Election 2006:
Whitbeck worried Wood won't work
House of Delegates candidate Clare Whitbeck.
ST. MARY’S TODAY
photo by Ahmar Khan
By Ahmar Khan
ST. MARY’S TODAY
BRETON BAY — Clare Whitbeck has been a Democrat all her
adult life and has no regrets she joined the party, though she admits there can
be scumbags in either party. “Thankfully they are not here in St. Mary’s or
Charles counties.”
Whitbeck was 21 when Barry Goldwater was running for president and she was at
the time living in Arizona. “Everyone I spoke to was a Republican so I
registered to vote as a Democrat,” she said. “I made the right decision.”
Married for nearly 40 years, but brutally honest as she is, Whitbeck said she is
happy she and her spouse Larry Whitbeck are now getting to know each other
reasonably well. “I now like him and I think he is beginning to like me also,”
she said.
Whitbeck will be challenging incumbent Johnny Wood on House Delegate 29A seat
after being disillusioned with him on one issue closest to her heart, wellbeing
of the seniors.
“Don’t get me wrong, he’s a very nice man,” she said of her rival in the
Democratic primary, but felt he had already played his innings.
She said she could not avoid mentioning the fact that Wood has lost the position
of influence he once commanded in the House of Delegates. “Our community is
growing rapidly and many needs have to be met,” she said, adding Wood was no
longer able to play a role after falling out with the House leadership,
particularly Speaker Mike Busch.
Whitbeck is vice chair of the United Seniors of Maryland. “USM took me to
Annapolis. I know senior issues. I know what seniors need,” she said.
Whitbeck is convinced seniors, school kids and folks with disabilities deserve
the best.
“I am really excited about getting an opportunity to serve the people,” she
said.
She said she really liked helping people and working as a delegate she would be
connecting people to the right agency in Annapolis.
She said she will work with the Southern Maryland delegation to change the rules
of the State that requires 50 percent of students for a new school to be in the
system before a planning approval is granted.
Whitbeck said one of her major concerns was the bottlenecking of traffic at the
Thomas Johnson and the Harry Nice bridges. “I will work to create a separate
Base Realignment and Consolidation (BRAC) office aimed at helping to identify
funding for infrastructure needs in counties which host military facilities,
such as St. Mary’s and Charles,” she said. Whitbeck said traffic jams on the two
bridges were already a nightmare for commuters and would worsen two years from
now.
She said the road tax monies get held back in Annapolis but needed to be spent
on roads in Southern Maryland. “I have a crack in the road in front of my house.
Many residents face the same situation. Those cracks need to be filled before
they become ditches.”
She said growth was needed but it did not need to be dirty and ugly. “People are
upset about the breakneck speed of development. They are worried about losing
their rural heritage,” Whitbeck said.
A member of sorts of the farm bureau, she said the only way to protect rural
charms was to promote agriculture. She said as many as 33 people were waiting in
queue for their lands to be put into agricultural preservation. “Many of them
are seniors and may die. Their heirs may not be committed to preservation and a
golden opportunity will be lost.”
She recalls one of her first jobs after graduating was working with
developmental challenges. “Grown up adults can a great deal from these kids,”
she said.
She said at this stage of her life her main area of interest is good governance.
At 15 as a bookkeeper for her dad’s air-conditioning and refrigeration business,
Whitbeck began visiting St. Mary’s. “My dad loved the waters here. He had a
mechanic working for him and when he visited St. Mary’s County his gas was
covered as a work expense,” she recalls.
“I have a checkered background,” said Whitbeck who is a Bachelor of Science in
speech improvement. from Georgetown University and Master of Arts in Music from
the American University.
Most of her working life she was a self-employed bookkeeper. She kept books at a
slew of different kinds of businesses. “I enjoyed helping business owners create
a healthy business.”
She is a cancer survivor. In 1998, Whitbeck discovered she had breast cancer
while she was working on a political campaign, a job and had now to deal with
medical issues. “I decided to tackle with two of them. Guess what, the job
wasn’t one of them.”
Whitbeck began 2006 with no grandchildren, but would be ending it with three
grandchildren.
“Sarah, 36, is pregnant and Karen, 33, would be giving birth to twins.”
Whitbeck said Cathy Allen had demolished her in the Board of Education elections
last time. “I have learned a lot from the last elections,” she said.
