Montgomery County to host meeting on security at houses of worship Feb. 21

Montgomery County officials will host a special meeting regarding security at houses of worship on February 21, 2024, from 7:00 - 9:00 PM. The meeting will be held in Bethesda, at a location to be announced only to those who register. "Attacks on houses of worship continue to occur at an alarming rate," a meeting announcement states. The meeting will feature presentations by representatives from the Montgomery County Police Department, the Fire and Explosives Investigation Unit of the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service, and the County's Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security. 

Attendees will learn how to "minimize the risk of violent intruders," and what to do in the event of an attack on their house of worship. A menorah was vandalized outside a synagogue in Olney last December, and a suspect desecrated and attempted to burn down two Christian churches - and vandalized a Baptist cemetery - along Old Georgetown Road in Bethesda in July 2022. Meeting registration is open online now.

Photo courtesy Montgomery County

Gaithersburg cancels several events due to poor air quality

The Washington, D.C. area, including Montgomery County, is under a Code Red air quality alert due to smoke drifting south from Canadian wildfires. As a result, the City of Gaithersburg has canceled several outdoor events that were scheduled for today or tonight, Thursday, June 29, 2023. Canceled are the Casey Farmers Market, and the Evenings in Olde Towne Concert. 

Text to 911 now available in Maryland

Callers in emergency situations who cannot, or do not wish to, speak on the phone now have a silent option. Text-to-911 service is now available in the state of Maryland. Residents and visitors alike can contact emergency services via text using the service.

To use Text-to-911 service, follow these steps:

1. Enter 911 in the “To” line.

2. Enter a brief message that includes the location of the emergency and type of service needed – police,              fire, or ambulance.

3. Hit send.

4. Respond to questions from the responding 911 specialist, and follow the instructions he or she provides.

Loudoun County leader blasts Montgomery County for failure of understaffed 911 call center in teen's death

Montgomery County Council has

failed to fully-fund 911 call center staffing,

leaving 54 positions vacant

The Montgomery County Council has failed to adequately staff the county's 911 call center for years, leading to call takers working overtime, and being stressed and exhausted. In recent weeks, the call center has been criticized for its response to a 911 call from the Loudoun side of the Potomac River. By the time the first rescue unit arrived at the correct location, 36 minutes had passed.

"I am baffled by how poorly Montgomery County handled this," Loudoun County Board of Supervisors Chair Phyllis Randall said, according to the Washington Post. "How do you wait 17 minutes and then keep waiving Loudoun off, and saying, 'We're taking this call?' They need to work on their 911 center."

But the Post reports that the Montgomery County Council has not only failed to fully staff the 911 center, but is now dragging its feet in investigating the 911 center's failures in the drowning incident in which a 16-year-old family friend of Randall's died. Loudoun has already completed an investigation, and developed a 77-page report. Montgomery County? A Council "briefing is expected later this month," the Post's Dan Morse reported.

It's mind-boggling to consider the tens-of-billions of dollars in wasteful spending and kickbacks to its campaign donors the Council has approved over the last decade. They also managed to have $6.7 million in taxpayer funds vanish, in an embezzlement scheme that has yet to be investigated by the FBI. 

Let's not forget Council expenditures like the $900,000 over-budget Glen Echo Heights sewer pipe, or paying $22,000 for a security camera system that costs less than $1000 retail. And countless extraneous new executive-level positions with six-figure salaries, often filled by political allies of the Council. 

Yet they've failed to spend the necessary funds to staff the 911 call center - where the 911 system itself has experienced two outages in recent years. 

It's a County Council that cannot execute the most basic functions of government. Now, competing jurisdictions aren't only whipping Montgomery County's posterior in economic development, infrastructure and schools, they're also starting to call out its incompetent and feckless elected officials. Considering the local press won't, it's about time someone did.

Montgomery County 911 system fails again

Officials don't know how

many emergency calls went

unanswered during outage

Montgomery County's 911 system failed twice Thursday, according to the Montgomery County Police Department, which does not operate the system. An MCPD spokesperson said that County officials cannot, as of now, tell them how many urgent 911 calls went unanswered during the service interruptions, but that the department is aware of one caller in need of basic life support medical services who was affected.

Callers who dialed 911 around 8:30 AM yesterday morning - and again between 9:35 and 9:43 AM - could not get through to the 911 call center, and instead heard a message saying they number they'd reached was out of service. According to MCPD, the failure was traced to a network outage between system components.

There is no indication that the Alert Montgomery system informed citizens of either outage. Montgomery County Government has yet to post any statement regarding the outages as of this writing.

It was exactly three years ago that I broke the story of a similar 911 system failure. Later, the County tried to cover up the fact that Alert Montgomery had failed to issue alerts to subscribers until long after the outage had ended. Two people were confirmed to have died has a result of that 2016 911 system failure, 

Yet despite their failure having fatal results for two of their constituents in 2016, the County Council has clearly failed to change its ways. Here we are again, with another 911 outage three years later. Similarly, the Council failed to upgrade the public safety radio communications system for County first responders for more than a decade, deliberately kicking the can down the road to have more play money to spend on their cartel sugar daddies.

In fact, since taking the oath of office last December, the latest Council has failed to take action on a single major crisis. Not a single thing has been done to exercise oversight and update the 911 system, complete our master plan highway system, turn around our moribund economy that now ranks last in the region by every economic development benchmark, nor to address rising rates of violent crime.

Most of the current Council term has been spent on a grotesque attack on the men and women of the Montgomery County police department. The Council's continual slander, defamation and disparagement of Montgomery's finest only put our first responders and the public in greater danger. Which fits perfectly with the County Council's record of making public safety a low priority, to the point that there are actual people who have died as a result of their failure to address basic government issues like providing a functioning 911 system. It's outrageous.