Decision
Finally, on March 28, the Commissioner made his decision. The school will be allowed to operate, but with a few caveats:
- The size of the student population is limited to 20
- A privacy fence must be erected between the school property and the property to its immediate north, a place that has long been used for the storage of heavy contractor's equipment.
- The school will need to provide landscaping to screen its property from the three houses across the street to its east, one of which is owned by the headmaster!
- Parking will be permitted only in the designated (paved) spaces shown on the site plan. [How the county intends to enforce this without aerial surveillance, illegal search or surveillance, or further trespassing by disaffected neighbors remains to be explained.]
- The driveway into the place will need to be widened from 10 feet to 20 feet.
- [This is the one that makes me laugh] Petitioner shall use similar architecture and building material where applicable to assure compatibility with the surrounding neighborhood.*
* I will need to post some photos to illustrate the absurdity of this requirement. The Bauhof House, which is the site of Darul Uloom, was built as the home of the local baker, back in the twenties, and has a style of its own. The rest of the neighborhood is a mash-up of stuff, much of which Malvina Reynolds described as "little boxes made of ticky-tacky." There are a handful of the original farm houses predating the residential development of the area, ordinary little Cape Cods, a handful of stuccoed split levels, two faux-Spanish-mission houses, the general run of stuff built before World War II, and a couple of freshly-built split foyer disasters.
Then there's the real killer-diller: "Petitioner shall not utilize the property to perform religious services for the general public." Aside from the fact that this requirement appears to violate the First Amendment to the US Constitution, there again arise several questions: (a) How does one define "general public?" I don't believe you will find the "general public" at any religious service; only members of that particular religious denomination and prospective members. (b) Who is going to enforce this, and how? Does the county plan to station someone at Darul Uloom's entrance to "card" people going in and out of the place.
I maintain, and challenge anyone to convince me otherwise, that this matter would never have seen the light of day had the proposal been for a Pentecostal Christian church, like so many of the jump-up congregations operating in storefronts, converted warehouse space, and rented hotel conference rooms around this neighborhood.
This entire matter is shameful and un-American, but alas, it's business as usual in Baltimore County, where we have The Best Government Money Can Buy.