By Katie Wilson

The College Park, Maryland citywide elections will be held on Nov. 7 of this year. Residents will vote for mayor and eight city council members. 

Two council members represent each district. Districts two and three are the only two races where candidates are running opposed, each district has three candidates vying for two positions. 

The city’s population is around 70% University of Maryland students, Mayor Patrick Wojahn said during an Oct. 21 town hall meeting, so many of these candidates have been focusing on students and their role in the community. 

Unopposed Wojahn has been the mayor of College Park for the past six years. District One candidates are Fazlul Kabir and Catherine Kennedy, and the District Four candidates are Maria Mackie and Denise Mitchell. All of these candidates are currently on the board and are expected to be reelected. 

The District Two election consists of candidates Robert Catlin, Llatetra Brown Esters and Susan Whitney. 

Esters was elected to the council in mid-2020 in a special election and is hoping to serve a full term in office.  She said that since her appointment, her favorite agenda item was voting for contributions to community organizations that helped College Park residents during the pandemic. 

“[I] would like to see more families choose College Park as a place to live and grow,” Esters said. She also said that she wants to encourage college students to stay in the city after graduation. 

Catlin served on the council from 2002 to 2013 and is now running again in order to address city development, housing problems and improve quality of life. Since Catlin left the council, he has been on The College Park Housing Authority board. Catlin said he believes that the greatest thing he accomplished during his previous tenure as a council member was the rezoning of Route 1 and the limits he imposed on additional property taxes for owner-occupied residencies. 

Whitney is a newcomer to College Park politics and politics in general. She is a business manager at a small tech company, and she founded the D.C. Lady Arm Wrestlers, a nonprofit that raises money for women and children’s charities. 

As a council member, she said she wants to gather stakeholders to build an effective housing plan for everyone in the community. She also is interested in bringing the community together through cleanup events and other city-sponsored activities.

“I’m a doer. When I hear about a problem, I want to roll up my sleeves and start fixing it. I don’t just pass the ball to someone else, I like to carry it across the finish line. I’m also very good at figuring out what’s behind people’s stance on an issue and explaining that to others — a skill that comes in handy in conflict resolution,” Whitney said. 

For District Three, the candidates are Stuart Adams, Robert Day and John Rigg. 

Adams is the nonincumbent for this race. He is a program manager at Stantec, an engineering services company, where he focuses on housing, transportation and disaster mitigation. He has also worked to protect Albion Woods and was a speaker at the Save Guilford Woods protest earlier this month. 

In terms of student and community interaction, Adams hopes to link the two groups of College Park through community outreach and programs such as a social sports league. For housing, Adams suggests the possibility of co-ops that require residents to be a student for maintained affordable housing. He said he has looked at other college towns’ handling of affordable student housing, such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, to get an understanding of what is possible for College Park. 

Day has been the District Three council member for the past 10 years. His campaign focuses are public safety, the economy, education and making College Park a place where “people and businesses would like to come home to for years to come,” according to his candidate summary. He said in the recent city hall debate that he is in support of the Western Gateway Project, because he fears that if graduate student housing isn’t built there, then another development will be, and there will still be a major graduate student housing crisis.  

Rigg is one of the incumbents for this race, and describes his presence on the city council as “progressive, pragmatic leadership.” He is encouraging the university to build additional residence halls to meet affordable housing needs, is advocating for rent control and is against the Western Gateway Project as it is currently proposed. 

Since he started on the council in 2017, Rigg has worked to protect Albion Road’s forest and create a daycare program with the university. Rigg has also advocated for an independent zoning authority for the city’s upcoming redistricting and purpose-built affordable housing for the area. 

Many UMD students and college students around the country are often confused whether to vote in their hometowns or their college towns. This often leads to students being unable to voice their opinions in city elections and politicians not always following the wishes of students. To combat this problem, the city council has allowed for student liaisons, undergraduate UMD students, to address student concerns directly to the council from the Student Government Association. 

“The things important to students are important to everyone,” said Mackie. 

City redistricting will happen this year, and one of the proposals that has been around for many years is to draw the districts so there is one encapsulating the UMD population. Currently, students are split between each district, which diminishes the influence of the student vote. “You don’t want the student voice to be spread across too many districts,” said Kennedy. Having one district mostly made out of students could put the student vote front and center during city council meetings. 

Candidates have been reaching out to UMD students. Most notably, the UMD SGA hosted the city council debates and mayoral town hall on Oct. 21. The debate portion took student-submitted questions mostly focusing on affordable housing, environmental policies and student safety. 

“To ask each district what they support and [explain] what the students are looking for is really important,” said senior government and politics major and SGA Vice President Josie Shaffer. 

At the debate, many candidates said that they walk through campus introducing themselves or have knocked on doors in neighborhoods asking the community to share their concerns and political priorities. 

“I think it’s super important that UMD students are asking their representatives questions about where they live. We are here for four years but it’s our livelihood for four years,” said senior government and politics major and SGA Director of Civic Engagement Sophie Minsk. 

The election is on a Sunday this year to encourage voting from workers who may have difficulty coming to the polls on weekdays. Due to COVID-19 concerns, the city has also decided to only host one in-person polling station on election day, which will be located in the College Park Community Center. Oct. 26 is the final day to request an absentee ballot. 

Featured image: The District Three candidates speak at the SGA-hosted city council debate. From left to right: Day, Rigg, Adams stand on stage. Photo by Katie Wilson