Critical Conversations is a series of discussions spearheaded by the Frederick County Chamber of Commerce focusing on timely topics and issues facing the Frederick County community.
Join us for this conversation as we focus on the current state of the City of Frederick with Mayor Michael O’Connor.
Transcription edited for readability:
W: Hello, Chamber Members. Welcome to the next in our series of critical conversations- our conversations with the influencers and leaders of Frederick, the special place that we all have grown to love. Our guest today is a lifelong Fredericktonian, a graduate of St. John’s Catholic Prep and then with a slight diversion from this bonaventure to get his degree, a mass communicator, a very effective radio and TV news broadcaster, and an even more effective public servant for the city of Frederick. And that’s our Mayor, Michael O’Connor- Mayor, welcome to critical conversations!
MO: Thank you, Rick. I appreciate it very much. That’s a nice intro. When I hear those things I don’t always recognize that in myself, but it’s been a long strange trip.
RW: So our connection goes back long- many years. We’ve known one another for a long time in our own evolving/various roles as community influencers here in the city of Frederick.
I’ve always said, in fact, I said this a lot during my time at Annapolis, but Frederick, unlike a lot of large cities/medium-sized cities, but certainly large cities in Maryland is really a city of neighborhoods- all connected, but with different challenges and interests and when kneaded together makes this incredibly special place that we know and love.
To kinda kick off- you just won a pretty significant city election. Your election for a second term as our mayor is what I would refer to as a mandate from the electorate. Clearly voters in the city of Frederick like the direction that Michael O’Connor is leading our city and felt very comfortable with embarking on a second four years in that big, beautiful office on the second floor at 1 0 1 North Court Street.
So can you talk about that a little bit? I know you understand the importance of the affirmation of the citizens of Frederick with the decisions you made in your first term but it’s really important as this city of neighborhoods continues to change and evolve as you move into your second term. So talk to us a little bit about you know, prevailing in that election and what you see in terms of the evolution of our great city.
MO: Thank you very much. The opportunity to serve the residents of this community has been one of the most rewarding and humbling experiences that anybody could have and you as a former elected official, know what I’m talking about when I say that. To win one election is a remarkable responsibility that one undertakes, to win re-election and then to run for a different office and win and then to win re-election- II want to believe that the mandate is the result of the work that you put in prior to election day and that mandates are sort of interesting- it’s an interesting concept.
When you’re elected to government, whether you’ve been elected by one vote or by, you know, 20% of the vote or 40% of the vote, it shouldn’t change how you approach the job that you do every day. So I try not to think about a margin of victory as what gives me the purpose for the work that I do every day but it’s to think about this community that I’m trying to serve and how can I come in every day and make Frederick a little bit better place than it was the day before.
To take that approach every day and to recognize that you’re serving 78,000 people and 3,500 businesses. Those people, those businesses don’t all agree on every issue. We’re never going to get that kind of a consensus on what we need to do and so it really has to be about community improvement and I just feel lucky to have the opportunity to serve.
I work with great staff at the city of Frederick. I’m fond of saying that, you know, Mayor is the title, but the job in many respects belongs to 700 employees that come in and work full and part-time and do direct service delivery to those 78,000 residents and 3,500 businesses every day. Trying to build that cohesive team to make the community the best place it can be is kind of the mandate that I try to operate under.
RW: It’s great. And again, it’s reflective of how folks voted, but I have to agree with you that the city’s workforce is just incredible. It’s, you know, it’s the great underappreciated factor that makes us special, you know, from the guys that are running the sanitation routes to the guys that are working utility permits and inspections, planning, and zoning top to bottom a great workforce. And it’s a great site.
MO: Yeah, I would say. And I don’t think people think about that very often when they think about government-government sort of has this.. it’s this word that gets thrown around. And it certainly, I don’t think necessarily the same at the county, the state or federal level, but I can tell you at the local level, government is service delivery.
That’s what we do every day. We’re in the direct service delivery business. So the people that we hire to do that work, come in every day to do things for our residents. Iit’s policing our streets, it’s picking up trash, it’s processing permits and development review, it’s processing payments and parking, and street maintenance and public works and keeping the water pipes clean and taking the sewage away.
I mean, people do those jobs, those jobs don’t get done by machines- they don’t happen by magic. People do the work everyday.
RW: That’s great. And it’s also the great segue to my next question. So having known you since your first election on the board of alderman, I understand how seriously you take the City’s commitment to reflecting the makeup of our community.
I know it’s a foundational element of your administration and your service as Mayor to address and acknowledge and celebrate the concept of diversity within our workforce, diversity in how public dollars are invested. What can we look forward to in the coming years knowing what you’ve already done with the committee that’s focused on procurement and purchasing, on your HR commitment to trying to reflect our community’s diversity through hires..
What can we look forward to in the years ahead?
MO: So I think they’re difficult, long overdue, really important conversations about how all institutions, especially public institutions really can be reflective of the communities they serve. I think we have to be honest as a society that we have fallen short of the aspirations of our founders in that regard but it’s never too late to start.
That’s kind of the commitment when I became Mayor, it was certainly something I talked about, as you said, as a member of the board of alderman, that we have an obligation and a responsibility to do all we can to try and make sure that that service delivery that happens every day is by workers that do reflect that broader community.
So we embarked on a D&I strategic plan, very quickly after I was elected mayor in 2017 that has translated into a strategic plan that’s looking both internally and externally at how we do a better job of attracting a diverse applicant pool, about how we ensure that we’re hiring in a way that is most open to looking at the necessary qualifications of the people that need to come to work for the city of Frederick.
We know that if we do that in a way that is open and transparent, that we’re going to get the diverse workforce that we want, but it’s not just enough to change the paint on the wall or the curtains, we want to keep those for a long period of time as well.
So the maintenance of our workforce then becomes really important as well. We have to make sure that we’re providing opportunities and training and competitive salaries and benefits. As we all know, and certainly your members know this as well as anybody- over the last two years, the nature of work has changed a lot and as a result of that, the city has to change how we look at our workforce and the work that we do every day as well. We have to be competitive in that environment also. So as you’ve said, it’s about our practices and hiring and what we do to make sure that anyone that walks in the front door, whatever background they may be coming out of to serve the residents of the city, that they’re welcomed, they’re affirmed, they’re appreciated and they can sustain that job with us for as long as they want to have it and we want to have them.
There’s not a magic to that but it is a commitment to processes and programs and keeping open conversations with our employees at the forefront of how we do our work every day.
You’ve also mentioned, you know, it’s in how we spend our money. So we know that that economic power really is power. That is the ability to make change in the world and it’s the ability to achieve who it is you want to be as a person- your ability to control your own financial destiny and, uh, again, difficult, long overdue, important conversations. For too long, too many segments of our society were cut off from those opportunities to build that generational wealth. So we have a responsibility and obligation as a city to look at how we spend our money and to make those investments in small businesses, minority owned businesses, women owned businesses- businesses that have traditionally been left on the outside looking in.
I think if we do that-because here’s what we know about those 3,500 businesses that I’ve referenced previously- the overwhelming majority of those in the city of Frederick are small businesses. They’re not 100 and 200 person operations, they are 10 and 20 person operations. It’s the backbone of our economy and if we’re not doing everything we can do in local government to try and support and uplift those small businesses, we’re going to lose something that’s really critical because they are the sustainers.
We love our big employers. Our big employers help us in ways that small employers can’t, but our small employers, by volume, are where the strength of our local economy gets built every day. They’re the service providers and they’re the points of connection between those large businesses. They’re not just a vendor for us, they’re a vendor for the private sector as well and anything that we can do that can build that landscape to be stronger, more cohesive, more diverse, I think it’s in the best interest of our community quite honestly. It makes good business sense, both for the city and for the business community, that this is something that we’re interested in and that the business can be interested in.
RW: So to affirm everything you’ve just said, anybody who listens to this conversation when we post it, that has questions about how we prove the things you said aren’t just inherently true, but are imperatively, demonstrable, I will provide them a copy of the 2018 Kellogg Foundation out of Battle Creek, Michigan study called the Business Case for Racial Equity.
It’s about a 48 page report that uses statistics from cities, mostly larger than Frederick, but one or two that are smaller than Frederick that had a commitment, the same commitment that you and the board of alderman made, that shows how those small entrepreneurs, medium-sized businesses and the largest fortune 20 companies have benefited by operating within a community that takes this concept seriously. The numbers are irrefutable, it perfectly backs up every statement you just made.
MO: And I think we know, sort of intuitively, that if we’re not building that opportunity for every segment of our society, every economic demographic, social, cultural background that we’ve got, we’re gonna pay for it in some other way, in some other way that we’re still gonna spend money on- but we’re not going to be spending money in a way that builds economic opportunity for people. We’re going to be doing it in how we provide direct services to people who are falling below the threshold of what it takes to survive. People who need the additional training and education to get that good job. So we’ve got to spend some money on the front side so that we can reduce over time what we have to spend on the backside of fixing the mistakes. Right now we’re trying to fix hundreds, if not thousands of years of mistakes.
RW: Yeah, no, it’s a great point.
Most of the folks that will watch us, including your constituents, both citizens/residents, as well as business owners, may not be aware of the important state leadership role you play on the Maryland Municipal League Legislative Committee. So given we’re in the heart of the General Assembly session right now for 2022, and there are a ton of bills that affect every aspect of how we live our lives, we are approaching something like 3,000 draft pieces of legislation. Hopefully we’ll only see six or seven hundred signed into law in April, but would you talk for a minute about why MML matters and why it’s important to influence the general assembly process as one of the leading voices of the 157 municipalities?
MO: So yeah for people who don’t really understand what the Maryland Municipal League is, it’s the sort of coalition of 157 municipal governments, like the city of Frederick, up to and including the city of Baltimore down to communities like Burkittsville. These are the incorporated municipalities in Maryland and we all support an association that works on behalf of our member organizations. One of the most important jobs that organization does on an annual basis is review legislative action in Annapolis to try and determine impact on local governments, to take priority legislation and move it forward in Annapolis, we hope,
With great advocates that work for the Maryland Municipal League but with support of elected officials from across the state who will go to Annapolis and will testify on bills, who will write testimony, submit it to the various committees..the legislative committee is the body that makes those recommendations on what the league should support, what the league should oppose, which sometimes is just as important. I want to believe that nearly every piece of legislation is put in with a good intention, but just because it starts with a good intention doesn’t mean it’s going to have a good outcome.
There are people who are putting in bills that are intended to solve some problems, but from a municipal perspective, we believe they’re going to create larger ones for us at the local level. So, it’s important for us to support what we think is good for municipal government and to oppose the things that we think are not good for municipal government.
On an annual basis, I think it is some of the most important work that I can do outside of what I do every day in my office for the city of Frederick, because the power that these 157 municipal governments have when we speak with one voice is substantial in advocating for things that are important to us.
I could get into the details of specific legislation that we’ve supported or opposed over the years, but I’ll tell you the most important thing that we’ve had to take a look at over the last decade has been highway user rep and while that doesn’t seem like a particularly sexy topic to everybody who doesn’t know what that is, this is the piece of the gas tax that every resident and visitor of the state pays when they buy gasoline, that goes to support transportation infrastructure in the state. A portion of that buy formula gets returned to the local government so we can do street maintenance projects in our own communities. 12 years ago that got cut dramatically as a result of the great recession and we’ve been fighting for a decade to slowly try and bring it back to what it was then.
We’ve lost millions of dollars in revenue that we’re never going to get back, but the roads don’t fix themselves and they don’t stop degrading just because we don’t have the resources. And I want to be clear that HUR money is critical to us, but it supplements the money that we have to put in anyway to do these- it just slows down what we’re able to do.
Our advocacy on that particular bill over the last couple of years, has been very successful in getting at least a substantial restoration to what those historic levels have been. It’s not something our residents necessarily are acutely tuned into but it means an enormous amount to us as we put a budget together on an annual basis, that we’ve got that money-, $800,000 or more- to support street projects in the city of Frederick.
RW: I hope Frederick residents pay just a little bit more attention to the importance of MML, because I know that when you, Emily Keller from Hagerstown, Jake Day from Salisbury, Brandon Scott from Baltimore show up in the halls of Annapolis, you are viewed as primarily concerned about the interest of the city of Frederick, but recognize that power that you referred to in terms of the voice of 157. So hopefully people pay more attention to that and see that.
I did want to talk about one really important factor because it’s something we’re seeing- I watched a CNN piece about this the other night about-public safety. You know, it is a foundational obligation that a mayor of a city and an elected board of alderman make to the citizens. You’ve done some really important things in that regard now and I wanted you to touch on them for a little bit.
So I’ll go back a couple years. Pre-COVID the downtown safety insecurity initiative was a holistic way to view quality of life issues that impact a historic downtown. Your creation of a housing and human services department that understands the importance of.. sort of critical backbone services to people who are most vulnerable and most in need and often because of that, vulnerability and need are contributing to quality of life concerns for folks who maybe don’t suffer in that way in their daily life. Finally, most important, I think recently when there’s all this talk about defunding and refunding and reallocating, the creation of the crisis car as a way to integrate mental health service delivery with law enforcement… I think those things need more focus and they don’t get the focus they deserve. So could we talk about that for a few minutes?
MO: Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I’ve been really proud of over my time in offices is the support that I’ve voiced for our public safety professionals in the city of Frederick. We’re very fortunate in Frederick, honestly more fortunate than a lot of communities in this country to have a really strong relationship between the community and our police department. I think that’s born out of decades of good leadership that has forged that relationship. Two years ago, 2020, I think we were all dismayed, um, agashed, angry about what we saw transpire in Minnesota with the murder of George Floyd and what that did was once again, crystallize a really important, long overdue conversation about the roles that these really critical public institutions have to play. How do we make sure that as we move forward, we’re doing that in a way that is responsible and respectful of some really complicated discussions.
I did not expect as the pandemic was getting underway, that I would have to fill a critical role in our police department, in hiring a new chief and yet that’s what happened. Just before the pandemic started, we didn’t know the pandemic was coming- we had our retirement at the top of the agency and then the pandemic hit. By the time the Fall rolled around, we were able to get back into that hiring process and I couldn’t be happier with the selection of Jason Lando as our police chief.
We talked through the hiring process- and we had the benefit of the summer of 2020 to help inform that process a little bit, to understand what his mindset and thought processes were about modern policing- that it’s not just about law enforcement, that the concept of community policing has to be something that you live out in a completely different way.
The establishment of crisis car programs, that we talked about in the interview process that he wanted to do… our ability to be able to support that I think is really critical because it acknowledged a couple of things- that police play an important role in the fabric of society. At their core they are our first responder of necessity to ensure that when situations are unpredictable that there is a trained individual who can evaluate and analyze that situation on the front end to provide support and safety to anybody else might be in the vicinity of whatever that incident is.
The crisis car places a police officer, mental health crisis counselor and a fire and rescue medical technician together in a single response vehicle so that when a call comes in, that’s appropriate for that kind of holistic response, all the pieces are in place to ensure that if this is really someone who is in mental health crisis, that we can provide first with a mental health response and not necessarily with a law enforcement response.
It doesn’t take law enforcement out of the equation, but it allows the person who ought to run point on a particular call to do so. Someone who’s in a substance abuse crisis- the paramedic may be the first one that needs to be able to respond to that situation. When the calls come in and we saw this only a few weeks ago, calls can come in that seem fairly routine from a policing perspective and they can change very quickly.
So I’m really excited about the opportunities that come from being able to create this mobile crisis response and coupled with that we have also entered into our law enforcement assisted diversion program with the health department and the state’s attorney and the public defender’s office and parole and probation, to take some low level- what would typically be deemed low level criminal offenses- and hopefully divert those individuals from the criminal justice system and get them into a mental health or substance abuse counseling system.
If we can solve that problem, then maybe the criminal justice problem won’t have to manifest itself and wouldn’t have manifested itself because of that, that lack of other support. So this holistic response, the ability to work in partnership with others to not look at policing as a silo, that it’s another piece of the service delivery model, I think is really important. I’m very happy that it was intentional to hire a police chief that had that mindset and then to be able to move forward to make it.
RW: And I think it bodes well for the future of the city of Frederick because these are decisions that have a level of risk inherent with them.
If we look historically at public officials and especially chief executives, there’s an element of risk aversion in doing what you do and it’s perfectly understandable and acceptable
MO: Well you’re having to run for your job every four years
RW: Right. But the fact that you’re willing to step outside of that veil to do things that you firmly believe will make life better for everybody involved. Conservatives and liberals agree on the concept that our criminal justice system needs deep, abiding and lasting reform. Locking a kid up for a possession, quantity of marijuana is likely going to make that kid a better dealer, as opposed to someone who can turn their life around where a diversion program has exactly the opposite-we know that from the success of the drug courts, but it took a little bit more risk averse and to take that further step. I think you’ve done that.
As we wrap up, I still have like four pages of questions so later in the year, I’m going to ask you to consider doing this again through more of our questions, but I think it all ties together right? I started off by saying you received a mandate from the voters of the city of Frederick to continue on, to step out, to lead our city with intention and purpose and focus. You’ve done that. You’ve been rewarded for it. We’re going to be your partner as you continue to do it.
The one thing I’ll say to our members is just know that every single day we are in strategic communication and collaboration with the mayor’s team, with economic development from the city and county, tourism and the Downtown Frederick Partnership in the main streets to create economic opportunity unburdened by bureaucracy because of the Mayor’s vision and County Executive Gardner’s vision.
I look forward to us continuing that work, and I look forward to all the great things I know you’re working on and will deliver to the residents of the City of Frederick. So until our next critical conversation, maybe later in the year, Mayor O’Connor I want to thank you for taking some time to talk to chamber members today.
MO: Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. We want to maintain a relationship with our business community that is open and collaborative.I think, the relationship that we’ve tried to build with the organizations that you mentioned- it’s one of the things that makes Frederick a really great place, and we’ve traveled around enough to know that it is not present everywhere.
These relationships are unique and I really think they make Frederick a better community.
RW: Great- thanks a lot, sir. Have a great day
MO: You too