PACKED & SHIPPED ON TIME FOR HEAVEN – John Boyd led the Town Hall Alliance effort for conservative government in St. Mary’s County 2010 election

JOHN BOYD: An Open Letter to St. Mary’s Taxpayers

My name is John Boyd.

As a senior citizen and business owner, I know we all live on relatively fixed incomes. Why have our County Commissioners (except for Larry Jarboe) voted to allow our property tax bills to escalate as significantly as we suffer through the present crisis?

I watched our local elected representatives vote to spend tax dollars on high-priced property deals while closing the door to public forums. They even held the questionable Hayden Farm acquisition hearing on Christmas Eve, assuring a smaller turnout to witness and question their underhanded deeds.

Only Commissioner Larry Jarboe voted NO to this and all the other abuses of power.

Rather than suffer quietly, I decided to take my government back.

I volunteered to serve as Treasurer on the slate of Republican candidates who have a reasonable plan to hold the line on your and my property tax.

They will return open government to St. Mary’s County.

Each one of these individuals on our Town Hall Alliance team has the common sense we need to represent us in the Mother County. Larry Jarboe, Randy Guy, Danny Morris and Rich Johnson will serve us well as we face continuing economic uncertainty.

Your donation in support of our commonsense slate of candidates will help secure a majority of elected officials who share your values. Your money will be well spent to get not one but four conservative County Commissioners elected.

Please take a moment to write a check for the Town Hall Alliance. We have established the Town Hall Alliance website to better communicate with St. Mary’s taxpayers. On it, you will find blogs where you can share your views on a wide range of topics already started by taxpayers like yourself. Join us there, and feel free to post about the issues already in progress. Additionally, donations can be made there using a credit card. You can find us at www.townhallalliance.com.

There is no need to suffer through four more years of tax and spend. But now is the time to begin the task of taking back our government. Won’t you please help?

Thank you,
John Boyd
Treasurer
Town Hall Alliance

Obituary

Our beloved father, John Richard Boyd, peacefully passed away on April 10, 2024, at his home in Valley Lee, Maryland, surrounded by his loving family. He was 85.    

John lived a full life. After graduating from Hoke Smith High School in 1957, he married his high school sweetheart, Mary Lee Forsyth. He enlisted in the Navy in 1959 during the Vietnam War, where he served as an Electronics Technician for 11 years. Decorations and Medals that John received for his time in the service included the National Defense Service Medal, Vietnam Service Medal, Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal, and Good Conduct Medal.  

While on a deployment to Guam, John and Mary gave birth to their first child, a daughter named Selene. Their son Jason arrived a couple of years later. Many years later, while living in Albany, Georgia, they had their son Jonathan.  

After being honorably discharged in 1970, he applied for and received an Electronic Warfare position as a Civil Servant. So, with his wife and young family in tow, they moved about every five years throughout the United States and overseas.  

John was stationed at Patuxent River Naval Base in 1978. Later, in 1985, John was stationed in Rota, Spain where he became a part of the Fleet Air Reconnaissance Squadron 2 (VQ4), nicknamed the “Batmen” and later “Sandeman.” The purpose of the VQ2 squadron was the collection of intelligence on areas and units of naval and national interest in the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern Theatres. This Naval Support Group Activity plays an integral role in the war on Terrorism, combat actions, crisis operations, and peacetime intelligence collection.

In 1987, John returned to St. Mary’s County, where he retired from the Navy only to find that he wasn’t ready to stop working. John and Mary opened a Mail Boxes Etc. in the Wildewood Center in 1988. He served the community by shipping and receiving packages from loved ones with a ready smile and an easy laugh. He finally decided that he would retire for good and sold his store in 2009.

Throughout his time in St. Mary’s County, John was a member of many clubs and organizations, including the Piney Point Lions Club, Elks Lodge, and Masonic Lodge.

John and Mary bought a house in The Villages, Florida (Home Port South), where they played cards with friends and neighbors, flew kites, and learned how to ballroom dance. They sold their home in Florida in 2018 to make their Valley Lee home (Home Port North) their permanent residence. John and Mary felt it was their true home.

John was a devoted husband, loving father, and proud grandfather. He is survived by his wife, Mary; his children, Selene (Shelby County, AL), Jason (Sargent, TX), and Jonathan (Stephanie, St. Mary’s County, MD); six grandchildren, Brittany, J.C., Emily, Sydney, Albany, Liam, and one great-grandchild, Abrea. John’s warm smile, infectious laugh, and unwavering kindness will forever be remembered by those who knew him. John will straight up be missed.

TOWN HALL ALLIANCE SLATE AIMS TO CUT WASTE, LOWER TAXES

LEONARDTOWN — (Oct. 6, 2009) — Dan Morris, of Oakville, has filed for the Leonardtown / Hollywood district Republican nomination for St. Mary’s County Commissioner. Morris, who ran for Sheriff in 2002 and was the campaign manager of the successful race by Republican Sheriff Tim Cameron in 2006. Morris has joined the Town Hall Alliance slate organized by St. Mary’s Commissioner Larry Jarboe on a platform of holding the line against tax hikes and doing away with shady backroom deals on land such as the Hayden Farm Deal. Morris is the latest commissioner candidate to join the slate; Randy Guy is filing today. Morris is a United States Marine Corps veteran who served in Vietnam.

TOWN HALL ALLIANCE AIMS TO PUT TEETH INTO CALLS FOR COMMON SENSE GOVERNMENT

By Kenneth C. Rossignol

ST. MARY’S TODAY

LEONARDTOWN (Oct. 4, 2009) — Tired of being on the losing side of 4-1 votes for the past few years as his fellow Republican Kenny Dement (R. Piney Point) joins with the three Democrats on the St. Mary’s Board of Commissioners, Larry Jarboe (R. Golden Beach) has worked to form a slate of candidates who pledge to be conservative with the tax dollars of the citizens and to hold down taxes.

James “Randy” Guy of Clements is joining the ticket this week. Guy, a retired Master Sergeant in the United States Air Force, is a native of Ridge and has operated a pool sales and service company for the past 15 years.

A former elected member of the Democratic Central Committee, Guy is another among the many conservative Democrats who are outraged at the present Board of St. Mary’s Commissioners’ tax and spending policies.

Asked on Friday if he would support tax hikes, as have Republican Kenny Dement and the Board’s three Democrats, Guy said, “Heck no, the taxes have been outrageous, and all this while people are losing their jobs and their property values have been dropping.”

Guy was working on setting up the American Legion booth at the Blessing of the Fleet on Friday, and his reaction from those he told of his plans was positive.

“They told me that we had to get that bunch of big spenders out of there,” said Guy. “I plan to file on Monday as long as my wife doesn’t kill me.”

Guy added that he thought his family would also support him, as his son is grown and his wife is still working full time.

Guy is a member of the St. Mary’s Zoning Appeals Board, which acts as a relief valve for citizens in their dealings with the county zoning rules and gives people a place to file appeals of rulings of the land use office.

Richard Johnson, of Valley Lee, is running for the commissioner seat, which covers Valley Lee, Callaway and Ridge, and all the southern end of the county; Kenneth Boothe had initially agreed to be part of the slate but voluntarily resigned on Friday so he could concentrate his efforts at highlighting farm issues and retaining a rural character in the county as it becomes overwhelmed with growth.

Dan Morris of Hollywood will file for the Hollywood / Leonardtown district on Monday. The group, which filed as a slate last week and is known as the Town Hall Alliance, still has open seats covering Great Mills, Lexington Park, and California.

Morris said it is time to stop the tax hikes and reign in spending on frivolous and unnecessary expenditures such as the $134,000 stage that the county had planned on spending in a recent budget.

Morris went to the elections office on Friday to file, but the office was closed for an event.

Jarboe said on Friday that the Town Hall Alliance slate hopes to fill the Lexington Park ticket spot soon, and he hopes to hear from those interested in running on the same conservative platform as the group.

Community involvement is the thread that led the group to become interested in serving as commissioners.

For Jarboe, a sawmill operator, it was the community group in the Huntersville area that successfully fought the efforts of a developer with close ties to Congressman Steny Hoyer and local Democrats such as John K. Parlett, who attempted to push through a debris dump in an area of steep ravines which drained into a tributary of the Patuxent River.

The developer, Ron Pickett, would truck in debris from Baltimore, including municipal waste, which was to be ground up, and turn the debris-filled with heavy metal and other construction and demolition materials into the dump.

After an outraged community fought the Good Old Boys plan in 1993 and 1994, Jarboe ran for commissioner against the unbeatable Democrat Eddie Bailey. Jarboe won in 1994, lost the GOP primary in 1998, and returned to win a commissioner seat in 2002 and again in 2006.

In his first political race, Morris nearly beat David Zylak for the Democratic nomination for Sheriff in 2002, coming only 300 votes shy. In 2006, Morris worked as campaign manager for the successful race won by St. Mary’s Sheriff Tim Cameron.

Morris has a strong law enforcement background, having worked as a Prince George’s County homicide investigator and hired by St. Mary’s States Attorney Walter B. Dorsey as his investigator. Morris also serves on the Sheriff’s Retirement Board and is active in the Mechanicsville Moose Lodge.

Morris has also been raising mums for the past few years as a supplement to his family’s income and experiencing the vagaries of dealing with land use rules when he rebuilt a cottage in Scotland.

Johnson decided to achieve some energy independence for his family instead of just sitting around freezing or lighting candles due to the soaring cost of electricity. An engineer at Pax River, Johnson studied wind turbines after deciding that solar energy had too long a payback time. When he attempted to obtain a building permit, he was told by St. Mary’s County that it would not be possible unless he were willing to wait for years while perhaps the county would review the code.

Johnson was also told that if he could get a county commissioner interested, there could be a faster solution.

Johnson went to Jarboe, and soon, a text amendment was drafted. After nearly a year, the county passed an ordinance to allow the construction of a wind turbine at home.

But the Critical Area staff is duplicitous and downright sneaky. They played games with Johnson to the point that he went to ask for help from Senator Roy Dyson (D. St. Mary’s, Calvert, Charles).

After reviewing the county ordinance and Johnson’s plans, Dyson found no reason to stop the permit process and hand-carried a letter to the Chairman of the Critical Areas Commission asking him to sign off on the permit.

The Critical Area Commission was involved because Johnson’s home was located on the water, which is exactly why the wind turbine would work for him, as the steady breezes came off the Potomac.

Harnessing the wind would drive down Johnson’s rates, and his wind turbine, built without any government subsidy, would allow him to sell any excess electricity to SMECO.

Therefore, this private investment on the part of Johnson would have payoffs for the public in that SMECO would be buying clean energy, which presently gets all of its power from fossil fuels, coal, and oil.

However, Johnson learned about the sneaky and underhanded way that local bureaucrats worked against citizens and state officials. There were fine and principled officials from whom Johnson got straight answers, but listing their names would put a target on their backs.

Johnson was also involved in crafting a compromise allowing hunters to continue using part of the Elms property for 30 years after hysterical elements of the school system attempted to ban all hunting on the property.

The citizens who have been using the Elms’s property for hunting, without incident, for all these years were nearly run over by the hysteria crowd, but by enlisting support from the public at large, as well as the commissioners, were able to have the school board agree to a compromise.

Even then, the sneaks of the state Department of Natural Resources attempted to subvert the compromise, and Senator Dyson’s intervention once again enabled it to be preserved.

While community involvement triggered the decision to form a slate and run, the unifying issues of respecting the tax money confiscated from taxpayers and the soaring assessments at the same time that property values dropped had incensed them and most voters.

The commissioner board did not hear Jarboe’s efforts to reign in frivolous spending and lower the tax rate to compensate for higher assessments.

Part of the past decade’s ever-higher spending patterns is tied to development issues and adding new schools and infrastructure to keep up with the Board of Commissioners’ development approvals.

The Town Hall Alliance’s initial platform clearly states that halting runaway development will be a significant goal.

“The message needs to go out that we are going to look at the real cost of approving large developments and commercial areas,” said Jarboe.

“I want to make government work for people, not against them,” said Johnson while working on the float the group entered in the St. Mary’s Fair Parade.

“We need to stop high taxes and treat the taxpayer’s resources respectfully,” said Morris.

While Commissioners Dan Raley (D. Great Mills) and Tommy Mattingly (D. Leonardtown) cannot run again, Kenny Dement (R. Piney Point) and Jackie Russell (D. St. George’s Island) can and have filed for election next year. Dement and Russell have established firm records for spending any money on any proposal by staff and supported the purchase of the Hayden Farm for more than $2 million over its value, causing many citizens to say that the deal stinks worse than a bushel of rotten crabs.

Dement and Russell have refused Jarboe’s proposals to lower the tax rate to compensate for higher assessments, so taxes have gone up while the economy is clobbering citizens.

Dement and Russell should count themselves lucky if they are merely voted out next year and not lynched, given the mood of the voters.

Many of those who were mailed tickets to a fundraiser for Dement this month are stating that they have just sent them back in and have no intention of attending.

Dement’s affiliation with a new girlfriend in the weeks after his wife’s death has many women in the county irked, and that move by the old baseball star may also lead to Johnson benching him next year.

All of the Town Hall Alliance slate is running in the Republican primary. Jarboe said on Friday that it appears that the liberal Democrats in St. Mary’s are now dominating primaries, and conservative Democrats are leaving the party in droves.

An article in the Hambone Gazette, a free suck-up tabloid owned by former Commissioner Tommy McKay, slammed the Town Hall Alliance for condemning the “Hayden Farm Deal Stinks” on their float at the fair parade last week.

McKay, who lied about having a college degree and tried to cover up for his son counterfeiting twenty-dollar bills, lost his challenge to Sen. Roy Dyson in the 2006 election by a wide margin, more than 2-1. McKay blamed his loss on ST. MARY’S TODAY, which exposed McKay’s college degree fraud and reported on his son passing the fake currency to drug dealers.

McKay had his stinky land deal when he put together a backroom deal with then-Governor Robert Ehrlich in 2005 to sell state-owned land to a Baltimore campaign contributor pal of Ehrlich for the same amount the state paid for the land. The developer’s name, Hackerman, who would have ended up with waterfront lots, became attached to that shady deal and helped sink both McKay and Ehrlich as the deal was uncovered.

McKay’s sleazy type of leadership is precisely what Jarboe is trying to avoid from taking place any longer.

Russell has followed in the footsteps of McKay by bailing out a developer on Indian Bridge Road and allowing a developer in Valley Lee to open up a public sewer in a large area of land, which may cause explosive growth.

Russell campaigned on a pro-environmental platform and quickly sold his supporters down the river.

Dement is incoherent and unable to understand the complex issues facing the county or answer questions coherently.

As Jarboe gets his running mates lined up for the campaign, his Town Hall Alliance slate grows, with John Boyd of Valley Lee as Treasurer and Joan Ritchie of Leonardtown as Chairman. The group is raising money to campaign hard through next year.

A campaign website for the conservative slate will be operational soon.

“Donations are sought from anyone who wants to join,” said Ritchie.

 Hitting the Streets
By Larry Jarboe

     As we count down the days to the Primary Election on Sept. 14, there are still many meetings and very important local issues that are taking place.

     This week, Town Hall Alliance candidates Randy Guy and Danny Morris joined me at the Higher Ed Center.  Specifically, we wanted to hear Congressman Hoyer and John Bohanan address the concerns of dozens of contractors.  The Obama Administration and our Democratically controlled Congress are increasing civil service positions.  Many contracted employees are being recruited away by the Federal Government.  This is making mission support difficult in already trying times.

     The present review of our zoning ordinance is underway. Our Board unanimously supported further limiting zoning approval to places that feature adult entertainment. Though there is no application pending, caution is the keyword.

     There is, however, an application under review to place a slaughterhouse between two sub-divisions in Mechanicsville.  Though it is not presently allowed due to limited highway access, the discussion was presented that a text amendment could be approved to move the project to the Board of Appeals.  Commissioner Mattingly expressed his disappointment that the neighbors would not be able to see the full proposal at the Board of Appeals public hearing.  Commissioner Dement concurred with his assessment

     Knowing the very real challenges a regional industrial slaughterhouse would have adjacent to any residential neighborhood, I recommended further restrictions crafted from our past code to protect our communities.  In this case, my fellow four commissioners voted no to my proposal to keep a slaughterhouse out of your backyard.

     Ironically, under the proposed ordinance, strip clubs will be limited, but slaughterhouses can proceed as usual.

     It has been a great honor to vote to serve the taxpayers and the conscience of the community.  Since last year, fellow commissioner candidates Randy Guy, Danny Morris, and Rich Johnson have aligned to help hold the line on our increasing property tax bills and stand up to behind-the-scenes zoning deals.  We have since been joined by State Delegate candidates Matt Morgan and Erik Johnson to unseat the Status Quo in Annapolis.

     Last minute candidate arrival, Tommy McKay, has had four years to attend public hearings and speak out for the people.  He has had many chances to stand up for neighbors aggrieved by the present board’s zoning decisions that were approved in a 4-1 vote.  He only has his public record from his past single term to stump from.

     His fixation on competing with the expanding ST. MARY’S TODAY media network and attempting to cover his past foibles has prevented him from hitting the street to hear what is on the minds and hearts of the people in St. Mary’s County.

     When the property tax bills arrive in the next couple of weeks, will he support the one commissioner who voted no to the increase you will see on your bill?  How will he answer the citizens in Mechanicsville who ask why he voted during his single term with Commissioners Mattingly and Raley for a shared water system in Morganza at Grand View Haven?  Will he defend Commissioner candidate Brandon Hayden’s vote of approval on the Planning Commission to install a water tower in Mechanicsville?

     Will he publicly disclose his alliance and business relationship with the long-standing Democratic network that influences zoning decisions in the Northern End of St. Mary’s County?

     Likely, he will continue to complain that Randy made fun of him.

     This is going to be one rip-roaring Republican Primary, with the guys who drive pick-up trucks taking on the Town Car Republicans. Change of registration forms are still available. See you on the street.