Pittman and Friends Podcast
Welcome to Pittman and Friends, the curiously probing, sometimes awkward, but always revealing conversations between your host, Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman - that’s me - and whatever brave and willing public servant, community leader, or elected official I can find who has something to say that you should hear.
This podcast is provided as a public service of Anne Arundel County Government, so don’t expect me to get all partisan here. This is about the age-old art of government - of, by, and for the people.
Pittman and Friends Podcast
Mayor Gavin Buckley and Pittman Riff
What happens when a mural sparks a political journey? This week on Pittman and Friends, City of Annapolis Mayor Gavin Buckley joins to share his unconventional path from small business owner to public servant. Buckley shares his story about how a mural on his restaurant wall led to legal action and ignited his run for mayor. We also reflect on our shared frustrations with government inefficiencies and how those experiences drove us into the realm of politics.
Facing a budget crisis, Annapolis took steps, including raising taxes to stabilize finances, and ultimately achieved a coveted AAA bond rating. Gavin also shares his insights from travels to the Netherlands and Sweden, and his inspiration for urban resilience and sustainable transportation. These experiences are shaping a vision for a forward-thinking Annapolis, underscored by innovative multimodal transport and electrification efforts that aim to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and mitigate flooding challenges at the City Dock.
In this episode, we also discuss the vital role of public water access and the responsibility political leaders have to ensure sustainable growth. Through cooperation among city, county, and state officials, City Dock aims to protect our natural resources and enhance our community for future generations.
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Welcome to Pittman and Friends. The curiously probing, sometimes awkward but always revealing conversations between your host, anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman that's me and whatever brave and willing public servant, community leader or elected official I can find who has something to say that you should hear. This podcast is provided as a public service of Anne Arundel County, so don't expect me to get all partisan here. This is about the age-old art of government of by and for the people. All right, I have got a really special guest here. I've got the mayor of Annapolis, the center of Anne Arundel County, the center of Maryland, the best little city in America, the Mayor Gavin Buckley.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:So excited to be here. Thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to this.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I like Gavin and so I'm really excited about having you on the show, Gavin, having you on the podcast, whatever we want to call it. Let's go back a little. I mean, I feel like you and I have an affinity as elected officials of a jurisdiction that probably never thought we would run for office and don't really seem like politicians. Is that accurate?
Mayor Gavin Buckley:Yeah, I think we both come from a small business background but we both love the place that we live and we love seeing this place get better and have things that we love to do here and our families love to do and other families love to do and I think you know for all of us that's the motivator to be in public service.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Yeah, and I can also say I know a little bit of the story of how you decided to run for mayor. I know my own experience. I think in both of our cases we were a little irritated with government and stepped up, you know kind of to fight back. You had illegally painted a mural on the side of your restaurant or you hadn't gotten the approval from the historic district. Was that the beginning of it for you?
Mayor Gavin Buckley:Yeah, my position was that I didn't need approval, that I checked the code and the code said that the Historic Preservation Commission does not have jurisdiction over paint or paint color. And I had a citation for peeling paint on my building and it just happened that the first Sunday Arts Festival was on a week after I got the citation, so it gave me a great opportunity to paint my building and then the debate came up and the lawsuit came up, or the legal battle came up whether paint and mural was an alteration or whether it was just paint, and we struggled with that for over a year and in that time I decided to run for office.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:And I got to say it wasn't just that you were, you know, arguing with people about the mural. You were in the process of revitalizing West Street. You have built, you have restaurants there and you've really been the catalyst for making West Street a thriving, thriving district now.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:Yeah, I think w hat we did was we tried to make a street for the locals. You know you're a local if you live in Edgewater or Crownsville or Arnold or wherever the downtown is for everybody. But on West Street we really sort of homed in on less tourists and more locals and then we knew the tourists would come after that. So we worked on rebranding it from. You know an area that had fallen on hard times. It had a reputation for where you go to buy your drugs. Or you know an area that had fallen on hard times. So you don't have to go on and on on this one.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:We know you get on these topics, yeah, yeah, so, so, um, and I gotta say, as a as a little boy who grew up in South County, Davidsonville, it was about 25 minute drive, 30 minutes sometimes to Annapolis. I loved the place because I liked going to Storm Brothers for ice cream, going down to City Dock and seeing the boats. It was just a huge treat to get to go into Annapolis. Actually, my mom would take us in to West Street, to the library the previous version of the library right there on West Street in the summer when we had to get books to read. That was my experience of Annapolis and I didn't really think a whole lot about how I would, you know, interact with the mayor if I were county executive. We sort of figured that out as we went.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:But I do remember one of the first times I met you was at your victory party when you won, and that was a year before I ran. And I remember Steve Shuh coming in to congratulate you that night. He had been supporting your opponent and that was nice to see. But there was an amazing energy. The place was packed way beyond fire code capacity, I'm sure upstairs at Metropolitan and you're not smiling about that.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:He thinks he's still going to get in trouble, doesn't he? Nah, you're not going to get in trouble. The fire chief was there.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Fire chief was there, so it was okay. Yeah, but you really launched a kind of enthusiasm. That was in 2017, right.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:Yeah, I think a lot of us woke up in 2016 and we were like, "what is happening, yeah, yeah, I think a lot of us woke up in 2016 and we were like what is happening, and I think that motivated a lot of us Democrats to sort of get you know, to step up. And I think you know, I would like to think that you know, we started a wave in 2017. And you know, if a guy with a funny accent and a bad haircut like me could get elected, I'm sure a lot of people thought, well, if he could get elected, I could get elected, yeah yeah well, the era of the non-politician, in some ways, you know.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Um, so uh, I watched, followed closely, as you, you know, started your your administration, and one of the first things you did was to, um, to move the cars off of Main Street on one side so that you had a bike lane that would go down on a wooden platform. And how'd that go? Oh, killed it.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:You took some flack.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Some of these business people who had been your supporters, your allies, supposedly weren't happy about that for some reason.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:No, the headline in the paper read "Did Buckley's Bike Lane Break Annapolis? And it was a one-month trial, and so it was just a trial and it was an extension of the sidewalk. So we put all these nice cafe tables down on those wooden platforms and then it was a three-foot bike lane going the opposite direction of traffic, which is the way that traffic should go, because you should come into Annapolis from the top of Main Street, because that is the money view. That's how, why you fall in love, it is it is.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I mean, I've been to a lot of marches. I remember the march after the, the shooting at the Capital Gazette. Everybody with their, with their candles, going down Main Street and and looking out to the water. It is extraordinary, um. So, uh, yeah, you, uh, at the time people thought, wow, this guy might be just too much for Annapolis, and you know he probably won't get reelected. But I, I had a very, very strong feeling that you were going to be very popular by the end because of your, your vision and your passion and your, your, your sense of place for, for Annapolis. And that, uh, you were talking about City Dock already at that at that time, and I, I thought City Dock is going to be what makes Gavin Buckley's legacy, um, and then the election came and you got re-elected. By what was the margin?
Mayor Gavin Buckley:it was extraordinary 73 percent of the vote.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So it was yeah, solid, solid, unheard of not since World War II.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:That was the headline. Okay, okay, uh, a nd, um, and during that time I remember I remember going down to City Dock for one of your visioning sessions. That was actually at City Dock, where you had tables set up with little blocks so people could put the buildings where you know to envision what they would like it to look like, and I thought that was really cool, that level of community engagement. So tell us a little bit more about how the plan for City Dock came together.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:I think you know I campaigned on a park, not a parking lot, and so you know, no European city, no modern city, would use its best real estate just to put cars on, and so we knew that before we could talk about taking away parking, I learned my lesson from my bike lane that we had to add parking capacity, and in that process we came up with a clever way to finance it.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:We worked with the county, side by side, to make sure that we funded this in such a way that it didn't hurt the local taxpayers, because it is the largest municipal project in the city's history. And so and then we also knew that this city experiences an extraordinary amount of flooding and that we needed to do something about that, and so this development gave us an opportunity to raise City Dock, create a barrier against the flooding, build a new parking garage to replace the aged-out garage that had concrete cancer that actually shouldn't have even been being used. When I came into office, it had a study done three or four years before I got there that said it's got a year or two more left, and so I would joke if people came to visit my office, I'd be like. You didn't park in the garage, did you yeah?
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Well, and you got that done and I was at the ribbon cutting, had a party up on the top and music, and the governor was there. Had a party up on the top and music and the governor was there and, and, uh, more capacity than the old one so that you could free up the parking. Uh, down on, down down on City Dock. Um, and you.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I also have to say that you were fiscally incredibly responsible in the way you did all these things.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:The first year you came in, the city's budget was a disaster and you had no choice but to do a little bit of a revenue enhancement. They call it a tax increase in some places and I know that was really tough to do and that you have been adamant that you're not going to do that again, because Annapolis residents already pay higher taxes in the county around them for their services, and that's pretty common for urban areas. But since that time, and having gone through that and of course, you've got your AAA bond rating as a result of that, I mean it was noticed that the city actually was honest about its finances at that point and hadn't been in the past. So kudos to you on that. But but then you made sure that you got your money from elsewhere and I got to say I, you are always on the job, selling your city, whether it's to me, to the state level of government, federal, and you have raised an incredible amount of outside money for City Dock.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:No, yeah, and I say that doesn't just happen. You have to have relationships, you have to put time into those relationships. There was a lot of money out there because of COVID, but either of us didn't get money handed to us. We had to have a good plan. It had to be designed, it had to be fleshed out and had to have people that could implement it. And because we've had very worthy projects and we think the City Dock is going to get a ton of national attention for Anne Arundel County and Annapolis, because it's a resilience project that not many people are doing in the country.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:And clearly the water is coming right and we have historic amounts of flooding happening this year, the highest flooding year in the city's history. Uh, there is another Isabel on the way. We don't know when that's going to be, but Isabel was our worst flooding event in history. This year we've had two that are in our top 10 flooding events, so clearly we've got to do something about it. And that's what you put in office for. You're put there to solve problems and I think you know I'll give it to you all the time. So you are a problem solver right, and you don't run away from hard stuff. You run towards hard stuff and take it on, even when some of your team are telling you not to.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Sometimes yeah, sometimes you just got to go with the gut. So a problem that you had to solve as a result of tearing down the old garage and then having to build a new garage is you had a shortage of parking there for at least a year, however long it was, and I remember the work that you were doing. You saw that as an opportunity to change the way people move around the city and a plan to electrify transportation in the city. So tell us some of the things that you did on that.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:If you walk into the City Hall of Annapolis, there's a big neon sign inside that says Annapolis is going electric. Right yeah. Now if we are really gonna decarbonize and if we're really gonna meet our goals, we need to be moving in that direction as quick as possible. And that is obviously transportation, that is bikes, that is bike lanes, that is electric scooters, that is any other thing that doesn't directly burn fossil fuel. Now we all have to work on how we power that electricity, and I understand that we've got a ways to go. We just learned a lot about that on our last trip.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:But that's what leadership is, you know, moving the city in that direction, and you know I can't. We have the perfect model here in Annapolis. It's the closest thing to a little European city with a compact eight square miles. We could achieve great things here. We could get people out of their cars, their fossil fuel burning cars, immediately. We could get them onto electric circulators or electric 10-minute trolleys or electric ferries and they could move around the city without burning any fossil fuel directly. So you, um, you went to the Netherlands last year and then, uh, Sweden this year.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I was not with you on the first trip but was with you on the second one and I can say and that was that was just recent um, you had your eyes open, or maybe they already were open, but you brought other people and opened their eyes on your first trip, to what multimodal transportation really can look like and what resilience to the rise of sea level can look like, or, and the actions that can be taken. And then the second trip I got to go on and it was really coordinated through the Resilience Authority with a grant that came through them, and it allowed public officials like us to go from state, county, and city. And it was really kind of extraordinary to me to see how few cars were in Stockholm and Gothenburg and how many people were on bikes, including our whole group, which was a little bit scary at times, but we managed to get through without crashing. And then all the transit um, so it does, it does really. You don't believe you can do it until you've seen it.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:And, um, thank you for, thank you for convincing me to go. Well, every politician in America should do exactly the same trip that we did. I mean, it was an, you know, exhausting five days. you know, it's better to travel 10,00 miles t r 1 b. t b y s c s s a b a show them v w a w p o i
Mayor Gavin Buckley:You guys got up to get on the plane at three o'clock on City Dock morning and came back. It must have been a blur, but you can't explain this stuff. I always use have, that Confucius quote.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:But nothing substitutes actually going and seeing how the leaders of the world Sweden are the leaders of the world in sustainability and America cared about that. People come to America all the time and we host delegations from bay other countries because we lead the world in plenty of things harbor right, but not this right, yeah. And when I went to the Netherlands the year before, they lead the world on holding back water and redirecting water and living below sea level, and you know, people in the Netherlands don't have flood insurance because their government takes care of it. And it's interesting to go to those countries where people trust government and then, you know, all we do is, you know, malign our governments. In some ways, I think this is a well-run city. This is a well-run county. Our ratings prove that. Our livability proves it.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Yeah. So let's get back to home, get back to Annapolis and CityDoc. You and I have both had situations where when we really want to do something big, we don't always have not everybody's on board. I think in most of our cases we've had a majority on board. So City Dock raising the land so that the water can't come and take over the businesses and shut down the city the way it's been doing.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:But it's also public space with a plan for fountains that kids can play in, a stage where entertainment can happen, a welcome center that has a platform where people can get the best views out onto the bay, out onto the dock, I mean out onto the harbor. And to me that was like icing on the cake. That was like, wow, we can actually do this in downtown Annapolis. Like City who aren't members of the Yacht Club and can't experience it there or can't afford to go to Chop Tank that has the great they can go to public events, public events that are on a platform like that, community meetings, even uh and and um, and then the people who come in, who are boaters, uh, play.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Obviously you got to move. You got to move your current harbor master building that's got the showers and all that stuff out of the way to be able to do this. So you replace it with something that's not blocking the view as much. And now we've got there are people who are saying it shouldn't be done because it blocks the view, or it shouldn't be done because you know we don't want to have those big entertainment activities going on Wednesday our town. What do you say to that? t
Mayor Gavin Buckley:I mean I say there's people out there that don't want any more people to come to Annapolis. You know they want to pull the drawbridge up because they like it the way there is. Look, you live in a state capital. You know we're entitled to grow. We don't overdevelop. Show me where we've ever overdeveloped. And we preserve buildings. We keep the scale and character of the city. But the city of Annapolis belongs to everybody. It's our state capital.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:People like you did when you said you were a kid there was a special treat to come downtown. But now it's going to be even better. And you know the ridiculous questions about the fountain, that people don't support it because the majority of people do, but they don't show up. It's only the squeaky wheel that gets all the attention. The majority of people would love a place where they could throw a blanket on some grass and watch the wednesday night races, or the kids could run through the the fountain while they're sipping a coffee, or or you could get on a ferry a new electric ferry from the waterfront welcome center and go to the maritime museum, or or maybe holly beach farm, or or or the white house plantation, white hall. I'm going to the white house tonight and and and David Taylor Center. When that comes online, how magic is that going to be? It's the best development site in Maryland, if not America.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Yeah, so people who don't know, the David Taylor site is right across the Severn River from the city and kinds of research and things going on there. Annapolis of the buildings are vacant, it's crumbling, it's Annapolis an environmental disaster over there and there's been a Annapolis, to trams, the last parts to Fort Meade of what has been out there as part of the Congress made a decision to do that and it still hasn't happened. And there's a person who's ready to build something over there that the public can enjoy, probably. I think they've talked about hotel, maybe some office, um, but restaurants and a way to get into annapolis without coming in row boulevard right um, you, you go in that way and then you get on the ferry and you come across and and, um, I, I love it.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:I think, and I think the. And by water is the way it used to be back in the day, and we can get back to that, and you and I saw some ferry systems in Stockholm and Gothenburg that were pretty impressive. It's so relaxing to get out on the water and so many people never get to do it.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:People come to work in. Yeah on a boat. They come to work in Sydney Harbour on a boat boat. They come to work in sydney harbour on a boat. We used to Annapolis ferries that came into annapolis. We used to have trains that came into annapolis. We used to have trams that ran through annapolis electric trim so so you know, we've had those modes of transportation before, but we have to get back to them because single-use vehicles is Bay is killing our environment. Right and then, and, and, and.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:That has to be addressed, right and so and just just to be clear for people, we're not talking about ferries with cars.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:We're talking about passenger ferries yeah, and so you can bike, and passenger, yeah, and with your bicycle, and so you will be able to park your car in the garage in annapolis and then walk down to City Dock, get on the ferry and, if the whole thing gets built out the way the five-county feasibility study lays it out, you'll be able to go to St Michael's. You'll be able to go to places all up and down the bay Matap eake Baltimore City, with your bicycle, live in Kent Island and commute to work in Baltimore.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:You could do that on a ferry, wouldn't that be great?
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Yeah, commute to work in Baltimore. You could do that on a City ferry Dock wouldn't that be great? Or even from Annapolis. And so you've got a grant to do the first ferry, which will be very localized in Annapolis. And then the county just got notification. We've got a federal grant to get two more and maybe a third. We'll see if we can get some outside money for that. That'll go from Annapolis to Baltimore and Annapolis straight across to Meadow Peak State Park over there on Kent Island. So that'll be a start.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:So, and it'll be amazing. And then people will get on it and they'll feel good and they'll love where they live. I P3, this is an amazing body of water that we all get to live on and we get to share. And I think you know, the more you get on it, the more you get in it. The more you get on it, the more you get in it, the more you'll love it, the more you'll fight for it.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:All those things you know okay. So how do you pay for city doc? R
Mayor Gavin Buckley:so we were very clever, like I think we've got to stop, you know, vilifying the private sector. I think you, when p3 was that the garage we we put that out for bid. We put, selected a company that um helped design it with us, build it, and then they operated on a 30-year ground list and then the future revenues of that were factored into that and it spun off a $25 million concession payment. So that gave us $25 million in our back pocket to go and chase the $75 million or $100 million that we need to finish the project. These things are not cheap.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:I can point to the Farragut Wall on the US Naval Academy. It's a football-sized field of resilience that they've just finished $36 million. It just takes care of one corner, one foot. So without the private sector, we are not going to achieve our resilience goals Washington, We're definitely not going to achieve them fast enough. So that's what we do. We try to be creative because we're small business owners. We don't expect the government to pay for everything. We we expect, you know, to be creative on how we finance it, have multiple funding sources for things and and make it easier on, easier on our residents. I think I'm proud of the work and you know we've done. I'm proud of theience Finance Authority, that other tool in the toolbox that we created, because we're acutely aware of what sea level rise looks like, because we experience it on a regular basis, with flooding here in different parts of the city and somebody has to take care of that.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:But you've got large, multi-million dollar grants from both the state City Dock the feds, and earmarks. And then, fingers crossed, there's a FEMA grant. That is schools, huge, right? How big is that?
Mayor Gavin Buckley:Yeah, $33 million FEMA grant. It's COVID money, it's Maryland money. Maryland received a tranche of money when COVID hit, like every state in America did, and you've probably read about it. Some states haven't committed that money to projects. It could go back to Washington DC or to FEMA. We've committed that to our project, but the FEMA process is so linear and that's what's frustrating for us. You know, we're not redeveloping some wetlands, we're redeveloping a parking lot on the water. Every single piece of it is hardscape. There's no, there's no environmental issues, uh, that that are really applicative to applicable to this, to this uh project. But you know it's government and so they take a long, long time. And you know, you and I both learned that the wheels of government move very slowly, no matter how much we try to make them go faster, it doesn't just happen.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Is it safe to say that you're not going to do city dock with money that would otherwise be used to build ball fields for kids or to build schools which of course you don't build we do, the county does but that it's not coming out of the capital budget that you need for other projects? Yeah, absolutely, it's not coming out of the capital budget that you need for other projects.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:Yeah, absolutely. It's not coming out of any of our budgets and the money would have gone somewhere else if we didn't direct it to our project. And people conflate that stuff all Eastport the time.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:It's not like either or is it right?
Mayor Gavin Buckley:It's not either. Or Like we work just as hard on money for housing. I can give you a list of how much money is coming to housing affordable housing $300 million to Esport. $26 million that's just gone to Newtown, $56 million that's going to Morrisplum. Close to half a billion dollars is going to come into this county for housing through our partnerships with HUD and the reimagining of what we're all trying to do together and create a better model than the one that existed before us.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:And while I acknowledge that everybody has a right to speak up and should with their opinions, when you get to the point where a community looks very divided and that there's not public support for a project, then you start losing money. You can't get grants, you can't get federal grants, if you don't have pretty broad public support for what you're trying to do. So my hope is that enough of the Annapolis community will get on board with what clearly the county, the state and the country want, which is this project at Annapolis City Dock to really celebrate what this city is and make it accessible for everybody. It would be a real disappointment, I think, to a lot of us, if a small number of people blocked this from going forward, and they should feel guilty, because every day that we wait is a day that we're vulnerable.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:And really, who's going to fight against the park? It's for everybody. It's just some silly politics.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Well, it'll happen and we all know. You know I mean. You campaigned on this. You got elected by a historic margin. There's no question that the people want Wes Moore this. So I'm really excited and Chesapeake Bay do anything I can to help as well.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:Um, you know, with the, you know the waterfront welcome center we we saw these governments build great municipal buildings. That waterfront welcome center is going to get more visitors come to it than than the state house. It's the truth, because everybody that comes to annapolis goes to the academy and goes to the waterfront. It's the truth, because everybody that comes to annapolis goes to the academy and goes to the waterfront. It's the number one location. ?
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So the public is going to connect people to the water yeah we talk about public water access, but do we really believe in it and that experience? I remember westmore talking about his relationship to the chesapeake bay. He said he grew up without one. He said it wasn't until he went out on a boat with Maryland his kids and saw, through their eyes, that connection that they had and they felt like it was their chesapeake bay. And then he started to feel that and if we don't get people connected to the water, they don't feel it. And if they don't feel it, they're not gonna. They're not gonna be good stewards, yeah.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So, um, well, this is um. You know, I, um, I know that. Uh, you know you're not going to be in office forever. I'm not council, going to be in office. Both of us are term limited. You know our jobs right now are to leave things in as good condition as we can and, for projects like this that aren't completed, leave them in a place where it's hard to say no, because they're already set up and teed up and ready to go. I think you've done that and you've got I guess you've got a year right.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:A little bit over a year. So a lot to do. But I think you know, I'm so happy that you're in front of a year too, because you know we have two years of the work that we've done together. You know, obviously we have a great relationship with the governor. I'm so proud of maryland, you know, as we move the state forward and and we innovate and we, you know, we, we run. I think we're running a good ship here, um so, uh.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So, you know, I'd like to still stay good relationships with our legislative. bodies Yeah too you know, you've got. You've got the city council, I've got the county council and then we've got the Maryland General Assembly, and it's a lot of people to work with and it forces us, as the executives of the jurisdictions, to stay accountable.
Mayor Gavin Buckley:Yeah, and it's their work too. Gavin They should be proud of it, because it can't happen. I've got a weak mayor system. I can't get things done unless I get the council support on it. You know you need to get support and I think that our state, you know, is there for us when we need them.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:So I think you know we've got great things going on here in Maryland, yeah, and we're lucky to live on an amazing piece of land with an amazing body of water next to it, that, uh, if we steward it well, um, you know, like I always say, it's our fundamental, like challenge as human beings is to have is to make peace with one another and, uh, to to respect the, you know, the nature that created us, and if we can do those things, we're good right?
Mayor Gavin Buckley:yeah, yeah, all right. Thanks david. All right, did it awesome cool, thank you, yeah, great, that was fantastic.
County Executive Steuart Pittman:Thanks a lot well, thanks for listening. Everybody, and wherever you're listening to this podcast, there should be a subscribe button that you can hit so that you'll be notified about what we're doing next week, and we'll see you next week.
