On the heels of the announcement that Nancy Allen moved to Gettysburg and would be resigning from the Frederick County Board of Education, our local Republican party decided to engage in some high theatrics:
Let’s talk about what would happen if the shoe was on the other foot!
Let’s say we lived in a dark timeline in which Michael Hough was the CE, and let’s just speculate for just half a second that Dean Rose decided that he couldn’t maintain two residences in Maryland and Pennsylvania and decided to throw in the towel? What would Hough do? What would this local Republican party do? We don’t need to think too long on that one! Y’all make our heads spin!
However, that isn’t even the main point. Allen decided she couldn’t or wouldn’t serve out the rest of her term. When she did this she knew (or should have known) the process for selecting her own replacement. Let’s take a look at what the law says, and be sure to see who sponsored it because what a treat!
Nowhere do we see that the new candidate needs to match the philosophy of the old. And how would that happen anyway? If anyone thought that was a necessity then the law would have been written to allow the board of education member to appoint their successor. But no one thought that idea made any sense!
We took some time to peruse the letters of intent for the over 50 people who applied for the vacancy:
Most of the candidates wrote about their dedication to education, their qualifications, and their community service experience. Unless some magic rubric exists to weed out those who wouldn’t be akin to Nancy Allen, we can’t imagine how their half-baked idea would even work!
The reality is the County Executive is only obligated to appoint (along with the County Council’s approval) the most qualified individual to fill out the last year of Allen’s term. As it is a non partisan race, there is no reason to only interview people who align themselves with the Republican party. And considering how those who align themselves with the Republican party have been behaving on that board this past year, why would anyone want that?
As we sat around the Round Table at Yokel Headquarters late last week, your Lady Yokels could hardly believe that 10 years had lapsed since we began this endeavor. In celebration of this milestone anniversary we will like to take you on a stroll down memory lane.
Not sure that everyone does, so we are going to retell it!
10 years ago, after reading this LTE, https://www.fredericknewspost.com/places/local/frederick_county/frederick/blaine-young-work-together-or-nothing-will-get-accomplished/article_b1616559-e265-5a0d-9fbc-fe09bfdbe811.html, from our anti-muse, Blaine Young, a group of what became known as the Lady Yokels met in our favorite coffee spot, Dublin Roasters. After we appropriately insulted both Blaine Young and his very poor analysis of why he lost, we decided that we needed to shine the spotlight not only on Blaine, but also on his buddies, Kirby Delauter, Billy Shreve, and Tony Chmelik. At first, we discussed writing a book, but nixed that idea fairly quickly as we knew keeping an eye on these people was going to be a very fluid situation. By the end of that first meeting we decided to embark upon a blog to educate people on what is not often at the top of their to-do list, the inner workings of their local government. (Don’t worry, we’ve also kept an eye on Blaine so every time he tries to slither back into politics we are there to remind everyone of his arrests and bad behavior!)
For the next four years we religiously watched every county council meeting. More often than not, we created a drinking game to accompany such meetings in order to spice things up a bit. Here’s an example:
We sincerely hope that we didn’t hurt anyone’s livers as these games were only meant for fun. Over the first four years we made sure that everyone had a front seat to just how crazy things were with those three on the council. Here’s a curated sampling from our archives:
While there are so many artifacts from this part of Yokel history, this is still hands down our favorite:
Backstory: Kirby wanted to prove that the Citizens for Quality of Life PAC was corrupt, but you will notice that nothing comes out of the PAC and somehow Jessica ended up with everything!
After one term in office, Kirby and Billy tried to obtain a higher office, while Tony wanted to stay put. Thankfully enough people paid attention and NONE of that happened! We sent our three amigos out with a departing post:
After saner folks got on the council we kinda checked out on that scene, though we did decide to check back once last summer and boy was there some drama:
Our main, but certainly not our only focus, has been the Frederick County School Board. People often underestimate (though perhaps that sentiment isn’t as true as it was in the past) the damage the wrong people can do on a school board. Just take a look at Colt Black and Jaime Brennan! The person who dragged us into this new focus was none other than Cindy Rose. Thankfully everyone understood how bad she would be, and after four failed attempts, she has finally seemed to have given up. Here’s some highlights of what we had to say about that one:
Hopefully we will be more successful next year in reminding everyone how to do the math with the school board candidates so we don’t get left with the shit show we have right now.
Thank you all for an interesting and fun ten years! Think of your Lady Yokels tonight as we clink our glasses together and hope that we can survive another ten years of politics! We appreciate all of you being a part of this journey.
If you haven’t paid attention to all the budget troubles going on around here..welcome to the terrible party. In the next few weeks the budget for FCPS is going to be voted on, and we need to make sure that our schools get what they need to educate our children. We’ll let a good friend of the Yokel explain it to y’all:
The most important duty of local government is to educate the children living within their borders. If we fail at this it really doesn’t matter how nice our parks, roads or other public services are. At the bottom of this post we are going to list the email addresses for county council members and County Executive Fitzwater so you can email them with your concerns.
Speaking of the important duty of education, one of the most important duties we have as citizens is to vote for competent school board members. That is where a fair number of us failed this time around. We tried to sound the warning about there being too many candidates on our side, but that warning did not reach enough ears and we are now left to deal with the consequences of it all.
Colt Black has decided to use his short time on the board to harass and demean LGBTQ+ students at school board meetings. From the Frederick News Post:
Referring to the part of a districtwide gender identity policy, Policy 443, that instructs teachers and staff members to use a student’s preferred name and pronouns, Black said at a Jan. 8 school board meeting: “Just as much as you have your right to be you, we have our right to be free from you.”
Lots of local folks filed complaints about this outrageous comment from a sitting school board member. Well, today an independent investigator determined that Black did not violate Title IX:
But that doesn’t mean that he’s not an unqualified bigot that shouldn’t be on the board. We’ll tell you right now that the 5 member panel of judges here at the LY have already tried and convicted him in our court of public opinion, and so has a majority of the school board:
We’ll remind y’all again in a couple of years, but we do need to remember how the math works when it comes to school board elections. We cannot pay this high price again.
We’ve been through a lot this year Yokels! But like the dumpster above we are going to have to find some way to plant a dumb little smile on our faces and solider on! You may see a pattern with our top five posts this year! Coming it at #5:
5. Let’s Armchair Quarterback Those Primary Election Results:
In this post we had a lot to celebrate, most especially that Dan Cox got knocked out in the primary! Towards the end we had a warning about the school board election results that was not heeded by enough folks!
4. A Yokel Stroll Down Memory Lane! Let’s Check in With That County Council.
In the midst of the summer heat, we decided to go back to our roots and watch a county council meeting. We had pulled away from doing so after Kirby, Billy, and Tony (Maybe we should think twice before voting for people whose names end in Y- except you Jerry!) got sent back home! It wasn’t a pleasant experience, so we haven’t been back. Though recently we’ve been alerted to some of the Frederick City Council meetings and we may have to pay more attention to those as there is an election next year!
And for our number one spot, the man whose letter to editor about his loss to Jan spurred the creation of this blog, occupies our most read post of the year: Blaine Young Can’t Seem to Keep Himself Out of Trouble:
We looked at West Virginia’s case search and his trial date is in 4 days:
Did you notice the theme? We need to do a better job of only supporting and promoting the exact number of candidates as there are open seats on the board of education. Some people are starting to get it:
So unless we want a Board of Education that will support Donald Trump’s agenda of destroying the public education system, we need to be sure everyone understands how these elections work!
We wish all of our readers a peaceful holiday week and as good a 2025 that we can muster through!
Sure wish we saw this before we tuned in this evening!
If you’ve been with us since our inception in 2015, then you are well aware that we made it a habit to religiously watch and report on the county council meetings. (Here’s a sampling if you are newer to our blog). We kept a good eye on Kirby, Billy, and Tony and made everyone aware of how they behaved on that council dais. When 2018 rolled around and all of our “characters” were expelled by the good voters of our fine county, so we took a break from the meetings as things seemed to be going so well.
Your good Lady Yokels have been talking about checking in on the council, kind of a walk down memory lane, to see how things have been going lately. Turns out the answer is:
First some context. The Frederick News Post ran an article and Council member McKay made a social media post about his building moratorium bill. You can read it here because we aren’t going to get into all of the allegations because we don’t know exactly what happened either and you can read all about it in the link. What we will say is that the first fifteen minutes of the meeting was a back and forth between Steve McKay, Brad Young, Kavonte Duckett, and the Chief Administrative Officer about these allegations, which was all an explanation as to why McKay wasn’t voting for the agenda. I mean we don’t have anyone abstaining like Billy used to do, but this was a whole drama onto itself. Must be that drama is now an honored tradition at council meetings! Thanks a lot Billy and Kirby!
Public comment leads us to our next part of the agenda. We are giddy while we wait to see if any of our old friends will grace the microphone. But alas it was not to be! However, the old theme of it mirroring public comment on the show Parks and Rec is still going strong.
Okay, maybe we exaggerate a tad. One man was there to talk about Steve’s bill which was the only thing resembling a comment relevant to the work of the council. Another dude showed up to ask for free farm land and encourage people to come to a rally in Montgomery County to celebrate the release of Julian Assange. And the rest were there to get the county council to issue a cease fire resolution to Israel. One man even admitted that the city already told him that didn’t seem like a local issue! We’ll see what the council thinks about all that, but looks to us that some folks are barking up the wrong tree.
M.C. is on the opposite side of the dais, but it was good to hear her voice again. Same goes for Jerry, as they are the only two remnants of our council of yesteryear. At the beginning of the meeting M.C. makes it a point to tell everyone that she pulled her bill so people wouldn’t worry about any conspiracies there!
Minutes, Budget Amendments, Appointments are all passed without a single nay or abstain! At least that much is going smoothly.
We are going to have two charter amendments to vote on come November’s ballot. Here’s the language thus far if you would like to get a head start:
THE COUNCIL SHALL HOLD A PUBLIC HEARING ON ANY SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATION TO THE GENERAL FUND IN EXCESS OF $1,000,000.
2. EXCEPT AS PROVIDED ELSEWHERE IN THIS CHARTER OR PRESCRIBED BY LAW, AFTER A PUBLIC HEARING ON THE MATTER, THE COUNCIL MAY REMOVE THE APPOINTED HEAD OF A DEPARTMENT, AGENCY, OR OFFICE UPON THE AFFIRMATIVE VOTE OF FIVE COUNCIL MEMBERS.
There’s a backyard chicken bill put forth by Mason Carter. Renee Knapp has some amendments in which Mason Carter doesn’t seem to be too found of. The amendments pass, with a nay from Carter and McKay. Which means this bill goes back to public hearing.
We end with public comment with more from the cease fire folks. One man comes in to admonish Steve for not talking to people before he accused them of wrongdoing in the newspaper. When it comes time for council member comments, McKay tells him it’s a two-way street. The rest of the council member comments are pretty tame and appropriate to the meeting.
And then it’s over. And while the meetings are lacking the stupidity and ignorance that Kirby and Billy brought to the table, the tension was still there. As we are no longer loyal viewers, we hope that this is a one off. But maybe we’ll have to tune in on July 16th to double check.
It’s supposed to be a time of relaxation. The kids are out for summer, the weather is nicer, and everyone should be slowing their roll. But alas, tis not the case round these parts!
We all know about the High Sheriff’s indictment, but you may not know that Jenkins is feigning victimhood! According to the Frederick News Post, Jenkins regrets signing the letters, claims he was “duped” into signing them AND because he didn’t receive anything in return, it shouldn’t matter anyway. Is that how the law works….no it is not! According to aforementioned article the government responded to Jenkins’ claim in this fashion:
Finally, the response said Jenkins’ assertion that he didn’t receive anything from Krop in return for the letters didn’t mean that Jenkins was absolved of the crimes or of fraud. Jenkins’ motion argued that there was no evidence Jenkins benefited from the alleged conspiracy, and that there was no fraud.
“The fact that Jenkins did not receive anything of monetary value in return does not speak to [the letters’] falsity,” the response said.
Seems to us that if you are the High Sheriff, there’s certain points of law you should be acquainted with! Dan Cox’s claims, in his poor attempt to throw out the charges against his client, were hilariously refuted by the government as well. We present the following for your viewing pleasure:
“The Government will not address the various inaccurate factual assertions that Krop made in these 44 pages, the erroneous legal arguments he advances in them or the political statements he makes which have nothing to do with either the law or facts in this case,” the response said.
The first point the government pushed back on was Krop’s allegation that he and Jenkins were misrepresented to the grand jury and in the indictment since they were addressed in the past tense. For example, the indictment says Krop was a Frederick County resident, not that he is a Frederick County resident.
The government said this use of past tense was standard practice, and included a citation to the definition of “past tense” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
Cox did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday afternoon.
The government then criticized Krop’s references to an ATF agent who is a former Ukrainian resident, calling them unacceptable “personal attacks.”
It also accused him of going on a “fishing expedition” in the grand jury process, despite having no evidence that any wrongdoing occurred.
Several of Krop’s motions asked for certain evidence to be turned over. The government said that everything he was asking for had already been turned over to him, and that he signed a document, like Jenkins, that he would get additional information a week before trial.
Finally, the government pushed back on Krop’s claim that the search and seizure at The Machine Gun Nest was unlawful. It argued that there was probable cause, which stemmed from lawful investigation, and a lawful warrant.
Side note: Read this great editorial of this whole situation by Matt Edens.
To make things even more crazy, today the Frederick News Post reported that Jenkins’ leave of absence isn’t really an absence as he’s still collecting his full salary AND attending meetings.
In a phone interview on Thursday, Jenkins said he attended sheriff’s office budget meetings and has gone back to the office on occasion to do work.
He said the letter about his administrative leave speaks for itself.
“I am still the head of the agency,” he said. “That’s not going to change.”
Jenkins wrote in the letter that Col. David Benjamin would take on day-to-day operations of the sheriff’s office and “perform the duties of the Sheriff.”
Not sure if the High Sheriff understands what a leave of absence is!
In other happenings, we recently shared an article on our Facebook account about who interacts with local government the most. As you may guess it’s the 55 and up crowd. Don’t think for a moment that we are in anyway disparaging the older crowd as we Lady Yokels are practically there ourselves, but they can’t be the only ones giving their feedback.
And those other wheels have opinions too!
Here’s two examples of what we are dealing with around here. First of all, we have this FCPS reconsideration committee that’s examining books that Cindy Rose et al. decided that no kid should be allowed to read. (If you haven’t read it yet, look at our legislative suggestions on how to curb the problem of a handful of people being allowed to potentially ban books.) Her research consisted of going to ratedbooks.com and printing out the most salacious bits. While her opinion may matter, being a local citizen and all, she needs pushback. (Thankfully we’ve all pushed her back from sitting on the school board itself four times now!) Another example of the older crowd attempting to influence the school board is the former Citigroup executive who has taken up the mantle of banning transkids from sports, not allowing these same kids to identify as their gender of choice in school, and has complained on our posts about the imagined teaching of CRT in the public school system. He’s been joined by the likes of Tom Neumark, who likes to write about how horrible FCPS is in the editorial section of the FNP. The formerly mentioned executive claims on his website that he got into this game, despite having no children in FCPS and with no background in education, because of failing scores on tests. However, the only things he’s been vocal about are the same things that national Republican party has used as scare mongering techniques in order to get more votes. If you haven’t seen it, and these folks should take a look as well if they weren’t so allergic to actual journalism, there’s a great article explaining how the American Principles Project needed to find a new social issue to rile up their side and transgender kids is what they landed on. All of this book banning, anti-history, and discriminating against gay and trans people is all part of the Republican strategy to win back votes. We cannot allow it to happen in our neck of the woods. So make sure you check the Board of Education’s agenda, and the county council’s agenda in order to give your feedback. It’s when the majority doesn’t pay attention that these folks and their outdated and harmful ideas sneak in.
There’s sparks of hope that the Trump way of governing is losing its sheen around here. A group that pretends to be non partisan tried to organize a pro-Trump rally on the overpass on Route 15 on Monocacy Blvd. last week. Guess how many people showed up?
Maybe we can all get back to some sense of normalcy soon!
And don’t forget to attend Frederick Pride tomorrow! All the best people will be there.
We are going to have to deal with this issue for quite some time since FCPS had to form a committee over her nonsense. Let’s hope that she and her ilk can learn the meaning of the word pornography. We won’t hold our breaths.
3 out of 4 isn’t bad! However, we are going to have to teach some folks in our community that we don’t just vote for the first name on the ballot just because we chose to remain uninformed about the election!
Our post reminding independent and unaffiliated voters made the number 8 spot on our list. We always need to remind our unaffiliated friends that they can vote in the BOE primary election, and it’s important that they do so!
This post concerned the absolutely appalling behavior that some of our community members (You know Cindy was involved) showed at a Family Life Advisory meeting. We always need to be careful of people who can’t comprehend what they read, or worse yet, don’t read and then make things up to purposefully enflame people.
Tony Chmelik, one of your LadyYokel’s least favorite council members, tried to run for at at-large seat and failed. Hopefully this blast from the past reminded a few folks why we didn’t want him the last time around and prevented him from getting back on this time!
This was truly one of the worst public meetings we have ever had the displeasure of watching. And this is coming from a group of ladies that watched every single county council meeting for the long 4 years that Billy Shreve, Kirby Delauter, and Tony Chmelik were on that board. Cindy really can bring out the worst in people.
One of our older posts got resurrected this year because people just could not believe that Cindy would complain about Click, Clack, Moo! Sometimes we can’t believe what we see either.
Thank goodness we kept Cindy and two of her minions off the board, plus the entire 2nd rate hate slate! We are sure we will see some of them back again, but at least we have the next two years to take a nice deep breath!
We wish all of our Local Yokel fans a wonderful holiday season and a peaceful 2023!
Before we get into the final results we need to address some cray cray we’ve seen regarding the election count. After deliberating at Yokel headquarters for a bit, we are convinced that the main problem is a good portion of Americans don’t understand how elections work. One of our favorite/crazy comments came from someone who stated that she couldn’t understand how Dan Cox won the 1st election and then lost the 2nd. Must be fraud! Not the fact that primary elections are party centered and who wins the primary does not have the assurance of winning the general election! If that were true we would have two winners in the governor race!
The Frederick News Post comments on Facebook are also a real treat. We have some folks positing that since the count is still going on then it must be all the Democrats just harvesting all those fake ballots!
Looks like a good crop this year!
Just because your orange menace ruined mail in voting for you doesn’t mean the rest of us bought into it. Republicans just hate when people are allowed convenient ways to vote, because they know that the more people allowed to vote the harder it is for them to win. NOT FRAUD. This Lady Yokel just got her notification that her mail in ballot was just counted and if these people had their way they would just be fine and dandy with disenfranchising me- Especially Cindy!
Now for the final election results!
Drum Roll please!!!!!
Jessica will be the next County Executive and Renee Knapp and Brad Young will be our At-Large representatives on the next council!
So thankful that we don’t have to worry about Hough and Chemlik, who recently posted conspiracy thoughts about Nancy Pelosi’s husband on his campaign Facebook page, destroying our county!
Mostly good news for our council races.Hopefully Mason will behave himself and grow.
And for the race we’ve been paying the most attention to, the Board of Ed race:
Let’s see if Cindy really means it about this 4th run being her last.
We would have really liked to have seen Ysela make it, and it seems like we’ll have to do another primer about not clicking on the first name if you don’t know who to vote for. But alas, this is what we have to live with for now. At least the January 6th insurrectionist and Cindy didn’t make it!
It’s time for your Lady Yokels to take a bit of a rest. Thank you to all who voted and have been paying attention!
If you’ve followed us for awhile, you know we’ve said a lot about Tony and his style of governing. We can’t fathom why he’s trying again, but here we are. Let us remind everyone that he lost his last primary as an incumbent to Steve McKay. And instead of accepting the results of that election (sound familiar?), he embarked upon a write in campaign that was very, very unsuccessful. We could go on and on about what a bad choice he would be, but instead we’ll link to our most recent article about him in which we revisit his political past as proof as to why he should not have a political future:
Now let’s move on to Phil Dacey. Remember him, the guy from Picturegate?
Phil wasn’t there, so they just photoshopped him in!
Phil not showing up to meetings is kind of his thing. He missed a lot of meetings when he was on the Board of Alderman and now he’s been missing council meetings. Here at the Yokel we get lots and lots of tips. People send us stuff all the time, and we welcome it. But we only really share things that we verify elsewhere or that people we know for sure are trustworthy tell us. So, Phil got divorced this year. No judgement, we have plenty of divorced friends; this isn’t the 1950s and we aren’t going to shame anyone for a divorce. But there is a part that applies to his duties here. Our source revealed, that Phil has a new squeeze who lives fairly far away (in Canada! How rich is that? A girlfriend in Canada! It almost sounds like we made it up, but we promise you we didn’t), and because of this new relationship he’s frequently out of town and has been zooming into meetings. (Edit: UH-OH we have a contradictory account confirming that he has been present for everything important)
We do sincerely apologize for this misunderstanding. A concern that past behaviors would repeat given current realities was miscommunicated. While that concern is completely understandable, we do not want to be adding to the world’s problems with false information.
Brad Young, on the other hand, is everywhere. Always on a fire truck at a impromptu covid grad party, or wherever he can show up and be seen supporting our community, annnnd He! Shows! Up!
See for yourself:
Candidate Renee Knapp is our other endorsement. She is a special-needs parent originally from Middletown, now living in Adamstown (which is not Canada!). She has a lengthy history of volunteerism with the school system and for the PTA. She has neither a track record of chronic absenteeism, nor a predilection for birth-your-own-militia posturing. If you would like to learn more about a one hundred percent bona fide sane and responsible human being concerned with education, internet expansion (which is truly a critical issue for much of the rural county, especially those who engage in small business endeavors and need reliable online communication) and our local environment, here is a link to the issues page on Ms. Knapp’s candidate website. Click around to explore more!
In light of Heather Fletcher’s national news making act of stealing the pronoun pins and checking out all the PRIDE display books from the Brunswick library, we’ve been getting quite a few inquiries as to which candidates should be avoided. This post will revisit some of our election posts (focused heavily on the school board) to get everyone up to speed!
In our most recent post, we did a deep dive to see how our local candidates feel about gun control in the wake of the shootings at Udvale.
We also put out the call for all Independent voters to make their way to the polls this primary season because the Board of Education primary race is open to ALL voters. You’ll also see your Yokel picks for this race!
Please share this information far and wide. We need to make sure our school board and county governments remain sane and functional institutions. And don’t forget to check into our Facebook page as we frequently share what we find on our local characters.
frederick local yokel 