$25,000 to Be Heard
Last year, my wife and I, alongside neighbors who joined us, raised and spent more than $25,000 out of our own pockets to get Anne Arundel County to listen to us.
That number doesn’t include the months we spent on the issue almost every day. It doesn’t include nights writing emails, weekends working with neighbors on flyers and yard signs, or time away from our businesses and our families. It’s just the cash: for an attorney, a lobbying firm, signs, flyers, a website, the legal registration of a nonprofit, and the dozens of smaller costs that come with making sure a few thousand neighbors weren’t steamrolled by their own government.
That’s the cost of being heard in District 6 right now. It shouldn’t be.
A Decision Made About Us, Without Us
Our neighborhoods learned about it the same way: at a public meeting where the project was already presented as a done deal.
A 200-foot water tower, taller than the Maryland State House, was planned at the Moose Lodge site on Crownsville Road. It would affect homes in Twin Hills, Asher’s Farm, The Ridges, and other communities along Crownsville Road. None of us had been asked. None of us had been notified during the planning. The acquisition was already moving forward, and construction was projected to begin within months.
That meeting is a moment I won’t forget. People who had spent years, in many cases decades, building lives in those communities were told, in plain language, that the decision was already made. That there was nothing we could do.
I watched my neighbors leave that room shocked. Many of them felt the only honest word for it: desperate.
My wife and I, alongside neighbors who joined us, refused to accept that answer. That refusal eventually became the Stop the Tower Annapolis Coalition: a registered nonprofit, organized for one purpose, to make sure residents had a meaningful voice in a decision that directly affected their homes.
We collected over 300 signatures in a matter of weeks. We sent emails to County and state officials. Our outreach to our District 6 representative produced no help. We met with the officials who agreed to hear us. We hired a lobbying firm and a lawyer. We reviewed every County document related to the tower project that we could access, and requested more through MPIA. We talked to neighbors. We sent more emails. We didn’t give up.
The County did, eventually, listen. They paused the acquisition, held public meetings, and ran a community-wide survey. The data came back clearly. Residents ranked impact to property values as their #1 concern. An alternative location with significantly less residential impact received more than four times the support of any other option. The majority voted for an alternative site that wouldn’t require purchasing private land at premium cost.
That’s what it took to get a fair process. A registered coalition. A five-figure budget. Most of a year. A few hundred signatures. For one County project. For one decision.
The Lesson
The lesson is the line I keep coming back to:
Government is supposed to work for the people. Not the other way around.
What about the next neighborhood that doesn’t have $25,000 and a year of evenings to spare? What about Crownsville, Millersville, and the parts of District 6 where residents are watching properties get up-zoned and developments greenlit at meetings they barely heard about? What about the agricultural land and open space being traded away project by project? What about the family on Riva Road watching townhomes start at $1.3 million while elected officials promise affordable housing?
If you’ve ever read about a project going up near your home and thought “why didn’t anyone ask us?” — that frustration is honest. You are not being unreasonable. You are paying attention.
Decisions are being made about us, but without us. That is the pattern. It doesn’t take cynicism to see it. It just takes paying attention.
But it also takes something else. It takes a community that decides not to accept it, that asks the hard questions, that shows up when neighbors knock, that doesn’t get told what to think. That’s who District 6 has always been. That’s who we still are.
Why I Am Running
Running for office was never part of my plan. I’ve spent over twenty years in Anne Arundel County, building businesses that meet payroll every two weeks and today employ over 500 people. That was the work I expected to keep doing.
What changed was the Tower fight and the year that followed. Months of reading County project documents. Emails to officials, most of them unanswered. Our own MPIA requests. The forming of a coalition. Petition drives. A five-figure budget paid out of our own pockets. Meetings with County and state officials that, more often than not, produced nothing. A year of watching one fight, for one County project, requires what most communities will never have.
And then I started looking at the field of candidates running to fill our District 6 seat — candidates more interested in ribbon cuttings and interest-group endorsements than in the daily reality of the residents they want to represent. The seat whose next holder will be in the room for every decision about our homes, our neighborhoods, our schools, our property values, our roads, and our future. And I realized that most of the people positioning themselves to fill it were already part of the same system that produced the problems in the first place.
Someone has to be in that room making sure these decisions get made differently. That’s why I’m running.
Running a business teaches you something government too often forgets: when something is broken, you don’t get to close your eyes and hope it fixes itself overnight. You ask why. You set a corrective plan. You assign responsibility. You set realistic deadlines. And you hold yourself accountable for the result.
I’ve already paid the cost of being a resident in this system. I’m not going to pay it again as a council member. And the next neighborhood that gets a 200-foot tower, an upzoning fight, or any of the other decisions made about them without them, shouldn’t have to pay it either.
I will never allow interest groups, corporations, or developers to influence me. The only endorsement I am seeking is from the people of District 6.
When I’m elected, we start on day one. We don’t have time to wait. We will execute. And most importantly, we will do it together.
Building the Tool I Wished We’d Had
I said we start on day one. The truth is, I didn’t want to wait that long.
When I decided to run, I made myself a promise: I wasn’t going to wait until I was elected to start working for the residents of District 6. Talk is the easiest part of any campaign. The actual work should start now.
So I built something. It’s called RealVote. It’s a free app designed to make it easy for residents to see what’s actually happening on the County Council – the issues being decided, the votes coming up, the projects being proposed in their neighborhoods. Residents can weigh in on those issues, see how their community feels, and contact their representative directly through the app.
I want to be straight about what RealVote can and can’t do. The app is a tool. It only works if the people in office actually want to use it – if they’re willing to put the issues in front of their constituents before they vote, and willing to listen to the answers. No app can force a representative to care what their community thinks. That part is on the representative.
My commitment is simple: when I’m on the Council, the major decisions affecting District 6 will go on RealVote first. Residents will see what’s coming, vote on where they stand, and reach me directly – before the decisions get made, not after. That’s the standard I think every elected official should hold themselves to. I’m starting with myself.
I didn’t wait for permission to build it. I didn’t ask for a budget. I didn’t bill the taxpayers. I built it the same way I’ve built everything else in this country: from scratch, on my own time, because someone needed to.
RealVote is available now in the Google Play Store, the Apple App Store and realvote.app website. Residents of District 6 can download it today and start participating in the issues being decided in their neighborhoods. This is my solution, and my commitment: to work for the residents of District 6, and with them. Starting now.
June 23, 2026
The next time someone proposes a major project in your neighborhood and tells you the decision is already made, that there’s nothing you can do, that the only role left for residents is to live with it, I want you to know there’s someone in that chamber who has heard those words before. Didn’t accept them. And isn’t going to accept them on your behalf either.
That’s what District 6 taught me. That’s why I’m running.