It’s that time of year when Frederick County decides what they want the State of Maryland to accomplish. Always fun, because it allows our Council bookends to get creative with their fantasy lives.

Our current favorite is Billy Shreve’s (failed) proposal that mobile homes be sold as real property and not as vehicles. Here is the best way to explain why it ain’t never gonna happen: what mortgage lender would find it in their interest to make a loan where the collateral can be up and VROOM VROOM coal-rolled right off into the sunset? He had another one about exemptions from the Forest Resource Ordinance that fell flat due to insufficient information provided. Why can’t they have a staff to understand things for him, freeing him from the obligations of his job?

Jerry Donald FTW with a measure to deregulate the liquor industry (if you click on the FNP link up above they say it’s come about because of something impacting a Brunswick brewery). YEEHAW! The current code does not allow smaller banquet facilities–those with less than a quarter of a million dollars invested in non real estate type stuff–to have a liquor license. Donald points out that this seems to be a measure to eliminate competition. Look, we’re all Republicans on this one. More competition! Oh wait, when was the last time a Republican busted up a monopoly? Never mind then. Still not Republicans.

Modest hat tip to hoodie clad and newly beardless Tony Chmelik (we get the feeling he was under the weather with that awful thing going around, and boy do we sympathize: get well soon, Mr. Chmelik!) for moving his school related priority through the Board of Ed. ICYMI, he wants homeschoolers to be eligible for county school sports teams. Kudos to him for being the lone current Republican of the Council who seems to understand how processes and procedures best work.

Y’all aren’t going to believe this one. The King of the Deplorables and his buddy (these are Billy Shreve and Kirby Delauter, if you’re new here–we’ve written a bit about this particular issue) voted against a position statement favoring providing support to youth victims of human trafficking. Billy interjected a complaint about not knowing what it was until they saw it written out, which becomes ultra weird immediately afterward when…wait, no. It’s already ultra weird. Gross.

Kirby. He had an idea about investigating funding for school resources, so that perhaps funds from the state allocated to one project might be moved to another if they are not used for the one they were intended for. He tried to inexplicably call this a position statement. This already had us furrowing our brows, so when fellow semantics enthusiast Jessica Fitzwater pinpointed the issue we were grateful. More than position statement, this seemed a (likely reasonable) call to investigate. It needs to become a fully fledged idea, and that’s fine–even for Billy–to leave in the hands of Roger Wilson and the County Executive’s office, even though we certainly had the impression that we don’t currently know precisely what it says. Perhaps we should simply be glad for a rare sign of good faith. Passed 7-0, too! Well done! Was this a moment of bipartisan harmony? Perhaps we were hallucinating.

There was what felt like a long hearing about the Forest Resource Ordinance. It had us mostly sawing logs like it was a zoning discussion. We did perk up when Kirby mused about what this was actually protecting and was told that there is a definition of forest and the county and the state use the same one. Guffaw!

That’s yer County Council, folks!