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The Gazette ROCKVILLE | ASPEN HILL | WHEATON
DAILY UPDATES ONLINE www.gazette.net
Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2013
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Former mayors express support for changing city’s charter n
STATEWIDE PROGRAM PROTECTS DOMESTIC VIOLENCE VICTIMS
BY
BILL RYAN/THE GAZETTE
Addressconfidentiality BY KATE ROYALS
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 Vehicles Administration asked her for her new address while she was re-registering a car she still owned with
ELIZABETH WAIBEL 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.
SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE
Voters can weigh in Nov. 5
her 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 Vehicles 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 ADDRESS, 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 ASSAULT, Page A-12
As Rockville’s election season warms up for Mayor and Council candidates, some people want voters to remember that proposed changes to the city’s charter will also be on the ballot. Rockville last year convened a Charter Review Commission to study the city’s charter, which provides the basis for its laws and election procedures. The commission recommended several changes, which will be on the November ballot as advisory referenda. Susan Hoffmann and Steven VanGrack, both former mayors and members of the Rockville Charter Review Commission, recently coauthored a position paper in support of the commission’s recommended changes to the charter. They said they hoped to generate more interest in the charter questions before Former Rockville campaign season Mayor Steven VanGrack gets into full swing. “You don’t want to minimize the importance of the election — because the election certainly chooses your leaders for the next two years — but this is really changing the constitution of the city, and it will have a far more lasting impact on the city and how the city is operated in the future,” VanGrack said. The Charter Review Commission recommended adding two councilmember seats to the city council; holding elections every four years instead of every two years; and holding city elections at the same time as presidential elections. VanGrack and Hoffmann wrote that longer terms of office would give newly elected officials
“... this is really changing the constitution of the city, and it will have a far more lasting impact on the city and how the city is operated in the future.”
See ELECTION, Page A-6
County to unveil steps for food recovery program n
Believed to be first countywide program in country 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
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Wheaton man admits that he murdered his girlfriend in 2012.
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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
GEORGE P. SMITH/FOR THE GAZETTE
Manchester Farm Pool in Germantown, in an annual Labor Day tradition, lets dogs close the pool season by jumping in.
See FOOD, Page A-6
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