Selections from Mayor Jake Day’s 2022 State of the City Address, Part 2
Jake Day • February 28, 2023
Edited by CSES Staff.
As mayor of Salisbury in Wicomico County, Jake Day delivered his 2022 State of the City Address on November 15, 2022. Because the speech is long, our staff has chosen selected sections to be published. On January 18, we looked at the mayor’s thoughts on culture and youth. Today, we look at crime and traffic. Common Sense for the Eastern Shore is grateful to Mayor Day and his staff for generously providing us with the full text of his speech.
2009 (Crime)
- “I’m here to work shoulder-to-shoulder with the men and women of the SPD, to push down crime and the fear of crime, and also get to the root causes of crime in Salisbury.”
- That’s Police Chief Barbara Duncan upon her arrival to Salisbury. We wanted someone who could combat long-running, persistent policing issues in our City and take them head on — with a twist. We wanted someone who valued holistic, community-centric practices that would establish good rapport with our citizens and, more specifically, our youth.
- The Salisbury she came to was not dissimilar from most cities in America. After a long decline in crime from 1994 to the early 2000s, crime had risen back to 1980s levels, reaching a climax in 2009.
- Since that time our police department has reached new heights and has brought our crime rates to new lows. From 2006 to 2016, Salisbury had the fastest declining crime rate of any city in the United States, with a 100% decrease in arson and 63% decrease in burglary. Part 1 crimes decreased almost 50% between 2010 and 2020. And crime continues to go down, as it has every single year since 2017, bucking the national trend of rising crime rates during the pandemic. This is all to say: we’ve reinvented our approach to policing, and we’ve seen a steady decline in crime as a result.
- This is how trust is built and rebuilt. And we readily acknowledge that our officers have perhaps the most difficult job in America: entrusted with deciding life from death, protecting and risking your own life, expected to make all decisions in an instant, and serving under a microscope with the worst examples always caught on camera and shared millions of times over. And we believe to be trusted we must be trustworthy. We were a regional and state leader on a universal body camera program. We’ve had a massive shift in equipment and quality of life improvements for our officers, from new weapons to our take-home vehicle program and on-site fitness center. When the proper resources are prioritized, our citizens reap the benefits — and that is clearer nowhere else than in our youth and community outreach
2018 (Safety - Traffic)
- "Anything is better than what is there now. I'm all for the circle." ~Linda Duyer
- Historically, and across the nation, streets have been planned and designed with the speed and convenience of the driver in mind. High-accident intersections and other problem areas were addressed by increasing signage, and stepping up speed enforcement — but neither of those solutions get to the root of the problem. To put it plainly, our roads have been too wide, and too fast, for too long. What changed our approach was changing our vision. In 2018, the city adopted Vision Zero — a plan that challenges us to reimagine what our infrastructure should look like — and more specifically to accept that deaths on our streets weren’t a given, but the consequence of our own refusal to prioritize the lives of innocent people over our comfort and convenience. Among the problem areas named as overused for cross-town traffic were Carroll Street and Eastern Shore Drive — two of the thoroughfares we have targeted for action under Vision Zero. Work is already underway on Carroll Street, and soon to begin on Eastern Shore Drive, to make these streets safer by reducing speed and volume of traffic, while using the wasted space by providing pedestrian and bike facilities to make them more accessible by means other than automobile. Since Vision Zero’s adoption, injury accidents have fallen 19% and no fatalities have occurred on city streets. What’s more: all categories of accidents have declined, while nationwide, crashes have risen more than 10%.
- Changing these streetscapes, making them more human friendly, also serves to eliminate the perfectly designed “moats,” or avenues of high-speed traffic that serve to isolate parts of the city from each other. In the case of Carroll St., the volume of high-speed traffic and the width of the roadway have served to create something of a non-traversable barrier, keeping residents of the Camden neighborhood and our county’s largest employer, Tidal Health, from being able to access downtown Salisbury on foot, leading to a sense of separation, and an overall decline in the number of folks who see downtown as a leisurely option for shopping and recreation. By narrowing the lanes for automobile traffic (reducing both volume and speed), and connecting our urban greenway with pedestrian and cycle facilities, we’re throwing the door open wide once again, and telling citizens that, yes, this is the heart of YOUR city, and we want you here.
- Much of Carroll Street is being given back to the Riverwalk Park which, since the 1970s has been included in every major revitalization plan as the Urban Greenway. Its goal: to link the city’s east and west sides via a continuous, non-vehicular route.
- Intersecting the Urban Greenway, Salisbury’s rail-trail serves the same purpose from north to south, providing safe access for pedestrians and cyclists through the heart of the city, and connecting the two biggest assets on the city’s north and south sides — Salisbury University and the Naylor Mill Forest. Just last month [in October, 2022], ground was broken on the northernmost section of this rail trail.
- That we have seen such positive results in such a short time speaks to the efficacy of our actions. Nationally, traffic accidents — including those that end in fatality — have been on a steady upward trajectory for years. Yet Salisbury is bucking that trend, with a continued reduction in the number of accidents on our streets. Ultimately, that’s our goal. I’d like to never again have to sit across from the parents of a child who was hit by a car and tell them: We knew what engineering fixes could have stopped this from happening, but we didn’t act. Our diligence in prioritizing life safety over all other values ought not be much of a surprise to you. After all, this city has sought to perfect its delivery of lifesaving services for 150 years.
Jake Day is the new Secretary of Housing & Community Development for the State of Maryland. He served as mayor of Salisbury, Maryland for two terms.
Common Sense for the Eastern Shore
Right now, Congress is working on a fast-track bill that would make historic cuts to basic needs programs in order to finance another round of tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations.
The House Agriculture Committee recently voted, along party lines, to advance legislation that would cut as much as $300 million from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. SNAP is the nation’s most important anti-hunger program, helping more than 41 million people in the U.S. pay for food. With potential cuts this large, it helps to know who benefits from this program in Maryland, and who would lose this assistance. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities compiled data on SNAP beneficiaries by congressional district, cited below, and produced the Maryland state datasheet , shown below. In Maryland, in 2023-24, 1 in 9 people lived in a household with SNAP benefits. In Maryland’s First Congressional District, in 2023-24: Almost 34,000 households used SNAP benefits. Of those households, 43% had at least one senior (over age 60). 29% of SNAP recipients were people of color. 15% were Black, non-Hispanic, higher than 11.8% nationally. 6% were Hispanic (19.4% nationally). There were 24,700 total veterans (ages 18-64). Of those, 2,200 lived in households that used SNAP benefits (9%). The CBPP SNAP datasheet for Maryland is below. See data from all the states and download factsheets here.
Apparently, some people think that the GOP’s “big beautiful bill” is a foregone conclusion, and that the struggle over the budget and Trump’s agenda is over and done. Not true. On Sunday night, the bill — given the alternate name “Big Bad Bullsh*t Bill” by the Democratic Women’s Caucus — was voted out of the House Budget Committee. The GOP plan is to pass this legislation in the House before Memorial Day. But that’s not the end of it. As Jessica Craven explained in her Chop Wood Carry Water column: “Remember, we have at least six weeks left in this process. The bill has to: Pass the House, Then head to the Senate where it will likely be rewritten almost completely, Then be passed there, Then be brought back to the House for reconciliation, And then, if the House changes that version at all, Go back to the Senate for another vote.” She adds, “Every step of that process is a place for us to kill it.” The bill is over a thousand pages long, and the American people will not get a chance to read it until it has passed the House. But, thanks to 5Calls , we know it includes:
Let's talk about our Eastern Shore Delegation, the representatives who are supposed to fight for our nine Shore counties in Annapolis, and what they actually got up to this session.
For the first time in recent memory, Virginia Democrats have candidates running in all 100 House of Delegates districts — a milestone party leaders and grassroots organizers say reflects rising momentum as President Donald Trump’s second term continues to galvanize opposition.
The 447th legislative session of the Maryland General Assembly adjourned on April 8. This End of Session Report highlights the work Shore Progress has done to fight for working families and bring real results home to the Shore. Over the 90-day session, lawmakers debated 1,901 bills and passed 878 into law. Shore Progress and members supported legislation that delivers for the Eastern Shore, protecting our environment, expanding access to housing and healthcare, strengthening workers’ rights, and more. Shore Progress Supported Legislation By The Numbers: Over 60 pieces of our backed legislation were passed. Another 15 passed in one Chamber but not the other. Legislation details are below, past the budget section. The 2026 Maryland State Budget How We Got Here: Maryland’s budget problems didn’t start overnight. They began under Governor Larry Hogan. Governor Hogan expanded the state budget yearly but blocked the legislature from moving money around or making common-sense changes. Instead of fixing the structural issues, Hogan used federal covid relief funds to hide the cracks and drained our state’s savings from $5.5 billion to $2.3 billion to boost his image before leaving office. How Trump/Musk Made It Worse: Maryland is facing a new fiscal crisis driven by the Trump–Musk administration, whose trade wars, tariff policies, and deep federal cuts have hit us harder than most, costing the state over 30,000 jobs, shuttering offices, and erasing promised investments. A University of Maryland study estimates Trump’s tariffs alone could cost us $2 billion, and those federal cuts have already added $300 million to our budget deficit. Covid aid gave us a short-term boost and even created a fake surplus under Hogan, but that money is gone, while housing, healthcare, and college prices keep rising. The Trump–Musk White House is only making things worse by slashing funding, gutting services, and eliminating research that Marylanders rely on. How The State Budget Fixes These Issues: This year, Maryland faced a $3 billion budget gap, and the General Assembly fixed it with a smart mix of cuts and fair new revenue, while protecting working families, schools, and health care. The 2025 Budget cuts $1.9 billion ($400 million less than last year) without gutting services people rely on. The General Assembly raised $1.2 billion in fair new revenue, mostly from the wealthiest Marylanders. The Budget ended with a $350 million surplus, plus $2.4 billion saved in the Rainy Day Fund (more than 9% of general fund revenue), which came in $7 million above what the Spending Affordability Committee called for. The budget protects funding for our schools, health care, transit, and public workers. The budget delivers real wins: $800 million more annually for transit and infrastructure, plus $500 million for long-term transportation needs. It invests $9.7 billion in public schools and boosts local education aid by $572.5 million, a 7% increase. If current revenue trends hold, no new taxes will be needed next session. Even better, 94% of Marylanders will see a tax cut or no change, while only the wealthiest 5% will finally pay their fair share. The tax system is smarter now. We’re: Taxing IT and data services like Texas and D.C. do; Raising taxes on cannabis and sports betting, not groceries or medicine; and Letting counties adjust income taxes. The budget also restores critical funding: $122 million for teacher planning $15 million for cancer research $11 million for crime victims $7 million for local business zones, and Continued support for public TV, the arts, and BCCC The budget invests in People with disabilities, with $181 million in services Growing private-sector jobs with $139 million in funding, including $27.5 million for quantum tech, $16 million for the Sunny Day Fund, and $10 million for infrastructure loans. Health care is protected for 1.5 million Marylanders, with $15.6 billion for Medicaid and higher provider pay. Public safety is getting a boost too, with $60 million for victim services, $5.5 million for juvenile services, and $5 million for parole and probation staffing. This budget also tackles climate change with $100 million for clean energy and solar projects, and $200 million in potential ratepayer relief. Public workers get a well-deserved raise, with $200 million in salary increases, including a 1% COLA and ~2.5% raises for union workers. The ultra-wealthy will finally chip in to pay for it: People earning over $750,000 will pay more, Millionaires will pay 6.5%, and Capital gains over $350,000 get a 2% surcharge. Deductions are capped for high earners, but working families can still deduct student loans, medical debt, and donations. This budget is bold, fair, and built to last. That’s why Shore Progress proudly supports it. Click on the arrows below for details in each section.
