2008 Board of Trade Potomac Conference
September 11, 2008
Thank you very, very much. It’s great to be with all of you.
I have enjoyed so very much over these last 18 months being able to work with two very committed and pragmatic elected officials as my neighbors, Mayor Adrian Fenty and Governor Tim Kaine. Not only do we have a tremendous amount of professional and collegial respect for each other, but we actually like each other, too. And it’s amazing the sort of synergies that we can create as we realize that we’re all in this together.
I am joined here by a great County Executive from Montgomery County, Ike Leggett. And Mike Knapp is here, who is the President of the County Council of Montgomery County.
Also we have Shari Wilson, who is our Secretary of the Environment. Malcolm Woolf is the head of our Maryland Energy Administration, and David Edgerley is our Secretary of Economic Development. Thank you all very, very much. (Applause)
I want to thank Delegate Bromwell, who is here from Montgomery County. (Applause)
And thank you to the Greater Washington Board of Trade for your support in our efforts to restore fiscal responsibility to Maryland.
For all of the diversity that we have in this Chesapeake crescent, we have a powerhouse of creativity, of innovation, of business acumen, of advantages and ability to compete in the global economy that’s unrivaled by any other place in our country. Not only do I believe that, but there are facts to back that up. And all of you know it as well.
And one of the happy facts that I’ve found from traveling around this entire region is that, for all of our diversity, there are certain important things that unite us as a people – our belief in the dignity of every individual, our belief in our own personal responsibility to advance the common good, and our understanding that, in the beginning and the end of our days, there is a unity to spirit and matter and, in fact, what we do in our own lifetimes does matter. And it matters especially on this pressing moral issue of sustainability of the land, the air, the water, the energy that we use.
In the corporate strategy that we use in our public corporation called Maryland State government, we have three unified strategies. One is security integration – sharing information so we make our region a safer place. The other one is workforce creation – if we have the best workforce in the world, we’re going to have the best economy in the world. And the third one is the sustainability issue that all of you are focused on today.
I’m not going to be redundant, but “Greening our Region, Growing our Business” – they go hand in hand, and I think that all of you understand that. It’s a big scary thing to see the projections for our State and our environment. For instance, Maryland is the third most vulnerable State in terms of sea level rise. But true consensus does form out of crisis. And out of this crisis, we can come together. We can apply the best minds to the challenges that we face together.
Our Efforts in Maryland
I wanted to touch briefly on a few things.
1. Earlier today our EmPOWER Maryland goal was mentioned. Admittedly, it is an ambitious goal to reduce energy consumption by 15 percent by 2015. How are we going to do it? Well, one of the ways is working with Governor Kaine, Mayor Fenty and many of you in this collaborative effort to convert 74 million square feet of buildings into high performance, green structures. Working together, we’re going to be able to save about $37 million, while reducing 555 tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
And at the State level, we’re setting new green standards for public buildings, we’re investing in green schoolhouses, and we’re giving grants and tax incentives to home and business owners to help defray the costs of installing green energy systems.
2. In addition to promoting efficiency, we’re also working to make our State a national leader in renewable energy. I think that there’s so much common ground to be found here with our neighbors in the District and Virginia as well. We’ve raised our renewable energy portfolio standard to 20% by 2022 and we’ve created an investment fund to help promote research and development of renewable technologies.
We’re working with our friends in Montgomery County, the University of Maryland, and the City of Baltimore to leverage our own market power to jumpstart large-scale commercial renewable energy projects. And our Department of Business and Economic Development representatives are fielding two, three, four more calls a week from alternative energy companies looking to relocate in Maryland or in this region because of our leadership.
3. We’re finding ways to grow smarter. My predecessor, Parris Glendening, was a real leader on this issue of growing in smarter and more sustainable ways, and we have picked up where he left off. We reinstituted our Office of Smart Growth and, more accurately, we actually turned our whole planning department into the Department of Smart Growth.
For the first time in a quarter century, we’ve upgraded our critical areas laws, and we are sticking with our open space laws. The temptation, especially when your budget is turned down, is to hit that open space funding for general fund relief. We haven’t done that. We did other things that, again, in the short term were very, very unpopular and painful, but long-term are in the best interest of our children and our children’s children.
We are prioritizing transit-oriented development. We anticipate about 1.3 million people moving to our State because of BRAC, and because of the nature of our vibrant economy in the years ahead. So by 2030 we expect about 1.2 or 1.3 million people.
There is enough land theoretically around the 111 transit stops in our State that can comfortably uphold that residential growth, and so we are really pushing in a new way transit-oriented development. We are certainly going through the same challenges, in terms of not having the dollars we would like to have in order to invest in those transportation improvements. But tough cycles don’t last, tough people do, and so we are keeping hope alive and that is our direction.
We hope to be able to work together as a region to make WMATA the centerpiece of a joint transit-oriented development effort that will lead the nation. We’ve already done some things in collaboration with Mayor Fenty.
4. On the climate change issue, we have converted all of our State vehicle fleet, including MTA buses, to clean fuel vehicles. We created a Statewide Climate Change Commission. We have, as I mentioned before, the 2015 effort that segues into this, and we’ll join with other States like Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, and Rhode Island in the nation’s first cap-and-trade auction on greenhouse gases.
And we are working very hard also to restore the health of that national treasure known as the Chesapeake Bay with performance-measured solutions. In Government we’re very, very good about telling you annually what the inputs are. We are only now, because of innovative leaders like Mayor Fenty and Governor Kaine, actually embracing this notion of measuring for outputs. We have embraced a program called BayStat, where instead of asking the question every year “What are we putting into environmental protection,” instead what we want to know is things like how much nitrogen have we taken out because of the $8 million we put into cover crops, because of this acreage of expended buffer, or because we were able to upgrade new sewage treatment plants.
Conclusion
I’ve probably run long enough, but let me leave you with this thought. There is a beautiful Native American saying that says that “How we treat one another is reflected in how we treat the earth.” How we treat one another is reflected in how we treat the earth. And you know what? How we treat the earth just might also usher in a new era of how we treat one another.
So it’s my great honor to be able to serve you in this vibrant region. Thanks very much. (Applause)
