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Quartet of actors to take on grueling five-act “Hamlet” A-13
The Gazette POTOMAC | NORTH POTOMAC
DAILY UPDATES ONLINE www.gazette.net
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
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Delaney tours C&O, backs green causes n
STATEWIDE PROGRAM PROTECTS DOMESTIC VIOLENCE VICTIMS
BY AGNES BLUM STAFF WRITER
Leah talks about the Maryland Safe at Home program, which provides victims of domestic violence with a substitute address for them to use for mail.
BILL RYAN/THE GAZETTE
Addressconfidentiality BY
KATE ROYALS
SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE
After filing a restraining order against her abusive ex-husband and buying a house to live in with her children, a Montgomery County woman who goes by the name of Leah struggled to keep her address secret from her abuser. Even with the restraining order, he continued to harass her, making threatening phone calls and blocking her car from leaving a parking lot. In 2008, the Motor Vehicle Administration asked her for her new address while she was re-registering a car she still owned with her
Politician believes in public/private partnerships to help environment
ex-spouse. She realized that if she provided it, her abuser, who was in and out of jail, could find her and her children again. Today, Montgomery County has 72 people enrolled in a staterun program to help domestic violence victims hide from their abusive partners. After the incident at the Motor Vehicle Administration, Leah became one of them. Up to that point, she says, “I felt like I was strong. I thought I could handle stuff on my own.” But when someone with the MVA told her about Maryland’s Safe at Home Address Confidentiality
See VICTIMS, Page A-12
County volunteers provide 24-hour support to victims of sexual assault ‘We’re just there with them, we’re not deciding if their story is right or not’ n
BY
KARA ROSE
SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE
It might be 8 a.m. on a Tuesday. Maybe it’s 10 p.m. on a Wednesday, or 1 a.m. on a Sunday. Whenever that beeper sounds, the on-duty volunteer
at the county’s Victim Assistance and Sexual Assault Program springs to action. The 24-hour, seven days a week crisis intervention program is an agency of the Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services and is staffed by mental health professionals and trained volunteers. When the crisis center is contacted by the police department
See VOLUNTEERS, Page A-12
Maryland’s newest congressman, John Delaney, took a boat ride down the C&O Canal on Thursday with a handful of environmentalists to learn about efforts to protect the Potomac River watershed. Also at the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park in Potomac were representatives from groups such as the Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection, the C&O Canal Trust, the Alice Ferguson Foundation and the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Association, who spoke about their work. The purpose of the meeting was to acquaint the new congressman with environmental issues in the area and to meet key volunteers, said Kevin Brandt, superintendent of Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park. Volunteers contribute about 80,000 hours of work each year to the park, he said. “We could not maintain our level of operations without all those volunteer hours,” Brandt said. Delaney, 50, beat 20-year incumbent Republican Roscoe G. Bartlett in last year’s election to represent the 6th Congressional District, which was redrawn by Democrats in 2011 and includes portions of Democrat-friendly Montgomery County, where Delaney lives, as well as heavily Republican Western Maryland. That means balancing those two areas, which often have diametrically opposed agendas. Delaney supports gun control and is a strong believer in the dangers of global warming, stances that have raised eyebrows in Western Maryland. But he also has upset some state Democrats by often voting to the right of the rest of the state’s congressional delegation. On issues such as oil drilling and domestic surveillance, he split with most of his fellow Democrats. David Moon, who runs the politics blog Maryland Juice and is eyeing a bid for the Maryland House of Delegates in 2014, said that there are constituencies, both within the Democratic Party and across Delaney’s district, that have serious concerns with what they view as profracking and anti-union stances. After he won the Democratic primary last year, besting a union-supported candidate,
See DELANEY, Page A-12
County moves to link the hungry with unused food Believed to be nation’s first countywide program
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BY
RYAN MARSHALL STAFF WRITER
Montgomery County is preparing to unveil a new program for connecting sources of unused food with people who need it. The county’s food recovery network is expected to make it easier to collect unused food and get it to nonprofit agencies who feed the hungry. The program will deal with both planned food recoveries — when a supermarket knows it will have meat, dairy, produce or other products that will be
NEWS
A CHANGE AT MONTESSORI Montgomery County’s only charter school has begun to alter its lottery process.
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past their sell-by date and can schedule the products to be picked up — and unplanned pickups, taking food that wasn’t served from large weddings or catering events, said Richard Romer, who works for Montgomery County Councilwoman Valerie Ervin. Ervin helped form a work group that developed recommendations on creating a food recovery program for the county. The work group was scheduled to release its finding at a press conference Sept. 10. The group plans to set up both a central phone number to help set up food collections, as well as a mobile phone app to help connect providers with distributors, Romer said. A survey of grocery stores in the county
found there aren’t many who don’t already donate products to organizations to feed the hungry, but restaurants and caterers may be more of an untapped market, said Jenna Umbriac, director of nutrition programs for Manna Food Center in Gaithersburg, which provides food for more than 3,500 families each month. According to the group’s website, one in four county residents is at risk of hunger, and 32 percent of Montgomery County Public Schools students qualify for free or reduced-price meals. People are sometimes reluctant to donate because they’re afraid of being liable if someone gets sick from the products they donate, Umbriac said. But the new
TOM FEDOR/THE GAZETTE
The Bullis School debuted its new sound system and video scoreboard at Friday’s football game against St. John’s College. Kathleen Lloyd, the girls athletic director at the private Potomac school, said Bullis raised about $200,000 through pledges to pay for it. More Bullis football news, Page B-3.
See RECOVERY, Page A-12
SPORTS
VOLLEYBALL: THE END OF AN ERA
For first time in four years Alex Holston won’t dominate county’s volleyball season.
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Big screen test at Bullis
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