Route 1 Reporter (https://route1reporter.com/category/news/mount-rainier/page/2/)
New revelations include confusion over the city’s administrative check-signing and credit card policies, allegations of improper credit card spending, proposals to freeze hiring or impose salary caps, and new wrinkles in the ongoing saga of the city’s now-three years of delayed audits.
Mount Rainier is planning a food truck event, perhaps as early as spring. The idea is to use the event to test demand and operational burdens for a potential food truck hub in Mount Rainier. However, the city is still working through the logistics involved with hosting a food truck hub. City officials first toyed with the idea in December 2018, but there remain significant logisitical, procedural and political challenges to address before Mount Rainier becomes a destination for vehicular restaurateurs and gormands.
Politically, the city’s brick and mortar restaurants aren’t exactly wild about the idea of a food truck hub. Representatives of the Mount Rainier Business Association aired concerns that a food truck hub could bring a competitive burden for the city’s restaurants.
“We’ve had five restaurants that have failed in Mount Rainier in the last five years, and we have three new restaurants coming up,” said Jimmy Tarlau, representing MRBA, during a discussion of food truck hubs at Mount Rainier City Council meeting Nov.
Mount Rainier has hired an interim city manager to head up the town’s administration as it looks for a full-timer to take on the role. The new city manager is Latasha Gatling, a former town councilor and, later, a town administrator for the city of Seat Pleasant and a former liason with the Prince George’s County Council. Gatling’s first day on the job is Nov. 19, 2019.
The hire was announced by Mount Rainier Councilor Celina Benitez in a Facebook post Nov. 14, 2019.
In part because the city’s financial audits are late, plans to renovate a Mount Rainier-owned building, Potts Hall, into a civic center still seem to be a long ways off, with city officials saying it will be an uphill battle to assemble the millions of dollars needed for the project.
During its most-recent City Council meeting Mount Rainier council members discussed the proposed renovations. A key focus of the discussion was efforts to solicit funding for the project from state agencies and officials. Mayor Malinda Miles has approached the governor’s office for funding, while Councilor Luke Chesek discussed his outreach to the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development for funding. But during the discussion, it became apparent that the piecemeal approach to funding the project likely won’t add up to the amount necessary to begin work.
“When I hear you guys talk about all those buckets, to me none of those things add up to the $5 million to $8 million,” lamented Councilor Luke Chesek during the meeting. Instead, according to Chesek, the city will likely be pushed by DHCD and other officials to go after low-interest loans for the project, which is estimated to cost between $5 million to $8 million (with the significant caveat that those estimates are several years old by this point).
A mixture of righteous anger, sorrow and radical activism permeated a vigil held last night to demand justice and accountability for Leonard Shand, the 49-year-old African American man killed by 10 police officers in Hyattsville last month.
In the first City Council meeting since the fatal police shooting of Leonard Shand last month in Hyattsville, city officials expressed sadness over Shand’s death, even holding a brief moment of silence to commemorate him, but offered no new information about the incident.
Route 1 Reporter has had a chance to get caught up on last week’s Mount Rainier City Council meeting. Here’s the top stories:
The fatal police shooting of Leonard Shand in Hyattsville was the most recent case of what an American Civil Liberties Union legal associate says is an ongoing failure by Maryland police departments to de-escalate situations with people who may have mental health issues.
Hyattsville City Councilor Joseph Solomon has called into question major aspects of the police narrative surrounding last week’s fatal police shooting of Leonard Shand.
It sure looks like Mount Rainier’s about to sell 3200 Rhode Island Avenue.