Budget Battle Became Personal

But as she tries to follow in Praisner's footsteps, Trachtenberg is also trying to maintain her labor credentials. She said her position surprised labor leaders, with whom she has worked on living-wage campaigns as the former president of the Maryland National Organization for Women. And she acknowledged the political risk of aligning with council member Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg-Rockville), persona non grata with union leaders, in calling for a rollback in raises.

"I felt we needed to have a jolt, because next year is going to be even more difficult," she said of the county's fiscal outlook.

Ervin said that she, too, is looking ahead but that she fears that allowing the council to tamper with the contracts this year would make them an easier target next year.

"Workers become disposable," Ervin said in an interview, wiping her hands for emphasis. "And whenever there's a money problem, there will be layoffs."

To Ervin, the services Trachtenberg is committed to preserving are inseparable from the people who deliver them. Her perspective was shaped early by her mother, a union leader who worked at a Safeway store when Ervin's father was fighting in Vietnam, and later by her own experience as a young mother.

At 24, Ervin lived in subsidized housing and relied on health-care benefits for her newborn son through a part-time union job checking groceries. She became a local labor leader like her mother, and was recruited to the District in the 1980s by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. Ervin traveled around the South, organizing workers in the catfish and poultry industries in Mississippi and the Carolinas, before joining the faculty of the National Labor College.

She became chief of staff to council member George L. Leventhal (D-At Large) in 2002, before running for the school board in 2004 and the council two years later.

"I have a fundamental difference of opinion with those who would break contracts that were negotiated in good faith," she said in one of several budget speeches that quoted Jesse Jackson, the late Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone and the Bible. "Employees deserve better."

After several late-night sessions, council President Michael Knapp (D-Upcounty) announced a tentative deal last week that won approval in a unanimous temperature-taking vote.

"We've had diverse, complex views," Knapp said. "We've brought those views together to hopefully achieve a common good."

But even as her colleagues spoke of finding common ground among eight members with eight different opinions, Ervin said she was skeptical.

"The pulling together as a team, I am still waiting to see what that really means," she said.