Christopher Adams for State Delegate

Estimated read time: 9 minutes

Primary elections are right around the corner - June 26th.  As a voter, you have been given the position of Human Resources Hiring Manager and tasked with the job of reviewing each candidate's qualifications.

The simple way to decide whom to vote for is to look at the letter following the candidate's name.  While that may be the simplest method to weed through the candidates, it's not the most reliable.  Think about how many jobs a Human Resources Manager rejected you for because they didn't see the letters BS, MS, or PhD after your name.  Do you think the candidate with one of those sets of letters after their name was more qualified than you?  If not, why would you think a D or an R after a candidate's name automatically qualifies them for the position they are running for?

You can also ignore the list of qualifications that includes such nonsense as born and raised on the Eastern Shore, go to Church every Sunday, and want to make our community a better place for my kids to raise their families.  Those types of statements tell you nothing about their qualifications for the position they seek.

What does that leave you to look at?  The person, their accomplishments, and their plan of action.

At least one candidate has given you his résumé loaded with some impressive accomplishments.  He prefaces his accomplishments with the introduction that he "served on the House Economic Matters Committee and worked directly on legislation that affected policy on banking, energy, business regulation, and commercial law."  He also stated that the House of Delegates, which he is a part, passed the state budget and worked on "well over 3,000 bills."  In other words, he did his job.

Now comes the hard part.  How well did Delegate Adams do his job?

Again, straight from his résumé, we can verify he did exactly what he outlined for us.
  • Delegate Adams is the primary sponsor of a HB135 that, in effect, edits an existing law.  The edits change the distance of offshore wind projects from "10 - 30 nautical miles" to "not less than 26 nautical miles."  What is important to understand about this bill is Delegate Adams created it in response to concerns that that the turbines - which are now much larger than originally proposed five years ago - will produce an eyesore that could have a negative impact on tourism.  As Delegate Adams told WMDT News, and they reported, "he's not against the turbines - he just wants them out of sight of beach goers." 

    Just as we should be concerned with preserving our rural and agricultural landscape, we should also be concerned with preserving our ocean seascape.  The opposition to Delegate Adam's bill doesn't live near the ocean and so ignore the potential negative aesthetic impact the turbines might have.  They are only concerned with the added cost to build the turbines six to nine nautical miles further out than with preserving the aesthetics of the beaches.  As of March, HB135 received an unfavorable report by the Economic Matters Committee and no further action has been taken.  Apparently, money matters more to those in Annapolis who won't have to live with the turbines than the people of Worcester County who will.

  • Delegate Adams is the primary sponsor of HB1163, Waterfowl Hunting License Reciprocity.  The bill allows a hunter from another state to hunt snow geese in Maryland if the hunter holds a valid hunting license from their home state, their home state also allows Maryland hunters to hunt snow geese in their state without holding that state's license, and the hunter purchases a Maryland migratory game bird stamp.  While I'm sure this bill cost Delegate Adams the snow geese vote, the bipartisan bill might stimulate economic activity here on the Eastern Shore benefiting more than hunters.  

    "What?" you might be thinking. 

    If you remember my article, Are You a Hole in Your Community's Leaky Bucket?, think of your community's economy as a bucket with holes and money as the water the bucket is supposed to hold.  Money leaves your community through state and federal taxes, spending at national companies (your big chain stores), and you leaving town for vacation, to name a few.  When money leaves your community, your quality of living goes down.  Money comes into your community through your pay check (if you are employed outside of your community), government grants, and, yes, tourism, to name a few.  When more money comes into your community, your quality of living goes up.

    Delegate Adam's HB1163 positions the Eastern Shore as a more desirable hunting destination for out-of-state hunters than other states that lack a hunting reciprocity agreement.  Hunters from another state means more money coming into your community.  More money means your quality of living goes up.  How does your quality of living go up?  More money circulating in your community means more money for your schools, more money to get local projects done, more jobs, including more seasonal jobs to earn extra Christmas money, to name a few. 

  • Sole sponsor of HB1426, Natural Resources - Aquaculture Leases and Public Shellfish Fishery Areas.  This bill is very near and dear to my heart.  When I first formed Five Drunk Rednecks with four other friends a few years ago, my friend Brian (The World Is Emptier Today) would spend many hours talking about how the state is forcing independent watermen out of business.  Burdensome legislation, buy backs of commercial licenses, waiting lists to get a license, prohibitive costs to get a boat licensed and on the water - and the list could go on for pages and pages - all create an expensive and tangled maze of obstacles to earning a living on the Bay.  As Brian said, "They [the government] want us out of business so the big corporations can lease the Bay bottom to farm it.  Most watermen can't afford to start an aquaculture enterprise.  Most of us don't even make enough money to get the credit we need to start in the first place."

    HB1426 attempts to step in to protect the independent watermen from the encroaching commercialization of the Bay.  The most endangered species on the Bay right now is the Maryland waterman.  HB1426 attempts to level the playing field to give our independent watermen an equal footing with multi-national corporations before our independent watermen disappear from the Bay.

The rest of Delegate Adam's résumé package gives an overview of other measures the House of Delegates worked on and gives you, the Human Resource Hiring Manager, a good feel for where Delegate Adams stands on various issues.  When he talks about the work on the budget and how Governor Hogan's plan, "Protecting Maryland Taxpayers Act of 2018", would shield Marylanders from paying an estimated $600 million in taxes, he notes the act never made it out of committee.

"Unfortunately, the temptation of new tax revenue is too much for the General Assembly to pass up," he wrote.

Delegate Adams echoed the sentiment many on the Eastern Shore have felt for several decades, if not longer.

State wetlands administrator Bill Morgante?
What do you mean there are no buffer zones
on Kent Island?  I see a couple of trees down
there.  The law doesn't say how many trees
make a buffer zone.
Watermen witness the transformation of a tidal marshland island, Kent Island, into a sprawling conglomeration of houses, condominiums, and big business connected by acres and acres of paved roads and parking lots.  In the last three years alone, approval has been given for a one thousand plus housing community, a community center complete with 108 parking spots and an active senior citizen community of an additional almost three hundred homes adjacent to a community of just over two hundred single family homes currently being built.  Rough math translates this growth to one building per less than one acre of land, which means close to a thousand acres of prime critical bay habitat is being paved and built on.  That's a thousand acres gone forever.

The watermen scratch their heads over the lack of the one to two hundred foot required buffer zones and the thousand foot limited development zone.  In the critical bay habitat the watermen live in, they can't build a house on less than five acres unless it is a house for a close family member.  They need to own twenty acres to build a house for anyone else.  Kent Island has become a suburb of Annapolis over the last thirty years and, apparently, is no longer considered by the Annapolis elite as critical bay habitat subject to the same rules as the rest of the Bay area.

Farmers witness the expansive lawns of mini-estates right to the water's edge and the lack of buffer zones, lack of storm runoff drainage ditches for filtering pollution and controlling erosion, and lack of strict limitations on all the fertilizers and herbicides used to create the perfect lawn.  They scratch their heads as they drive by an estate booked for a weekend wedding accommodating a couple of hundred guests trampling the perfect lawn, the trampling that will be fixed the next day with more fertilizers and herbicides before next weekend's booked event.  Lawmakers in Annapolis, apparently, don't view waterfront mini-estates in the same light as farms despite the evidence that private residences contribute to at least half of the Bay pollution and possibly even more.

Enough of blaming the little guy.

Delegate Christopher Adams has given you a comprehensive employment package you can read below.  From it, you can see the action he has taken, why he took those actions, and deduce what more he would like to do if hired for another four years.  He has actively fought for the average Worcester resident who doesn't want to look at an eyesore every day as she looks out over the ocean, an eyesore that has the potential to deter tourism and negatively affect her local economy.  He's actively fought for the hard working watermen to help preserve the long history of their way of life by giving them a fighting chance to remain competitive as corporate interests gobble up the leasing rights from them.  He's actively fought for local businesses and made it easier for hunters to hunt in this state, a move that may entice more hunters to come to the Eastern Shore and support our local businesses.

That's a pretty impressive record for a freshman delegate.  If he could do all that in his first four years, imagine what he could do in the next four. 



TL;DR folks:
Delegate Adams has built an impressive record of accomplishments during his first four years in Annapolis.  If the article above or his newsletter below are too long to read, then take my word for it.  Vote for Christopher Adams in the primary on June 26th.


Related Links:
Jury reform may have a sympathetic ear in a genuine statesman




For your reading pleasure:
Some readers may find this smaller version of the flip book below difficult to read or control.  You can either right click the newsletter and select "view in a new window" or click here to read the enlarged version at its home website, yumpu.com.  Yumpu is the third party website that allowed me to create the flipbook of Delegate Adam's newsletter.  No registration is required and it is not a spam site.  It's a legitimate website run by a company based in Germany.  You can visit the site with the same sense of security you visit any other web site.





Added bonus for your viewing pleasure:



Posted by Five Drunk Rednecks

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