Our endorsement for Gaithersburg City Council

This fall, voters in Gaithersburg will choose three City Councilmembers, at least one of whom will be new. GGWash endorses Shanika Whitehurst for the open Gaithersburg City Council seat.

First, the questionnaires

We mainly use a candidate questionnaire to choose our endorsements. Candidates must complete the questionnaire in order for our elections committee to consider them for an endorsement.

There are six candidates running in Gaithersburg, and we published questionnaire responses from the three candidates who responded (here’s a blank questionnaire). The questionnaire asks applicants 23 questions about housing, land use, transportation, and community input. Some of the questions are about specific issues in the city, while others are more broad. They are designed to reveal how applicants think and how they would approach the many tradeoffs and wicked problems that arise in urban planning.

What we’re thinking about

Gaithersburg is the nation’s most diverse city and the core of Montgomery County’s biotech industry. Like its neighbor Rockville, it’s grown a lot. Since 2000, it’s added about 17,000 people and has about 69,000 residents today. Unlike Rockville, Gaithersburg is a PAYGO (“Pay-as-you-go”) city, meaning it does not take on debt. That forces city leaders to seek out new people and businesses, who can grow the tax base and help pay for the city services people want and need.

The city has its own planning and transportation departments, so its solution to growing the tax base is approving lots of dense, walkable development. That includes places like Kentlands, the 1980s planned community designed to look like a small town, as well as a proposal to replace the dead Lakeforest Mall with a mix of homes, offices and shops. This type of construction is more cost-efficient, since you don’t need as much stuff (streets, water lines, trash trucks, etc.) to serve people than you would if they were spread further apart.

But like the rest of Montgomery County, Gaithersburg still doesn’t have enough housing, resulting in rapidly rising home prices. Between 2016 and 2023, the median home price in the city jumped 36 percent, from $366,000 to almost $500,000. There also remains some reluctance to embrace a more sustainable form of development. Gaithersburg officials support the state’s plan to widen I-270, and even in the heart of the city’s walkable Old Town, neighbors have been fighting a proposed apartment building. With an open City Council seat, Gaithersburg has an opportunity to bring in a new perspective that embraces where the city’s headed.

GGWash endorses Shanika Whitehurst for Gaithersburg City Council

Of the three City Council seats up for election this year, two are incumbents, Neil Harris and Rob Wu. The third seat belonged to Ryan Spiegel, who was appointed to fill a state delegate seat earlier this year. We think Shanika Whitehurst should succeed him.

Whitehurst has a deep understanding of environmental policy, having spent over a decade at the Environmental Protection Agency before her current role at Consumer Reports. From reading her questionnaire, we can see Whitehurst appreciates the two big tools that local governments like the city of Gaithersburg have to advance sustainability and environmental justice: land use and transportation.

Her housing recommendations were detailed and thorough. “I am committed to finding balanced and inclusive solutions for housing affordability,” Whitehurst wrote. She’d replace a 1990s-era policy that requires new developments in Gaithersburg include at least 50% single-family homes with one that would instead mandate a percentage of “missing middle” homes, such as duplexes and townhomes. Whitehurst would also increase the availability of affordable housing by allowing bigger buildings, creating a fund to build affordable homes like Rockville’s Housing Opportunity Fund, and raising Gaithersburg’s MPDU (moderately priced dwelling unit) requirements, under which developers must set aside a percentage of new homes for lower-income households who either currently live or work in the city.

On the transportation front, Whitehurst would make room for bus or bike lanes by repurposing space currently used for cars, taking advantage of Gaithersburg’s typically wide roads (here’s one example we found) while giving people more travel options. She’d also support tolling I-270 as it is now instead of widening the highway to add toll lanes, which could require taking many homes within the city.

When asked whose feedback on a given issue she’d prioritize, Whitehurst listed a civic association first. That originally gave us pause as civic associations usually aren’t representative of the broader community. But it’s notable that Whitehurst cofounded such a group in her racially and socioeconomically diverse neighborhood, East Gaithersburg United, to raise concerns about a proposed crematorium coming to the area. If elected, Shanika Whitehurst might be the first openly LGBTQ+ member of the Gaithersburg City Council, and one of a handful of out legislators in Montgomery County. No doubt that she’d bring in a perspective we don’t hear from enough here, but that’s only one reason we think she deserves your vote.

About the other candidates…

A two-term councilmember who works for Amazon Web Services, Neil Harris admitted that he probably didn’t share our views. It’s a mixed bag. In his questionnaire, Harris supported going above and beyond the 7,000 homes that the city will need by 2045, as well as changing the city’s policy on single-family development. He wasn’t enthusiastic about creating more affordable housing in Gaithersburg, writing that “Gaithersburg already is home to a large number of naturally occurring, market-affordable housing, particularly in older garden-style apartments.” And he’s not down with taking away space from cars to build bus or bike lanes, or calming traffic on busy arterial streets.

Dan Lukomsky works for a nonprofit affordable housing developer, and in his questionnaire described the different tools he’d use to build housing, from zoning for denser housing to redeveloping older commercial properties. At the same time, he wasn’t okay with ending the city’s policy requiring that single-family homes compose 50% of new developments, which is an impediment to producing the housing the city, and Montgomery County, will need in the future.

We didn’t receive questionnaires from three candidates, including incumbent Rob Wu and Yamil Hernandez, a Coast Guard veteran and executive at a pharmaceutical firm who has been active in Montgomery County’s YIMBY community. We wanted to hear from Omodamola Williams, an organizer with the Montgomery County Racial Equity Network (MORE). Like Izola Shaw, who we endorsed for Rockville City Council, he was a big part of getting rent stabilization passed at the county level and hopes to do the same in Gaithersburg. “I know firsthand the struggles of being a renter, the uncertainty of experiencing homelessness, and the pain of discrimination,” he notes on his website, which are all perspectives we need to see more of in elected office.

Now what?

Election Day is Tuesday, November 7. Gaithersburg has same-day voter registration; if you’re already registered in Maryland (you can check here), you can vote in this election.

If you’d like to vote in person, the only polling place is the Activity Center at Bohrer Park (506 South Frederick Avenue) which will be open for early voting on October 29 from 10am to 5pm, and on election day from 7am to 8pm. Voters can also request a paper ballot, which they can mail back via USPS or place in one of seven ballot drop boxes located around the city by 8pm on November 7.