Left Handed Leftist
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Left Handed Leftist
*Trailer* On the Record: Charles County w/ Mckayla Wilkes
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This is the trailer the full episode that will be posted on 6/3!
In this episode, host Carlos Childs is joined by Mckayla Wilkes, candidate for Charles County Commissioner District 3. She discusses her opposition to data centers in Charles County. Mckayla also highlight her platform of affordable housing, youth services, and empowering small businesses.
Mckayla Wilkes:
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I want to ask you what are some of the things that you want to see done or that you will uh fight to put in place to hold developers accountable within the county.
SPEAKER_01Yes, I think that there should be a higher standard of the requirements of the qualities in which they have to abide by when they're constructing these housing units. Because people are paying a lot of money for these homes. People are paying a lot of money everywhere we're living at. And the bare minimum is to have a home that is habitable and that can withstand a thunderstorm, okay? Up to the quality that they should be. The other thing that we need to do is make these developers pay their fair share because these big residential developers that are coming into our communities, they're paying the same flat tax rates as our smaller owned business owners. And so we need to look at how we can make the tax structure progressive. We shouldn't be relying heavily on the property taxes, because once again, that's again putting the burden on working class people. But from what I'm seeing and what I have seen, what I have seen over the years is that we're leading with incentives saying that we need to attract developers to come here. And I feel like when you lead with those kinds of incentives, you take the leverage away from the benefits that they get from our economy here. Charles County is one of the wealthiest black counties in this country. I believe they're in the top 10 generally. Yes. And we are the richest black county in the entire country. We are 20 minutes or so outside of Washington, D.C. And so we have no issue at all being attractive to developers. But when you are leading with incentives, you are leading with shortchanging your constituency. You're telling your constituency, it's okay, you got it. We got property taxes. We want these developers to come here. And it's no coincidence that that's happening. So when they tell us that they're, you know, we don't want to raise the taxes of the developers because then they won't want to come here. Well, if developers don't want to invest in our communities, then those are the developers that we don't want in our communities. And so we have to make them pay their fair share. And oftentimes we're told this because our current sitting commissioners are taking developer money. And so that goes to the integrity of, you know, when you're taking all of this developer money, whether it's $500 here, $1,000 there, it's always an incentive to be an allyship to them and to not be in community with us. And so we need more commissioners who are going to be able to understand that and convey that to people in the community. But developers absolutely should be held to a higher standard and they should be paying their fair share to invest in our infrastructure, in our public schools, and in our community in general.
SPEAKER_00That's amazing. Would you support or push to get a stop work order in place for developers that we have seen these like multiple egregious acts, people coming to the public uh meetings and complaining about? Would you support having having developers have to stop work on future development until they fix the concerns of the uh residents who they who they built their homes for?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely, because that's a part of holding them accountable. People are spending over half a million dollars for these homes. And the absolute bare minimum would be to make sure that their homes are built at top-notch quality. Half a million dollars is not pocket change. Okay, people are essentially going into debt to have housing. And so that's the least that they can do. And absolutely, we should be pushing for stopwalk orders because you shouldn't be able to continue on benefiting from our economy if you are not treating our residents with the dignity and empathy and respect that they deserve.