As the deadline countdown comes to a close for the group seeking to be elected to the Charter Board, former county commissioner Kai Hagen and his “Citizen Nominees” have ramped up their claims of land developer influence on the BOCC appointed board.
Monday, May 9th marks the final day for the petitioners to garner another 300 plus signatures to reach the minimum requirement of 2,000 submissions.
In 2009, Mr. Hagen and his comrade Janice Wiles lead an unsuccessful a petition drive to overturn the annexation of 3 parcels in the City of Frederick. There are claims that the approval rate on the number of valid signatures ended up being well below 50%; however in a subsequent communication with Hagen, he stated that the signatures were never turned in so that figure has no way of being substantiated. With this current drive, and a stated goal of 2,300 signatures, they will need a validity rate of better than 85%.
In a May 3rd petition update authored by Sherry Greenfield with the Frederick Gazette, it was incorrectly stated that Rocky Mackintosh is a land use attorney. However, the rest of the piece gave a good update on the current effort status.
The authored an article on May 4th about Mr. Hagen’s concerns over the 5 board members who have “ties to real estate.”
The MacRo Report Blog has addressed this issue as completely immaterial to the matter of writing a charter , as well as the issue of what Hagen and Wiles refer to as the appointed board’s desire to craft a strong county executive position in the charter document.