These endorsements for the current candidates for Mayor and Council are provided by Tom Moore, a whom I first met when we both ran for Council years ago. Even though we don’t always agree, he’s informed, thoughtful, and may help you with your ballot choices. He served two terms on the Rockville City Council from 2011 to 2015, then served as counsel and chief of staff to Commissioner Ellen L. Weintraub of the Federal Election Commmission. In June, he joined the Center for American Progress as a senior fellow on its Democracy team. He has lived in Rockville since 1997.

No matter what happens this November, the City of Rockville will enter a new era of leadership. We’ll have our first new mayor since 2013. And we’ll have six councilmembers, up from four – and at least five of them will be newcomers.

Given the scarcity of information about the election, I wanted to share my thoughts about those who are running. With just two exceptions, I will be saying positive things about the people I’m supporting, and not much about those I am not supporting. I hope you find it helpful. 

First up: I will be proudly voting for Mark Pierzchala for Mayor. I have a tremendous amount of respect for, loyalty to, and affection for Mark. He and I served together on the Council during my first term (2011-13).  I learned a lot from him about the issues, but, more importantly, he modeled for me how to vote your conscience fearlessly.  He took on tough issues when popular sentiment went the other way. He championed good development and housing policies when it would have been easier – sometimes, much easier – to vote the other way.  He has a good heart, good common sense, and is admirably careful about the City’s budget. Mark has been a terrific councilmember who has served his City well, and he will be a terrific Mayor. 

As to the Council: I will be voting for (in alphabetical order by last name): Kate Fulton, Barry Jackson, Anita Neal Powell, Izola Shaw, Marissa Valeri, and Adam Van Grack.

Kate Fulton impressed me when she and I sat down so she could pick my brain on how to run and serve.  I was just about to talk about how the City budget was intimidating to me when I was first elected (but that the City’s budget staff were very kind and patient in explaining it) when Kate mentioned that she’s COO of the Federal Reserve. Yeah, she gets budgets.  She’ll be a good councilmember. 

Similarly, Barry Jackson and I sat down for a marathon coffee session months ago when he was first thinking about running. He’s a solid guy with great experience running the King Farm Citizens Assembly.  He and I clicked on a lot of issues, and he immediately erased my concern that a candidate who runs KFCA would only represent King Farm if elected. He’ll be a good councilmember. 

Anita Neal Powell has served the City for many years. She has been an effective and tireless advocate for Lincoln Park, and I’m delighted that she’s offering to serve on the City Council.  On a City Council that will be made up of newcomers, Anita will bring a badly needed breadth and depth of experience. She’ll be a good councilmember. 

I met Izola Shaw when we were both advocating for the city-citizen ballot initiative (which I’m going to be writing about separately!).  She served the City well on the most recent Charter Review Commission. I like her, I like her values, and I think she’ll be a terrific voice on the Council. 

I met Marissa Valeri when she was on the national staff of Common Cause and I was serving on the board of Common Cause Maryland. Marissa devoted years as a fierce advocate for the Twinbrook neighborhood as head of the Twinbrook Community Association.  I think she’ll be the kind of councilmember I strived to be – energetic, attuned to her constituents’ needs, forever unsatisfied with the status quo, and eager to stick her neck out to do the right thing. She’ll be a good councilmember. 

I had not met Adam Van Grack before this election season, but I’ve known his dad (Steve) and one of this brothers (Brandon) for many years.  Adam sat down with me and we chewed over some of the stickiest issues facing the City – among them development, crime, and the fate of the King Farm farmstead and the former Redgate golf course. What impressed me most about Adam was not how much he agreed with me, but how much he disagreed with me – and how he did so.  He was well-prepared to address the issues (important) and respectful in how he addressed our differences (less important, but shows he was raised well). But even when we came to opposite conclusions on different issues, the core values Adam used to analyze the issues were similar to mine, which is the most important. He’ll be a good councilmember. 

Those are the six I’m voting for, and I recommend them to you. 

As to the rest of the field: I haven’t met four of the candidates – Danniel Belay, Harold Hodges, Ricky Mui, and Paul Scott – and I can’t say much about their candidacies. I will note, however, that Mui supported Dan Cox for governor in 2022, which I think puts him well outside Rockville’s political mainstream.

I am actively deciding to vote against the two remaining candidates – Rich Gottfried and David Myles – and would like to provide some context for this. I know both of them, and I like both of them personally, but I do not believe the City would be well-served with either of them on the Council for the next four years.

Rich Gottfried has run for Council several times over the past few cycles, sometimes dropping an eye-popping amount of money into his campaign coffers, without success so far. He’s used that money to run very unpleasant campaigns, attacking the good will of those who confronted the City’s growth issues. Does he have a right to do that? Sure. But it doesn’t speak well of his grasp of the issues and doesn’t speak well of his ability to work on the Council.

Incumbent councilmember David Myles, who was elected in 2019 as a member of the Team Rockville organization I helped start in 2013, was involved in a domestic incident this summer in which the police were called and he was arrested. I am not judging David’s candidacy on the incident itself, because I just don’t know enough about it. It appears to be a sad and complicated situation. 

But David’s response, in the form of a lengthy e-mail he sent to members of the community immediately after the incident, gave me great cause for concern. It was all over the map, kind of claiming victimhood in one section and kind of trying to be a public-service announcement in another, and weirdly dodgy throughout. The only thing I got out of it for sure was that David’s personal life needs to take priority over his public service.