Anne Arundel County Council Republican Nathan Volke withdrew a controversial bill Tuesday night that would ban all flags other than the county, state and federal flags from flying on county flagpoles or being displayed in county buildings.
He replaced the bill at Tuesday’s council meeting with one that would prohibit the county from allowing individuals or groups outside government to fly flags on county flagpoles. The bill will not be open for public hearing until Oct. 3 due to council procedure that allows residents time to review the new proposal.
Both the original and new bill were inspired by a Supreme Court decision over a case in Boston in which the city told a group it couldn’t fly a Christian flag on a city flagpole because it violated the separation of church and state provision in the Constitution. The group sued and the case rose to the Supreme Court, which unanimously sided with the group, saying it had a right to express free speech.
The case got Volke, of Pasadena, thinking about the messages a jurisdiction sends when it flies certain flags, he said. Sometimes those messages can conflict, so he decided to come up with a simple rule that would keep the county from being in position to exhibit any sort of bias with the flags it flies — only the Anne Arundel, Maryland and U.S. flags would have been allowed on county poles under the original bill.
The bill quickly drew criticism from a variety of groups, including LGBTQ+ advocate organizations and veterans who value seeing the pride and POW/MIA flags in the county and don’t want that visibility taken away.
“I listened to what everybody said. There was a lot of feedback and a lot of people thought this bill was not what I thought it was,” Volke said after Tuesday’s meeting. “I think it was going to fail even more than as a 4-3 vote. It may have gone down even more than that.”
After learning of his colleagues’ thoughts on the bill, he spoke with some of them to come up with a new draft that would get at the same idea as the original but perhaps be less restrictive.
“It’s a bit narrower,” Volke said. “I listened to what people had to say and I adjusted.”
However, some were unhappy with Volke pulling the bill at the start of the meeting, as about a dozen people had come to the Arundel Center in Annapolis to testify in front of the council about it. Annapolis Pride, an LGBTQ+ rights group, had several members in attendance who left early upon hearing the bill had been pulled.
“We’re very upset about the last-minute pulling of the bill and introducing a new one,” said Annapolis Pride spokesperson Joe Toolan. “We are happy that it has been reworded in a way that addresses what [Volke] says it is supposed to address, which is the Boston precedent, but there are still concerns about the authority of deciding which flags can or can’t be flown still lying with whoever is in charge of that building.”
Individuals and nongovernment groups should be able to have their flags flown if they request it, Toolan said, granted that the flags represent unity and inclusivity.
He said another positive change with the new bill is it no longer limits flags that can be displayed within county buildings, only on county flagpoles.
Others, like LGBTQ+ community member Emma Buchman, said that whatever the fate of this bill, damage has been done to local groups of marginalized people.
“He’s compelled so many people to share personal stories to prevent something like this from happening,” Buchman said. “[Then] he just pulls it without any regard for how much he’s hurt people and I’m really angry for this entire community that he used county resources like that.”
And with a new bill come a new host of potential legal interpretations. What is and isn’t a government entity is sometimes less clear than it seems, as in the case of Anne Arundel County Public Library, which is a quasi-government group that uses county property.
Skip Auld, the library’s CEO, said he thinks the system’s part-government status will allow it to make decisions about its flags.
“In the case of the libraries I believe that we could decide what flags we want to fly on the county flagpoles,” Auld said. “I don’t know what the need is for even that bill, but at least it’s not this bill that restricts our libraries and library staff from celebrating all walks of life.”
After the bill was pulled and those who came to testify met up in the lobby outside the council chambers, they got a chance to meet someone who may be an alternative to Volke’s style of governance — Michael Gendel, Volke’s new Democratic write-in opponent.
As Gendel, from Pasadena, shook hands with county residents, the 80-year-old pitched himself as a more locally focused representative than Volke.
“Council person is a grassroots type of job and should look after the welfare of people, promote equality and equity, clean up the transportation, build sidewalks — it’s local government,” Gendel said. “We don’t need to bring in the national mantras of exclusion and bigotry.”
Before Gendel filed for office Aug. 11, he had no intentions to run, but after seeing Volke go unopposed in the primary and poised to be unopposed in the November general election, he decided to put himself forward as an opponent.
“I thought, what do I have to lose at my age?” he said. “I decided to be a symbolic opposition.”
Gendel understands his chances of even acquiring a meaningful percentage of the vote as a write-in candidate are slim, but he said simply providing an alternative to Volke for voters is important. He’s aiming for 100 votes.
