August 18, 2003

If you have been reading the Gazette and the Beltsville News, you should have heard the news by now that there is a committee looking into incorporating Beltsville. Kevin Kennedy started it. When he was running for the county council, several people approached him and asked about the idea of incorporating Beltsville. He decided to look into it.

The Executive Committee has been meeting since January. It is made up of several different community/association leaders, including myself that Kevin picked. Since then, the group has been on a fact-finding mission to look into all of the aspects of being incorporated. We needed to establish boundaries, begin to draft a charter, look into the services we would be interested in having, taxes, size and boundaries of the wards/precincts/districts, and find data associated with the cost of being incorporated.

At this point, we have decided on the 20705 zip code area as the boundaries. We are recommending that the Beltsville Ag Research land to the east of Kennilworth Ave. be included as well. We have come up with a living charter that is a broad framework for the proposed municipality. It is currently 35 pages long. The draft can be found on the internet at Beltsville.com. We have decided to call the incorporated area The Villages of Beltsville. We wanted to preserve the individual neighborhood areas, hence, smaller areas may possibly be known as TheVillage of Calverton , The Village of Vansville etc.

There will be a Mayor who has "veto" power and will have a 4 year term. He will have the right to sit in on the Council’s meeting but will have no vote at those meetings. The Council will be made of 7 members each for a 2 year term. Five will be voted for within wards/precincts/districts, one will be at large, and one will be appointed from the business community by the Mayor. Business meetings will be twice a month and 1 extra monthly meeting will be a working session. The Mayor and Council will then appoint others as needed such as Director of Public Works, Chief of Police, etc.

One of the members obtained copies of the budget for Greenbelt, Laurel, Bowie and College Park. He has been working diligently to compare the costs of running these municipalities. He’s gathered information on the population size, area in sq. miles, assessments, tax rate, amount of real estate taxes, and the total budget for each. We need to dig deeper to find out more specific information on the types of services each municipality has, the number of people involved to run the services, salaries, etc. Our goal is to figure out just what it is going to cost to run our municipality. If anyone has any expertise in this area or is interested in helping, please send an email to Kevin at incorporate20705@aol.com.

Currently, we figure it will cost about 11 million for the operating budget. About 50% will come from

property taxes (18-22cent/100). The state will give some funds for the police and will give us a refund for maintenance of roads. Other income may come from permit fees and fines (which we want to keep low- we don’t want to be another College Park).

From here on out, the meetings will be open to anyone who desires to help out. You can email Kevin at the address above. We intend to hold a public meeting at Highpoint High School the week of Sept. 25^th.  A full page ad will be in the Beltsville Newspaper in September and the exact date should be known by then. We could use some financial donations and help with the petition drive.

We will obtain a new voter registration list and will pull a petition starting with the September public meeting. The intent of the petition is to get signatures of registered voters who are interested in seeing the process move ahead and later be voted on by referendum. Signing the petition doesn’t mean that you are signing to incorporate. We need about 25% of the voters (3,000 signatures) to move to the next step.

If you have connections to civic groups, church groups etc. talk with them and help to get the word around^.