The cavalry is coming for Carroll County Commissioner Julia Walsh Gouge.
Gouge had been inundated with critical letters and phones calls from residents who considered her comments “racially charged” after her vehement opposition to bringing public transportation from Baltimore City.
However, the tide appears to be turning in favor of Gouge.
“We moved to Carroll County after 20 years in the U.S. Navy to raise our two young children in good schools, clean environment and protected them from most of the crime that would come to Carroll County if buses were allowed,” Jim Farrow wrote to the commissioners in an e-mail.
And resident Heather Row said crime already comes to southeast Carroll when people from Baltimore County drive in.
The county?s infrastructure doesn?t allow for a mass transit system, which would need to make multiple stops in a spread-out county that generally lacks sidewalks, she said.
“It?s irritating me every time I go home that there?s more lights, more houses and the farms are leaving,” Row said. “I cannot believe that people would think that those comments are racially charged.”
But with a population that?s about 96 percent white, Carroll needs to make extra strides to diversify, others said.
A racist perception has persisted, ever since Carroll County Progressives founder Brad Brown, 27, witnessed Ku Klux Klan members recruiting on a street corner when he was a child, he said.
For now, it?s Carroll?s country character many residents want to preserve.
“I was raised to understand that elected officials were elected by the majority of the people voting, not the three percent minority,” Farrow wrote. “I believe that should a poll be taken, the people of Carroll County would speak up against bus service connecting the county with other counties or God forbid, Baltimore.”
