It’s been a very strange week on Rockville’s campaign trail, starting on Monday at the Mayor and Council meeting and ending with a conversation in the parking lot after the Candidate Forum on Thursday night.

The Mayor and Council meetings often start with a half hour of proclamations highlighting a particular person, anniversary, or community issue, each read out by a council member without any drama. The October 2, 2023 meeting followed this tradition with the 45th Anniversary Art in Public Places Program, Arts and Humanities Month, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Domestic Violence Awareness Month, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and Walktober but things went strangely awry. In the agenda, David Myles was assigned to Domestic Violence Awareness Month, an ironic choice give his recent arrest for an assault on his wife. That must have caught someone else’s attention in City Hall because Myles was reassigned to Breast Cancer Awareness Month at the last minute. Council Member Myles, who participated in the meeting remotely, didn’t agree with the change and voiced his concerns during his presentation, and then proceeded to discuss domestic violence instead of reading the proclamation on breast cancer awareness. Mayor Newton attempted to interrupt him but they merely wound up talking over each other, making an uncomfortable mess, leaving it to the Mayor to read the proclamation on Breast Cancer Awareness Month. You can watch this unfold online at “Proclamation Declaring October 2023, at Breast Cancer Awareness Month (CM Myles).”

The Candidate Forum on Thursday, October 5 hosted by Community Reach of Montgomery County with Rainbow Place Shelter at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Theatre demonstrated the extraordinary challenge that voters will have when faced with a dozen council candidates. Although we’re mid-season, most candidates haven’t managed to distinguish themselves and are relying far too much on platitudes and vague statements about leadership, neighborhoods, vacancies, residents, funding, taxes, transparency, experience, city services, safety, housing, green space, diversity, partnerships, and sustainability, so they all seem to offer the same ideas and solutions. Here are some potential distinctions among them, but can you identify who they are (and more importantly, does it matter?):

1. “I’m the only candidate that lives in Town Center.”
2. “I led the effort to tie funding for our needs-based organizations to the cost of inflation.”
3. “There’s a need for more live music in Town Center and throughout the city of Rockville.”
4. “While on the Charter Review Commission…[I] routinely brought up the issues of justice and equity.”
5. “I am disappointed in the vacancies in Town Center.”

Confusing matters, many talked out of two sides of their mouth: “we’re doing well on diversity but need to do more” or “we are a safe community but must hire more police” or “we need more live music and parks but we have to reduce expenses.” Part of it is due to the pressure to avoid alienating potential voters, but it’s also due to the nature of Candidate Forums: demanding simple answers to complex questions. At the Forum, a couple candidates had 90 seconds to answer:

• What are the problems you currently see facing Town Center and how do you intend to address them?
• Nonprofit organizations cover many services for city residents that Rockville helps to fund through grants.  Is there too much funding going to nonprofits or not enough? Is the city funding the most important services? Does the city get the best bang for its buck through the nonprofits that provide those services or would you recommend increasing city staff to provide such services?

Complex, compound questions can be tricky for both seasoned politicians and newcomers. Experienced politicians will sidestep parts of the question, while new candidates may struggle to provide clear answers due to lack of knowledge or experience, resorting to vague statements to avoid embarrassment. Neither helps voters make informed decisions. For clearer answers, forums should pose simple, open-ended questions. Providing questions in advance could also lead to better responses. While spontaneous answers can reveal a candidate’s values and superficial knowledge (gotcha!), they don’t necessarily reflect their critical thinking on specific topics like Town Center, Red Gate Park, or the city budget.

But even if questions are provided in advance, some candidates will be unprepared. The October 5 Candidate Forum addressed the referenda questions on the November ballot, which have been discussed by Mayor and Council for the last year (see Board of Supervisors of Elections Recommends Lowering Voting Age to 16 and Mayor and Council to Choose Earmarks and Decide Upcoming Election Changes), so every candidate should be prepared with an answer. The issues of lowering the voting age to 16, permitting noncitizens to vote, setting term limits, and creating representative districts are quite familiar to Council Members David Myles and Monique Ashton, yet were strangely unwilling to state their conclusions. In his closing remarks, Myles stated that “voting is private matter” and provided an “outline of his philosophy” so that voters might guess at his answers (perhaps he prefers that the City Council vote in secret?). Mayoral candidate Monique Ashton held up an illegible handwritten sign that elicited groans from the audience, who eventually was asked to read it out: “I will listen, convene, and do what I think is best for Rockville.” It’s a non-answer that anyone running for office can spout, but certainly not appropriate for a current council member running for mayor. Voters “hire” the Mayor and Council to lead the city; we need to know what you think and where you’re taking us.

Finally, the strangest event of the week occurred after the October 5 Forum in the parking lot. I ran into a candidate for the Rockville council who pointed out an error in my post about their voting record. They told me they had voted in the 2019 election and thought I had used an incorrect 2019 voter list provided by the City of Rockville. They also mentioned that they had notified the City Clerk about this mistake. So, on October 6, I contacted the City Clerk’s office to request an updated voter list, as the one they gave me in September 2023 seemed to be incorrect. They responded quickly, but instead of giving me a corrected list, they directed me to the State of Maryland. This was very strange. The City Clerk’s Office didn’t show any concern about the potential error in the 2019 voter list—it could suggest there are errors in the voter list for the upcoming election. Hmm. There are several ways to get at this without the City’s cooperation. It’s slow and costly, but I’ll keep at it. Hopefully, I’ll have answers before the election.