Do your Patriotic Duty! VOTE
Sonya Dunn
Profile
Address: 9103 Woodmore Center Drive
Lanham, MD 20706-
Website: www.votesonyadunn.com
Social: facebook.com/vote.sonyadunn
instagram.com/votesonyadunn
Sonya Dunn: A Taxpayer Watchdog Built Outside Annapolis
The Comptroller of Maryland is not a ceremonial title. The office collects and distributes more than $36 billion in state revenue. It sits on the Board of Public Works. It helps oversee the Maryland State Retirement and Pension System — a fund of roughly $73 billion. It is supposed to be the independent fiscal officer of the state, not a stepping stone to the next race.
Sonya Dunn is asking Maryland to treat the job that way again.
Dunn is the Republican nominee for Comptroller. She faces Democratic incumbent Brooke Lierman on November 3. She won the Republican primary unopposed on June 23 with 160,629 votes. She is a businesswoman from Bowie. She has never held elected office. That is the point of her campaign.
She grew up watching a single mother balance a checkbook at the kitchen table. She is the daughter of pastors. She is the spouse of a retired United States Air Force major general. She is the mother of four adult children, including two sons with developmental disabilities. Those facts are not campaign garnish. They are the habits she says she would bring to Annapolis: count the money, keep a promise, put the family first.
She founded and still runs JEMH Enterprises, leading business and media operations for more than twenty years. Her résumé is not a legislative stack. It is enterprise operations, finance, procurement and acquisition management, technology integration, and strategic communications. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Oklahoma in film, radio, and television production with a business minor; a master’s from American University in producing film, television, and emerging media; an MBA from Webster University; and a master’s from Webster in procurement and acquisition management. She is pursuing a Doctor of Business Administration in finance at Liberty University.
She has also worked as a producer and radio host with the District of Columbia Office of Cable Television, as chief content officer at SimlTV, and as founder of MilitaryHomeLife.com. That is a military-family and media background, not a Central Committee résumé. Maryland’s last Republican Comptroller was elected in 1897. Dunn would be the first Republican in the office in more than a century. She would also be the first African American woman elected to statewide executive office in Maryland, and the first African American woman elected as a state comptroller anywhere in the country. Those firsts matter only if the books are honest.
Why Harford should care is simple. Harford families pay the taxes Annapolis spends. Harford schools, roads, and pension obligations ride on whether the state’s chief fiscal officer tells the truth about revenue and waste. Maryland is running a long-term structural imbalance. Projected spending keeps outrunning recurring revenue. A recent legislative audit found the Comptroller’s office failed to pursue more than $600 million in unpaid taxes over four years and left thousands of questionable returns uninvestigated. Unpaid taxes rose from about $1.03 billion in fiscal 2022 to about $1.58 billion in fiscal 2025. That is not an argument for another fee on working people. It is an argument for collecting what is already owed and stopping the leak.
Dunn’s case is that the office has been treated as a political platform instead of a watchdog. Her first-100-days language is operational: repeal or restructure tax policies that do not work, put real-time evaluation on the books, and treat procurement as a discipline instead of a patronage channel. She talks about fraud, waste, and abuse in the language of a person who has had to meet a payroll. She talks about transparency as a duty to families and small businesses, not a press release. She says she will work across the aisle without surrendering the taxpayer.
She is underfunded next to an incumbent who has raised millions. That is the usual Maryland math. It is also why a county that still believes in balanced books should look past the war chest. The Comptroller does not need another Annapolis regular. The Comptroller needs someone who learned fiscal discipline before she learned a district map.
Harford does not get a separate Comptroller. The person elected on November 3 will sit on the boards that shape the state’s credit, its contracts, and its pension promises. Sonya Dunn is asking for that vote as an outsider who already ran a shop, already raised a family under military orders, and already treats other people’s money as a public trust.
That is why she is on this ballot. That is why she is worth the line.
Brooke Elizabeth Lierman
Profile
Committee Name: Brooke Lierman for Maryland
Address: PO Box 891
Baltimore, MD 21203-
Email: info@brookelierman.com
Website: www.brookelierman.com
Social: facebook.com/brookelierman
@brookeelierman
Brooke Lierman: A Party Heir Asking Maryland to Keep the Books in Party Hands
The Comptroller of Maryland is supposed to be the state’s independent fiscal officer. The office collects and distributes more than $36 billion. It sits on the Board of Public Works. It helps oversee a pension system of roughly $73 billion. It is not supposed to be a campaign platform, an equity shop, or a press office for the rest of the Democratic ticket.
Brooke Elizabeth Lierman is asking Maryland to give her four more years in that chair. She is the Democratic incumbent. She faces Republican Sonya Dunn on November 3. She won her primary unopposed. She has raised more than $3.3 million. Dunn has raised a fraction of that. That is the usual Maryland math. It is not an argument that the books are in order.
Do not vote for her.
Who she is
Lierman was born in Washington, D.C., on February 14, 1979. She grew up in Montgomery County and graduated from Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda. She took a history degree from Dartmouth in 2001 and a law degree from the University of Texas in 2008. She clerked for federal judges in Maryland, then practiced civil-rights and disability-rights law at Brown, Goldstein & Levy in Baltimore. She is married to Eben Hansel. They have two children. She lives in Baltimore.
That is a polished résumé. It is also a pedigree. Her father, Terry Lierman, chaired the Maryland Democratic Party and later served as chief of staff to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. Before she ever sat on a committee in Annapolis, she worked the national progressive farm team: field work for Paul Wellstone, state field director for Howard Dean, a year at the Center for American Progress, AmeriCorps VISTA. She did not wander into statewide office from a shop floor or a county ledger. She was raised inside the machine that produces Maryland Democrats.
Baltimore City’s 46th District sent her to the House of Delegates in 2014 and again in 2018. She served eight years. She sat on Appropriations and on Environment and Transportation. She chaired the Joint Committee on Pensions. She founded a transit caucus. She passed a statewide ban on foam food containers. She wrote bills on transit, broadband, school discipline, name-image-likeness for college athletes, and gun-violence programs. That is a legislator’s stack. It is not a comptroller’s stack. A comptroller’s job is to collect what is owed, tell the truth about revenue, and say no when the spending story does not add up.
In 2022 she beat Harford’s own Barry Glassman for the open Comptroller’s office, 61.56 percent to 38.33 percent. She was sworn in on January 16, 2023, the first woman to hold the job. Firsts are not a substitute for collections.
What she did with the office
She treated the Treasury Building the way a Baltimore delegate treats a platform. She created a chief equity and transformation officer. She talks about an “inclusive economy,” minority-business set-asides, and the wealth divide. She publishes economic reports that read like briefing papers for the rest of the ticket. When Moody’s cut Maryland’s credit rating in May 2025 — Aaa to Aa1, the first Moody’s downgrade in more than fifty years — she put her name on the joint statement that called it a “Trump downgrade.” That is not how an independent fiscal officer talks. That is how a running mate talks.
Moody’s cited economic and financial underperformance, high fixed costs, and Maryland’s exposure to federal employment. S&P later shifted its outlook from stable to negative and warned about out-year budget gaps. The state’s answer was to drop Moody’s as a paid rater and keep the agencies that still said AAA. Shooting the messenger is not fiscal management.
Then came the audit. In September 2026 the legislative auditor reported that the Comptroller’s office failed to pursue more than $600 million in unpaid taxes over four years. Unpaid taxes rose from about $1.03 billion in fiscal 2022 to about $1.58 billion in fiscal 2025. Some 18,300 delinquent accounts totaling $251.7 million had no wage garnishment or bank attachment as of February. Thousands of questionable returns — on the order of 6,500 — went uninvestigated. That is the core of the job. She did not do it.
Lierman’s public answer to Maryland’s structural imbalance is that “cutting waste” is overstated. She points to federal disinvestment, health costs, energy costs, and an aging workforce. Some of that is real. None of it excuses an office that left hundreds of millions on the table while the same office lectures the public about equity and modernization. Maryland Tax Connect and unclaimed-property press releases are not a substitute for collections.
On the Board of Public Works she is one vote of three. She has occasionally voted no on a contract. That is the least the job requires. The larger record is the one she shares with Governor Wes Moore and Treasurer Dereck Davis: taxes and fees layered onto a structural deficit, a credit hit, and a Comptroller who signed the political talking points instead of writing the dissenting memo the office exists to write.
Why Harford should vote no
Harford families pay the freight. Harford schools, roads, pensions, and bond rates ride on whether Annapolis tells the truth about money. Glassman already made that case from this county in 2022. Four years later the rating is worse, the unpaid-tax pile is larger, and the incumbent is asking for another term with a war chest Dunn cannot match.
Lierman is not a neutral bookkeeper who happened to be a Democrat. She is a product of the Maryland Democratic Party, the daughter of a party chairman, a Wellstone-and-Dean organizer, a Baltimore delegate, and now a Comptroller who built an equity office inside the tax collector and blamed Washington when Moody’s did the arithmetic. She says the Comptroller should be the state’s “chief financial educator.” Maryland does not need another educator. Maryland needs someone who will collect the $600 million and stop pretending the leak is a talking point.
Sonya Dunn is the alternative on the Republican line: a Bowie businesswoman, military spouse, special-needs mother, and outsider who talks about the office as a watchdog instead of a platform. Lierman is the incumbent who already had the keys.
Do not give them back.
Vote no on Brooke Elizabeth Lierman for Comptroller of Maryland on November 3.
.png/:/rs=w:400,cg:true,m)