Ken Ulman: The maverick of Howard County

Ken Ulman, 34, took the helm as Howard County executive in December 2006 as the youngest county executive ever elected in Maryland.

Ulman previously served as a councilman representing District 4 after running his own law firm in Columbia. He’s a Centennial High School graduate with degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park, and Georgetown University School of Law. He lives in Columbia with his wife, Jacqueline, and their two daughters.

What is the status of enrollment for Healthy Howard?

At the end of September, people will be enrolled and start to receive services related to the health and wellness piece. They will later get the medical services.

What is the health and wellness piece?

They will get a health coach and do a health risk assessment. We will begin to understand what each person’s needs are.

There are two sides of this program: the wellness and the medical services. We will have the health teams in place, the community research coordinator — the person who will find them workout classes for free and [help them] overcome barriers to healthy lifestyles.

Then the medical service side, there are still a lot of moving parts, from Johns Hopkins health [officials who are collaborating with the county on Healthy Howard] who need to print what looks like insurance cards for every participant and make sure the primary care folks at Chase Brexton are ready to receive them.

The last thing I want to do is to have someone enrolled and show up and hear they don’t accept the card.

We felt like we wanted to err on the side of caution and make sure everything is ready. In September we start enrolling, and three months later, it will be up and running.

Is the funding in place, and if so, where is it coming from?

The funding is in place. I know it has all been received for this year, but we are also continuing to raise money from the private sector. The more we raise, the less we will need in future years. We needed to raise about $1.2 million privately, but we did [include] the $500,00 from the county budget matched by Horizon Foundation, and $65,000 from Aetna and a number of other foundations.

You are starting with just 2,000 people enrolled for the first year to find out what parts work and what parts don’t work as well. Any idea what might not work as well?

We are modeling electronic records with Johns Hopkins, and there’s the wellness piece and the pharmacy benefits. It’s like a startup business, to a certain extent.

There will inevitably be something we look back on and say, ‘Gee, that could have worked smoother.’ That’s why we are testing it.

Also on the financial side, we have modeled this on the Medicaid population, but we don’t know if our population will be as sick as that population. We can predict based on what we see in the Medicaid population, but out of 2,000 people, we won’t know what the level will be for drugs.

So we put in a very conservative budget. We hope the need is less, but we just don’t know. Also, they get six to seven appointments with a primary-care physician. We think that is plenty, but it could be that because they haven’t seen a doctor in a long time, they need it more.

You have been recognized for aggressive environmental initiatives, such as purchasing hybrids for the county and creating incentives for developers who build green buildings. What other initiatives do you plan?

What we are focused on right now is executing the policies we have initiated. We spent a lot of time talking about our pilot project in recycling [in which every resident gets a bin to encourage more recycling]. Now, we are rolling that out in September. We really want to focus on getting the word out on that and promoting single-stream recycling.

We are also in very serious negotiations with SunEdison on building a major solar array over the top of the capped landfill, the New Cut Road landfill. It would provide 90 percent of the energy needs for Worthington Elementary. We are hopeful it will work out.

How would that be financed?

The company would come in and say, “OK, we can finance the construction and operation of the facility, and you lock into buying energy at a certain price over the long term.”

You recently proposed plans to rework zoning to help revitalize Columbia’s older villages. But some residents are concerned those changes could mean more housing and traffic.

The status quo, especially at Wilde Lake Village Center today, with the vacancies is unacceptable. The question is, where do we go from here? The property owners have some ideas of what could make it a viable redevelopment project, which is some residential above retail.

That makes sense to me.

As far as how many residential units, how many square feet and what it looks like, that is up the property owner and the community and Planning and Zoning.

I am not wedded to any particular proposal.

My biggest concern is that we do not have blighted vacant storefronts in any of our village centers.

How do you make sure it’s not a one-size-fits-all when the needs are so different?

What I think is important is to come up with an overall option based on specific criteria when you do work with individual village boards and input from that community and talk about what makes sense for each case.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all.

I understand the reticence from some for density, for change, but what is unacceptable to me is vacant, boarded-up storefronts. Grocery stores used to be built as 25,000-square-foot stores. They are not now.

We have to create an opportunity for things to evolve and be what they want to be based on current market conditions.

There have been two police-involved shootings this year, one in which an officer shot a Columbia woman who allegedly lunged at an officer and was threatening harm to her husband and others, and one in which an undercover narcotics officer shot two teenage boys during an investigation.

I do believe we have the best, most professional police force anywhere. Within that, you will have officers who are going to make mistakes. Clearly that happened with the accidental shooting.

Nobody’s perfect, but certainly Police Chief William McMahon and on down expect high quality, integrity and character, and we have not had some of the problems other departments have had.

[Both officers were cleared of any wrongdoing in the shootings.]

What can be done in the wake of those shootings?

I have spoken with the chief, and they are redoubling their efforts as far as training.

The conditions of Mount Hebron High School were a major discussion among residents this year, and the budget included $27 million this year toward renovations. With a $57 million renovation project approved, is there going to be enough funding for other high schools? Will Atholton High School be another Mount Hebron?

Talking with folks in the county, I have not heard a push for a brand-new school [to replace Atholton].

I have heard a need for a renovated school.

There’s a little less land at Atholton, and the only time the county [built a new school] was at Wilde Lake.

They tore it down and moved people to River Hill.

We’ll not build any new high schools, at least not while I have the opportunity to be county executive.

The important issues we need to tackle are our expectations and the level of funding available.

We’re seeing the price of construction going up dramatically. The state sets those costs, [and] school buildings are obviously different than office buildings.

We have legitimate capital funding issues. The school system has rightly turned their attention to renovating older schools.

Do you think the county should ease the strict limit for new housing, which is now 1,850 units a year?

The adequate public facilities ordinance has been a real success. In the last year and this year, we have had no schools closed [to new students].

It’s important to take a look at the housing-allocations process, and that’s what we do with the general plan.

There has been some tweaking in the interim.

As of now, I don’t see [increasing the number of houses built] happening, but I think it’s healthy for the community to have that discussion. I don’t see a lot of additional density.