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One of the more interesting documents that I found on a shelf in the County Executive’s corner of the 4th Floor of the Arundel Center when I arrived was a magazine-like report called The Lighthizer Years.
Jim Lighthizer served as County Executive from 1982 to 1990, and reading about his administration’s accomplishments in the words of the people who worked for him was fascinating and instructive.
My staff is feeling pretty good about what we’ve managed to get done over the last eight years, and have convinced me that it’s our duty to publish something similar, both in video and in a readable form - a performance report. They have proposed calling it The Pittman Years: Making The Best Place For All.
Yesterday, they had me scheduled for an unscripted recording session at the ArundelTV studio in Glen Burnie, and they provided me with two documents in advance. One was a three-page list of questions that I would be asked to prompt my reflections. The other was a 25-page list of highlights to jog my memory.
They made a valiant effort to organize my thoughts into categories, an undertaking that they’ve been at for eight years. They used to call them Pittman’s Principles, but I never really took to it, because I’m a right-brained person who likes to stay in touch with the big picture, the whole, with all of the ways that the parts are connected.
It’s probably why I’ve always been better at big ideas than follow-through on the details, but I digress, just as I digressed over and over again during a solid two-hours of talking in front of the cameras yesterday.
The principles are my own, and I’m committed to each of them: growing trust in government, expanding economic opportunity, delivering livable communities and green infrastructure, and protecting health and wellness. But most of the sub-categories contribute to all four of the pillars: community engagement; diversity, equity, and inclusion; fiscal discipline; education; economic and workforce development; land use and planning; environmental protection and climate resilience; housing; health and human services; public safety; Crownsville. And below that is a much longer list.
The good news for all of us is that the only people who will be expected to watch the two hours of me rambling on these topics are the folks editing the video. They’ll be interviewing our partners in the work and mixing it all up with images and graphics to keep you awake.
But as a regular reader of this weekly letter, I need your help. Please email us at weeklyletter@aacounty.org with what you think should be included. It can be something we built, a law we passed, or even an event we organized. And if it’s work not finished, that’s even better. When I agreed to do this look-back, it was on the condition that I could also identify work that remains to be done. That’s what matters most.
And for a bit of a giggle, take a look at the last time I was in the Arundel TV studio trying to cram our first year of accomplishments into a two-minute video. I was younger then. Here’s the link.
Until next week…