Read the questionnaires submitted by Montgomery County Planning Board applicants

This month, the Montgomery County Council will appoint three new members to the Planning Board. The board has a very powerful and influential role in everything from transportation to housing to parks, but it’s hard to find publicly available information about the applicants.

That’s why we reached out to all 27 applicants and sent them a questionnaire. We’re sharing the responses we received here as a service to the public. Questionnaire responses also inform our applicant endorsement decisions, which we’ll announce prior to the County Council’s vote.

Wait, how does this work?

In fall 2022, all five Planning Board members resigned for messy and complicated reasons. There’s a temporary board in place now, but the County Council has to find people to finish the four-year terms of the board members who left. An old state law requires that the new appointees be from the same political parties as the previous board members. Right now, the Council is looking for one Democrat, one Republican, and someone who’s unaffiliated with either party. Later this year, they’ll fill the two remaining seats, which were already opening up this spring and are open to anyone regardless of party.

The actual appointment process is, honestly, pretty opaque. The Council releases a list of everyone who applied, then announces finalists for each seat. They only release the finalists’ resumes, so the public doesn’t know why they were chosen over the other applicants. (They also do not release applicants’ contact information, so our regional policy director Dan Reed spent several days feverishly Googling each of the applicants, and in a few cases, slid into those DMs.) In the past, the County Council selected Planning Board members in private as a way to hide any disagreements among councilmembers, but this year’s appointment process will be done completely in public.

Here’s what the applicants had to say

This is the first time GGWash has run a questionnaire and endorsement process for the Montgomery County Planning Board. Below, we are excited to share the questionnaire responses we received, organized by party. Click on a linked name to view that applicant’s questionnaire. Names without links are applicants who did not complete the questionnaire.

The finalists

Democrats	Republicans	Unaffiliated
Raj Barr-Kumar Cherri Branson James Hedrick Brian O’Looney Alex Ratner	Shawn Bartley David Winstead	Paul Gaiser Mitra Pedoeem Donald Silverstein Leanne Tobias

Applicants who did not become finalists

Democrats	Republicans	Unaffiliated
Jacob Barker Corey Davenport Denine Fernandez Robin Moore Lasky Paul Massaro Richard Reinhard John Zittrauer	Gerald Cichy Rita Ferrall Ron Gupta Issa Khozeimeh Thalia Sanders Ryan Schulte	Mike Cremedas Tina Patterson

If you have a few hours to spare, you can also watch the County Council interviews with the Republican, unaffiliated, and Democratic finalists.

We will announce our endorsements next week, and the County Council will vote on which finalists to appoint by February 28. To send your feedback to the County Council on the applicants, you can click this link to pre-fill all eleven councilmembers’ email addresses, and if that doesn’t work, use this link from the Council website. From there, please write a personalized message. It can be quick! If you don’t mind, cc Dan Reed at dreed [at] ggwash.org so we can track how many of you contact your representatives.

And don’t forget, our Elections Hub is your one-stop shop for questionnaires, endorsements process details, and our endorsements themselves. Access the hub anytime from the “2023 Elections” link in the upper right corner of our webpage.