Renters also deserve a voice in community

The article about the Columbia Council election in Long Reach Village was very disturbing to me ("Long Reach renter issue sparks election debate," April 1).

I do not know the details of each candidate's merits, but I do know that the comments of incumbent Cecilia Januszkiewicz make her an unacceptable candidate, regardless of her previous record as a member of the council.

Since when does homeownership make one a more worthy citizen than a renter? I thought that the concept that property owners were the only individuals who could have a say in government was as obsolete as limiting voting privileges to white males.

Although rules about voting for Columbia Council and village boards are not identical to federal, state and local election laws, I doubt that the intent was to make renters second-class citizens.

Ms. Januszkiewicz's statement about the nature of renters -- "They're not necessarily permanent residents, or people with more permanent roots in the community" -- smacks of an elitism that is distasteful and hurtful.

Not everyone can afford to be a homeowner, but that should not preclude their full participation in the life and decision-making of their community.

Roni Goss Berkowitz, Columbia

Affordable housing for the truly needy

I would like to thank Philip Valle for his letter to the editor in The Sun in Howard April 5 ("Merdon suggests teachers can 'eat cake'").

I am a firm believer in holding our public officials accountable for the actions they take and the statements they make. The issue of affordable housing is sensitive and often invites heated debate.

The Howard County executive and the County Council will be faced with deciding the future of Howard County in the area of affordable housing. The debate should not focus on public employees, but rather the truly needy. We have a significant percentage of residents who earn less than $20,000 a year. It is my belief that the county government has the responsibility to help those who fall within the realm of low income.

A person making in the range of minimum wage cannot easily afford the $80,000 to $130,000 house that Leonard Vaugh, director of public housing, defines as affordable.

I commend the Housing Authority for its efforts to define affordable housing, but I believe it is missing the needs of its target audience. While reviewing proposals the council is asked to consider, I will consistently ask whether any initiative will move people in the lower income bracket into their own homes.

While I understand that the county needs to address the issue of teacher salaries, I do not believe it is fair to the disadvantaged to tie it to the issue of affordable housing. The proposed increase in teacher salaries will be addressed in the appropriate forum through the budget process.

Christopher J. Merdon, Ellicott City

The writer is a Howard County councilman.

Reading my own obituary

When Sun reporter Edward Lee said he wanted to do a profile of me as a community activist, I was surprised and reluctant. I am but one of hundreds of volunteers in Howard County, and our country, who enjoy being active in community affairs.

As any one of this number will attest, volunteerism is based on the desire to better the quality of life beyond the boundaries of one's own immediate life.

Volunteers don't seek compensation or public glorification. But if journalists are going to seek them out to write profiles of them, they must get the facts straight and, in what they write, truly reflect what that volunteer is all about.

In his profile of me published April 2 ("Longtime activist Sieg to retire"), Mr. Lee did not write about my philosophy of life as I related it to him; how I believe each citizen in a democracy has a magnificent opportunity and obligation to be involved in bettering community life -- not a novel idea, but one that excites me.

Instead, Mr. Lee chose to concentrate on my "retirement." In effect, he wrote my obituary. (There is nothing as certain to make you feel irrelevant as reading your obituary before your death.)

True, I am moderating the depth and intensity of my work in some areas. True, I am resigning an active role in the Coalition to Protect Maryland Burial Sites. But this is only so I can devote time to writing a book about the amazing strides of this organization to help save Maryland cemeteries from wanton desecration and destruction.

Have I "retired" from involvement in community affairs? Never. Have I quit as volunteer coordinator and caretaker of the 19th century Whipps Cemetery in Ellicott City? Not until my final breath.

While volunteers work on different problems and in different arenas -- and depending on age, health and other circumstances, at differing levels of intensity -- we all share this truth: Volunteerism is a state of the mind, the heart and the soul.

Volunteers may die, but they rarely "retire."

Barbara Sieg, Ellicott City

A council trying to make its own rules?

I recently spotted an ad for a Howard County Council Resolution 26 by council member C. Vernon Gray, proposing to pool all the members' expenses in one account and to modify the current council rules and regulations.

There are two automatic alarms here for a council member who really believes that being elected gives you inherent rights to make your own rules.

Alarm 1: During the 1996 Charter Review Commission hearings, with an agenda driven by the County Council members, the county attorney addressed the commission and explained that the "Council Rules and Regulations" did not agree with the citizens' charter. Therefore, the charter must be amended -- and the group proceeded to do just that.

Alarm 2: The County Council may not revise the rules and regulations by a resolution (an administrative act). It must be changed by a council "bill." This practice was initiated by then-council member Ruth U. Keeton in the (false) belief that it would circumvent the citizens' right to force a referendum.

During Dr. Gray's tenure, he has voted to raise his annual salary from around $5,000 to $30,000. During his previous term, the press reported that his expense account ran more than $4,000. Now, Dr. Gray has received fellow member Mary Lorsung's blessing to go for a $7,000 allowance.

To reduce the storm from future press stories, Dr. Gray intends to put every members' expenses into the same account and avoid personal accountability.

Dr. Gray was wrong when he recently told a reporter that everybody in his district knows what he is doing. Most Columbia residents do not follow council business because they do not feel impacted.

You cannot serve the citizens and set acceptable standards by violating the charter regulations. The real issues are ethics, not politics.

As one of the authors of the charter, I hope that a group of citizens will correct the damage done during the last 20 years by a number of council members and demand higher ethical standards of their candidates.

James M. Holway, Ellicott City

Tax money, church not a good mix

Despite the implications of Delroy L. Cornick Sr. ("When church does the work of state," letters, The Sun in Howard, April 4), I am not against permitting religious institutions to help meet the needs of impoverished people and communities in the state if they should choose to do so. I am simply against funding such institutions with our tax money.

Mr. Cornick writes of "the paternalism and largess of the state" as if it were some kind of foreign entity about which we should be concerned. That, of course, is nonsense. The state is us, all of us, and we all control it through our elected officials.

There are real public needs that need to be met. We should ensure that they are through the only entities that we control, regardless of whatever churches and other religious groups may do of their own accord.

Religious institutions, on the other hand, are not controlled by us. Some of them (the ones ruled from the top down) are not even controlled by their own members.

Why should we trust these independent institutions, each having their own interests, to do our work for us? Should we be required to offer them the equivalent of a bribe to do for us what we ought to be doing for ourselves?

Mr. Cornick mentions the three-pronged test that courts have sometimes used when government programs involve religious institutions and asks "what is the objective?"

My objection is that the "secular legal purpose" of the first prong can be served directly by public institutions, that religion is advanced when religious institutions are provided with money (from taxpayers) that they would not otherwise have and that such programs inevitably "foster an excessive entanglement with religion." How, otherwise, is the state going to ensure that the secular legal purpose specified in the legislation is truly being implemented?

Mr. Cornick argues that the Constitution's "free-exercise clause" is inadequately quoted in discussions about this issue.

Religious freedom is not denied when taxpayers do not fund it. Those who want their own religious freedom would do well to fund their own institutions.

Kenneth A. Stevens, Savage

Kazan heroically fought Communism

Elia Kazan is a hero. His testimony against the Hollywood Ten, the notorious card-carrying members of the American Communist Party who blackballed hundreds of anti-communist writers and filmakers during America's Red Decade, was courageous.

The Hollywood Communists deserve no sympathy.

They supported a foreign power that sought the violent overthrow of the United States, and whose practicioners throughout the "workers paradise" in the Communist world were responsible for the murder of tens of millions of innocent victims.

For them to claim that their freedom of speech was violated because they were asked whether they were members of the Communist Party is hypocritical at best since they took their orders from a totalitarian regime that would have extinguished this right for all Americans had their political goals become reality.

If there is any "deafening silence" in America or "respect" lacking, it has to do with the everlasting silence of the left in American, who to this day have never acknowledged the death and destruction wreaked throughout the globe by their collectivist ideology during this century.

Nor have they ever paid their respects to the millions of victims of the practicioners of their cherished ideal.

Manfred Smith, Columbia

Pub Date: 4/11/99