This post is from another voice from Charles Village - by Pamela Wilson
What if there was no
Charles Village Community Benefits District (CVCBD)? And, what is it anyway?
As was discovered in a University of Maryland
study a few years ago*, many people in our community do not even know what the
Charles Village Community Benefits (CVDBD) is or even that it exists at all. Many people, even those paying the surtax, do
not know what the CVCBD does. Many
people credit the CVCBD with programs that have nothing to do with it. Many people do not really know how the CVCBD
is run. Many people are dissatisfied
with the CVCBD but are uncomfortable in directly opposing it because they are
not sure what would happen if it were to cease operations.
Certainly there is much misinformation out there not only for
the people who live within the "District" but also people who are not
in the District, including academia and the government. I recently discovered two papers on urban
issues which used the CVCBD as their subject, one entitled "The
Sub-Districting of Cities", was written by two professors, one from the
University of Maryland College Park and one from Indiana University and the
other, entitled "Private Governments In Urban Areas Political Contracting
and Collective Action", written by professors Susan E. Baer of San Diego
State University and Richard C. Feiock of Florida State University. I found some of the information used in these
papers was not entirely correct or was missing important aspects affecting the
outcomes described. In both cases
neither paper correctly states the Maryland
State law's percentage of
required referendum support for passage of the CVCBD's enabling legislation. Instead the papers give credit to much
greater community support for establishing the CVCBD than the actual numbers from
the referendum show. This affects the research
and continues the spread of the misinformation about the CVCBD possibly
resulting in governmental decisions not beneficial to communities.
Even among long-time residents and property owners in the
area who voted in the sole referendum establishing the CVCBD few know much
about it. So, I will try, as briefly as
possible, to explain a few important facts so that people reading our blog can
better determine for themselves what this CVCBD really is and how it affects
their lives, more than they may suspect.
The information provided here comes from more than a decade of work by
community activists, including me and my husband, to research every source of
information we could find. These sources
include the enabling State and City laws (before and after amendments to the
original bills), early promotional pamphlets, grass-roots efforts to defeat
passage of the law, and recounting of meetings and experiences by residents
present at that time. We obtained board
meeting minutes and as many notes as possible from the inception of the CVCBD. Besides our research, we participated in the
CVCBD, we worked to make the CVCBD better and we even worked to eliminate it,
through legal means via law suits as well as governmental means through our City
representatives. In an effort to more
closely understand on a personal level how the CVCBD worked and what it was
doing, I and others of our group even became members of the CVCBD's Board of
Directors as well as participated in many of their committees. Here is some of what we discovered from all
our work.
Because there is some complicated information to pass along
I feel it better to divide my blog into several smaller ones which will cover
the following questions:
I. What is the Charles Village Community Benefits (CVDBD)
and where did the CVCBD come from?
II. How the CVCBD is run?
III. What does the CVCBD do?
IV. What would happen if it were to cease operations, if
there was no CVCBD?
Each week I will post one of these chapters and will also keep
them listed on the right side of the blog's under the list of pages starting
with "Home". This way it will
continue to be readily available to readers.
Here is the first chapter on this subject -
I. What is the Charles Village
Community Benefits (CVDBD) and where did the CVCBD come from?
