Bob
Preston
To create a autobiographical account of
one's tenure as mayor might imply a certain inflated ego
on the part of the author. But I was asked to write this
article for the Mount community, so here it is. However,
it must be noted at the start that since I am a
professional historian I always envisioned myself
writing such an article after a couple of years of
research in documents of the "era," and not
writing it for a journalistic deadline in a few days. So
this is just a first attempt at getting some thoughts
together.
In a small town, everyone has to pitch
in to make it work. And in Emmitsburg, everyone
(volunteer firefighters, emergency personal, etc.) does.
In my case, after serving as Cub Scout Master, I decided
that it was time to move on to something else. Someone
suggested that I should run for the Town Council,
because only few were interested in serving in the Town
Government. I ran and won a seat as a Commissioner
(legislator) in 1980. I didn't know anything about town
government, how it worked? who did what? and why? were
all mysteries to me. The first meeting included a
somewhat hostile exchange between citizens complaining
about dogs barking and the owner of the barking dog.
Heavens, I thought, what have I got myself into.
But undeterred as the Streets
Commissioner I forged ahead with a program to repair
broken pavements in the town, which the town had the
authority to repair and to pass the expenses along to
property owners. On the day the contractor was to begin
the work, I was informed the Town Council had decided
not to proceed with the work. This had been decided at a
part of a meeting I was not able to attend (one of our
daughters was singing in the County Chorus).
Soon thereafter the Town was sued
because someone fell on a broken sidewalk in Town. The
whole Town Council had to appear in court. The other
members of the Town Council suggested that I should sit
at the table with the Town attorney, and they would sit
right behind me, supporting me all the way. About twenty
minutes into the trial I looked back at the seats where
the Town Council members were. The seats were empty. The
Council members had left me all alone. Wow, they must
really have confidence in me, I (foolishly) thought.
But the mayor himself was a wonderful
person. A decent man. He had served five terms (two
years each) but wanted to step down as mayor. He asked
if I would run. I did. And I won. My parents had moved a
few years before, after my father had retired as an
engraver for John Wanamakers in Philadelphia, to
Emmitsburg and my father was a very friendly person. He
knew everybody in Town it seemed. I think people thought
they were voting for my father, but they got me as mayor
instead. Apparently I was one of the few
"foreigners" -- not born in or around
Emmitsburg -- to be elected mayor since the middle of
the nineteenth century.
But I was convinced I could handle the
job (there goes that ego again). After all the former
mayor had spent only a few hours a week in the Town
Office. Only after I became mayor did I realize that he
had conducted most of the Town's business over the
butcher counter that he ran in a local grocery store.
Conducting business with meat cleavers near by and with
a winning personality had made him very effective. I had
a full time teaching job and had history books near by.
Not quite the same thing.
The Town had problems, big ones. There
was a state imposed moratorium on all construction
because the Town's wastewater plant was antiquated and
inadequate and was polluting a stream that flowed into
the Chesapeake Bay. The Town's five acre reservoir was
held in place by an earthen dam that had more than 150
trees growing out of its side, meaning that one good
wind storm could cause the trees to fall, pulling the
earthen dam apart, the dam would burst and Emmitsburg
area residents below the dam would be endangered. The
dam also was holding about five million gallons more
water than it was designed to hold. The State rated it
the fourth most dangerous dam in Maryland.
And Emmitsburg's Main Street had a huge
hump in the middle, causing cars that parked on its side
to be so tilted that gasoline ran out of their gas tanks
and the cars' occupants to slip under the cars on the
steep inclines that served as the parking area along
Main Street. And there was no storm water drainage and
no curbs on the south side of Main Street. Storm water
poured into the basements of peoples' houses. Street
lights were affixed to high poles that leaned
precariously. And of course those sidewalks along Main
street were still broken, some because of huge trees
that had erupting root systems. And then there were the
police.
The Town had its own three person police
force. As mayor I was now Police Commissioner. One
citizen came every month to the Town meeting and
complained: "Where are the polish when you need
them." That always confused me, because I was
married to a Polish woman, and I knew where she was, so
what was this guy's problem? Well of course he was
talking about the "police." They were never
around. Then he would complain about the police being
around too much, often just cruising up and down Main
Street wasting gas. We worked hard trying to improve
policing in Town, cutting response time to calls.
Then one night I was convinced that our
efforts were succeeding. I saw an accident that had just
happened down on South Seton. "What happened down
there?" I asked from some distance away.
"Accident, just happened," a citizen said.
"Looks like the police responded rather
quickly," I said with some pride. "No, I don't
think so," the citizen said. He continued:
"Apparently the police had made a traffic stop and
then when pulling back into traffic the policeman had
caused the accident when he pulled in front of a
car." "Oh," I said.
Fixing the dam was our first major
project. The engineering was problematical. Of course
just cutting the trees down wouldn't help because when
the roots died there would be these root canals left
through the dam that would cause the dam to burst. So
the whole dam had to be reconstructed and raised because
there were millions of gallons of water more in the dam
than there should have been. The dam work was started
and eventually that project was off the
"to-do" list. The town would not disappear in
the Great Flood of Emmitsburg.
The "no construction"
moratorium remained. No growth, no nothing. A new sewer
plant was needed. But no chance. The Reagan budget cuts
were having their effect by 1984. Money for new local
sewer treatment plants was drying up. The only exception
was for proposals for "innovative" plants,
whatever those were. No clue.
Then one cold February night I was on a
ride-along with the police chief and he needed to stop
and ask a local diary farmer something. The chief
introduced me to the farmer -- Dick Weybright of Mason
Dixon Farm which stretches along the Maryland and
Pennsylvania borders -- and we started to talk. The
chief drove off and left me with this farmer who started
to explain how his entire farm was powered by
electricity produced from the use of the gas created in
the piles of cow dung on the farm. Well that was cool.
And then he began to explain that in the summer he mixed
cow dung with water and spray irrigated his farm fields
with the mixture. I asked if such a method could be used
to treat municipal waste. And the farmer shot back:
"Of course it could, but no municipal leader in
America has the 'guts' to try it." Well don't ever
say that I don't have the guts to try something. Go
ahead and call me stupid, for I had no idea what the
farmer was talking about, but where my brains weren't, I
had extra guts.
Back at the Town Office the next day I
repeated the conversation to our Director of Public
Works, Duke Martin, a brilliant guy. I tried to recreate
the conversation, but it was difficult, because I didn't
understand the process that had been explained to me.
But Duke knew what I was talking about. We had our
innovative sewer treatment proposal. If we could get the
grant, the feds would pay for 90+% of the development of
the plant. Our proposal included a series of lagoons to
hold effluent (sewage), then it would be trickled over
vast acreage of land. The effluent would be absorb by
the grasses on the land, seep down about four feet where
pipes would convey it to another lagoon and then from
there the farmer who had given us the idea would spray
this effluent over his fodder producing fields. Got
that? I was still in a murky haze myself.
But even if we were awarded the grant,
the time for planning and engineering studies and
construction would mean the moratorium would remain for
at least another three or four years. So still no
growth.
But then one afternoon I took a call
from a guy with a heavy German accent who worked for an
engineer firm in Columbia, MD. After he repeated himself
several ideas, for I could not understand what he was
talking about, I got the distinct idea that this guy had
been experimenting with "cleaning" effluent in
trash cans by growing cattails in the cans. Great. This
guy wanted us to fix our broken wastewater plant by
putting our effluent in trash cans instead of into the
stream that flowed to the Chesapeake. This engineer said
he wanted to use Emmitsburg to experiment with treating
sewage with cattails (creating a wetlands system). He
had only experimented with the process in trash cans,
and although it seemed to work, he needed an actual real
municipality to try it. He had asked the State for
suggestions of towns that might be interested, they told
him: "Call Emmitsburg, they'll try anything."
It was time for another visit to the
Duke Martin School of Ideas. He listened and understood
and we had our temporary solution to our sewage
problems. We would take the poorly treated effluent from
our plant, pump it into a "finishing pond,"
about a half acre in size, that was filled with stones
and had cattails growing in it. In two days the flow
would go from one end to the other. When the effluent
came in at the beginning it was, shall we say, brownish.
After two days the effluent that flowed out of the pond
-- the nasties in the effluent having been absorbed by
the cattails -- was as clear as drinking water. We
called the pond our Nature Assisted Sewage System (NASS
Pond). The State loved it. They lifted the building
moratorium partially. Emmitsburg was growing again.
At the same time, while waiting for the
new plant to be built, for we had been awarded our $7M
innovative grant, we convinced the State Highway
Administration that our Main Street was unsafe. The hump
in the middle of the road (one side of the town is
higher than the other, but state road crews had for
decades merely paved over Main Street and compensated
for the difference in heights on either side of Main
Street by raising the hump in the middle of the road)
was a danger to drivers and those who parked along Main
Street and couldn't get out of their cars on the upside
of the hump and those on the down side of the hump got
out of the car easily, for they often just fell out.
The State bought out story. Main Street
was to be completely reconstructed, with new gas lamps
and trees and new sidewalks and a storm water system,
the whole works.
We called a special Town meeting and
explained excitedly the plans for the reconstruction of
Main Street to the citizens. We also explained that
there was one hitch. For Main Street to have legally
wide lanes, after the reconstruction there would be
parking allowed only on one side of the street. But
other than that, this is great news. We asked for a show
of hands in support. A lesson in democracy was about to
be taught to the history teacher qua mayor. The citizens
said no. Parking on both sides of the street or else no
new Main Street. We went back to the State and they gave
in. Lesson learned: the mayor is not the CEO of the
corporation known as the Town of Emmitsburg, the people
are.
On the 4th of July, 1989, after three
years of construction of the sewer plant and three
seasons of reconstruction of Main Street, the Town held
grand openings. A big celebration (Big Time, Small Town,
we called it). Tours of the sewer plant were a big hit
and Main Street had its ribbon cut.
Scores of people had contributed to the
renaissance of Emmitsburg. A dozen Town Commissioners --
including the present mayor, Doc Carr, and the Mount's
Registrar, John Gill -- and town employees and town
citizens (what patience they showed through three years
of Main Street being torn up) and State and County
official. And of course, Duke Martin, who had the vision
to see all this to fruition.
Duke Martin had shown himself to have
been creative, thoughtful and bright. For years he was
my partner, my brains and my friend. To demonstrate the
commitment and respect I had for him there is one
incident that I think says it all which occurred near
the end of my tenure as mayor. In 1991, with one year to
run in my fourth term, so after nine years of being
mayor, I told Duke that I had decided with my family
that I was not going to run again for re-election. I
knew he enjoyed working with me but maybe he would not
enjoy working with a subsequent mayor (we had no idea a
year before the election who that would be).
So I thought I owed it to him to give
him time to figure out what he wanted to do, as far as
seeking other possible job opportunities. He moved on
the suggestion faster than he or I ever thought
possible. He, his father and his brother a couple of
weeks later won the Maryland Lotto -- for $12 million.
Amazingly, he promised that he would continue to work
for the town until my term was up, and he did. When he
finally resigned, he came to the Mount and finished his
degree.
Thus in 1992 I left the mayor's office a
richer man, because of the knowledge and experience I
had gained. And Duke left the employ of the Town, also a
richer man!
Read
other articles by Bob Preston
Read
Ed Houck's Recollections as Mayor of Emmitsburg