Greater Greater Washington Includes Izola Shaw in Endorsements for Rockville City Council
This article originally appeared on Greater Greater Washington.
This fall, voters in Rockville will choose a new mayor and a newly expanded City Council. GGWash endorses Monique Ashton for Rockville Mayor, and Kate Fulton, Izola Shaw, Marissa Valeri, and Adam Van Grack for Rockville City Council.
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 14 candidates running in Rockville, and we published questionnaire responses from the 11 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 issues in each city while others are more broad, designed to reveal how applicants think and how they would approach the many tradeoffs and wicked problems that arise in urban planning.
This endorsement is long, so in case you want to skip to the good parts:
What we’re thinking about
Rockville is the nation’s 13th-most diverse city and has added about 20,000 people in the past 20 years, reaching a population of 67,000 in 2021. It also has its own planning and transportation departments separate from Montgomery County, meaning unlike places like Bethesda or Silver Spring, Rockville residents have a bigger say in what their city look like: how it grows, who gets to live and work there, and if it should change at all.
Even if you don’t live there, you’ve probably spent a Saturday afternoon on Rockville Pike, navigating its miles of shopping centers for a deal on a TV, a sofa, or a car. But it has the potential to be a great urban place. There are three Metro stations either in or just next to the city limits, one of which is also a MARC and Amtrak station. Over the past 20 years, Rockville has been restoring the downtown it ripped out during urban renewal, one parking lot at a time. And those shopping centers on Rockville Pike are evolving into something much bigger, weirder, and alive.
The city needs a leader who reflects and embraces that diversity. Current Mayor Bridget Donnell Newton is stepping down at the end of her term, creating an open seat for the first time in a decade. Two sitting councilmembers are running to succeed her, Monique Ashton and Mark Pierzchala. We think you should vote for Monique Ashton.
For Rockville Mayor, GGWash endorses Monique Ashton
A first-term councilmember, Monique Ashton works in the public health field. She was gracious and forthcoming in her questionnaire, demonstrating a strong grasp of the city’s housing and transportation challenges and how to solve them.
“Approximately 90 percent of housing in Rockville was produced through market-rate production,” she wrote. “Therefore we need to continue to foster sufficient market-rate housing development and collaborations with affordable housing developers who can…provide housing affordable for the wide range of those who live in Rockville.”
What does that look like? Ashton supports building up to 15,000 homes by 2040, 50% more than the city’s current goal of 10,000. She would put those homes in a variety of places, including near the Red Line and in “Community Nodes,” which is what the city’s Comprehensive Plan calls small-scale, neighborhood main streets (like Veirs Mill Road near Twinbrook Parkway, for example). She also supports the Comp Plan’s recommendation to allow more types of homes, like duplexes and small apartment buildings, in places where you can only build single-family homes today, a crucial opportunity to build more affordable homes in a city where the median home price is over $600,000.
In her time on the Council, Ashton has taken an all-of-the-above approach to creating more permanently affordable homes. She’s the council’s liaison to Rockville Housing Enterprises, the city’s public housing authority, which has expanded its portfolio by 31 percent over the past four years. Ashton also championed increasing the city’s inclusionary zoning requirements from 12.5 to 15 percent. (She also politely let us know we’d gotten that wrong in our questionnaire!) She’s also supported density bonuses for developers who provide public amenities, including building more permanently affordable units than required.
Ashton’s shown a commitment to sustainable transportation as well. “I walk all across the City to be able to be available to residents and to ensure that we are looking at equity across the City,” she wrote. She’d support taking space from cars to make room for bus and bike lanes, giving people safer, more reliable travel options. Ashton also supports more automated traffic enforcement, like red light cameras and speed cameras, to discourage reckless driving and reducing the need for police traffic stops, which can escalate into deadly confrontations, especially for people of color.
If elected, Ashton would be the first person of color (her parents are Latinx and West Indian) to lead Rockville in its 200+ year history, and just one of four women. She brings a perspective that’s been missing in this majority-minority city, and is open to hearing from a wide range of its residents, listing online surveys and door-knocking in apartment complexes as the kind of public input she’d weigh in making a decision.
What about Mark Pierzchala?
We wanted to consider Pierzchala, who we endorsed over Ashton in 2019. His questionnaire said he’d like to build more than 20,000 homes in Rockville by 2040, twice the city’s current goal, by “zoning for denser housing.”
But where? He supported building more homes near Metro and in community nodes, but not in areas zoned only for single-family homes. And during his five terms on the City Council, Pierzchala has sided with people who didn’t want things near them. He won his first election in 2009 after opposing an affordable housing development in the city’s affluent, historic West End. When neighbors opposed plans to turn a former mental hospital into housing before it mysteriously burned down, he opposed plans to build just seven townhouses on the site. He’s also sided with residents who don’t want a school bus parking lot and a county mental health facility near them.
His transportation platform was disappointing as well. “Every time I can take a trip by bike or by walking, I do so, without exception,” wrote Pierzchala, who’s biked every street in Rockville four times. But he doesn’t support building bus or bike lanes on city streets if it takes away space from cars. In 2011, he even voted to move the proposed Corridor Cities Transitway from a street in his neighborhood designed for the rapid transit line because neighbors complained.
When asked whose feedback he’d consider first when making a decision, Pierzchala said people at a civic association meeting, who are typically older and wealthier than the community as a whole, but he wouldn’t hear comments from door-knocking in an apartment complex. He dismissed poll results from Data for Progress that showed most Montgomery County Democrats support building more types of homes in their neighborhood. “These data mean nothing. I’m a survey statistician,” he replied.
Your votes, however, do mean something. We hope you’ll use them to make Monique Ashton Rockville’s next mayor.
For Rockville City Council, GGWash endorses Fulton, Shaw, Valeri, and Van Grack
This fall, Rockville could have an entirely new City Council. It’s expanding from four seats to six, two councilmembers gave up their seats to run for mayor and only one incumbent, David Myles, is running for reelection. There are twelve candidates running this year, many of whom have great ideas and perspectives to offer. We’ve endorsed four of them: Kate Fulton, Izola Shaw, Marissa Valeri, and Adam Van Grack.
Fulton, Shaw, and Valeri are all part of Monique Ashton’s Rockville United slate, and are aligned with Ashton on many issues. Shaw is a communications strategist who was a vocal advocate for rent stabilization in Montgomery County (it doesn’t apply to Rockville, and right now the city opposes it.) She showed enthusiasm for making homes more affordable and accessible in Rockville. “As a longtime affordable housing advocate, I understand that good housing policy starts with having a substantial amount of housing stock,” she wrote in her questionnaire. She’d prioritize opening up single-family zones to duplexes, townhomes, and apartments, as well as increasing the city’s supply of social housing.
Valeri is a Montgomery County native who works at the Montgomery County Medical Society and has been active in Twinbrook, a historically working-class neighborhood. She and her neighbors worked closely with the developers building Twinbrook Quarter, a massive mixed-use project next to the Twinbrook Metro, to make the project an asset to the community.
“It is critical to build relationships with developers who have the best interest of the City in mind…we need to use these moments to build relationships, not create enemies,” she wrote in her questionnaire. “Our community shared feedback in a civil manner and encouraged the developer to include amenities that the entire neighborhood could benefit from.”
Fulton, a deputy director at the Federal Reserve Board, supports giving busy arterial streets road diets, calming traffic and improving safety for everyone. She was one of two Rockville candidates that called for tolling I-270 instead of Governor Moore’s current plan to widen 270 and add toll lanes. Tolling the existing highway can both cover the cost of maintaining the highway while creating a powerful incentive for people to drive less.
A land use attorney and son of a former mayor, Van Grack dove into the weeds of city policy in his questionnaire. He’d adjust adequate public facility ordinances or APFOs–which can be used to block development due to traffic or crowded schools–to increase housing production and help lower prices. He’s also aware of how elected officials often hear from a small number of people whose views don’t reflect the majority. “Despite the minority at times being loud, Democratic votes generally support residential density — even in their own neighborhoods,” he wrote. “Therefore, elected officials in Montgomery County should not assume that loud NIMBY opponents are the only voice on residential projects.”
Van Grack was the other Rockville candidate who supported tolling 270. That’s a big reason why our elections committee chose him over Paul Scott, the fourth member of the Rockville United slate, who’d widen 270 and make all of the lanes free. We do like that Scott supports a higher housing production goal, and putting those houses near Metro, in community nodes, and in single-family zoned areas.
Now what?
Election Day is Tuesday, November 7. Rockville 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, two polling places will be open on election day from 7 am to 8 pm, at City Hall (111 Maryland Avenue) and the Thomas Farm Community Center (700 Fallsgrove Drive). All registered voters will also receive a ballot in the mail by October 13, which they can mail back or place in a drop box.
Update: this post has been updated to reflect that Marissa Valeri currently works at the Montgomery County Medical Society, not Common Cause.