Do your Patriotic Duty! VOTE
Jeff Beck
Profile
Republican
Committee Name: Committee to Elect Jeff Beck
Address: 102 Chell Rd
Joppa, MD 21085-
Phone: (443) 722-7824
Email: jeffbeckforharfordcounty@gmail.com
Website: www.jeffbeckforharfordcounty.com
Social: www.facebook.com/people/Jeff-Beck-for-Harford-County-Council/61559101808742/?_rdr
Jeff Beck: A Neighbor Ready to Represent District A
Harford Chronicle
District A does not need another career politician who treats Joppatowne, Edgewood, and the Route 40 corridor as a line on a map. It needs someone who lives here, raises children here, coaches here, and is tired of watching the district get talked about instead of served.
That is Jeff Beck.
He is the Republican nominee for Harford County Council in District A. He filed first. He ran unopposed in the June primary. In November he faces appointed Democratic incumbent Nolanda Robert. The choice is straightforward. One candidate is a Joppatowne father of seven who has spent nearly twenty years in this district building a life, coaching kids, volunteering, and showing up. The other is not that neighbor.
Vote for Jeff Beck.
The life he built in District A
Jeff Beck lives on Chell Road in Joppa. He did not grow up in Harford County. He graduated from Baltimore Lutheran High School in Towson in 2000 and later earned a certificate in automotive technology from Lincoln Technical Institute. What he did after that is what matters for this race: he moved into District A, stayed, and put down roots.
He has lived in Harford County for nearly two decades. He and his wife, Nicole, make their home in Joppatowne. They have seven children and a granddaughter. They also have five dogs and two cats, which is another way of saying this is a full house that knows what a school calendar, a grocery bill, and a Saturday at the park actually look like.
In their free time they eat at local restaurants, kayak at Mariner Point Park, and treat the county as a place to live in, not a place to campaign through. That is the right starting point for a Council member from the southwest corner of Harford.
He works as a commercial account manager. His working life has been sales, management, and problem-solving — automotive and otherwise. That background is not a political talking point. It is how you learn to listen, close a deal, and deliver when a customer does not care about your excuse.
He has never held elected office. That is a feature, not a gap. What he has done is the work that actually knits a district together. He has coached youth sports. He has volunteered with local and national charities. He serves on the Harford County Human Relations Commission representing District A. He shows up at community cleanups and conversations about homelessness along the Route 40 corridor — not because a consultant told him to, but because the problem sits in his own backyard.
He officially filed for County Council District A on March 5, 2025, among the first in the field. Republican voters sent him through the primary unopposed. The general election is November 3.
What he stands for
Beck’s platform is local because District A’s problems are local.
He wants parks, farms, and open space protected, and growth that is smart instead of sloppy. He has said he will fight to protect those places and push responsible reuse of vacant properties by attracting businesses owned by people who actually live in District A. That is the opposite of treating Edgewood and Joppatowne as a dumping ground for someone else’s density experiment.
He wants the tax burden lowered the only way it stays lowered: by growing the tax base with good businesses, not by squeezing the same homeowners harder every assessment cycle.
He wants the Council to stop acting like a schoolyard. His own question to voters is the right one: are you tired of local politicians bickering and name-calling? He is running to restore civility and collaboration — professionalism instead of petty score-settling that serves bureaucrats and nobody else.
He wants public safety, strong schools, and infrastructure that families can use. On quality of life he has committed to something you can see from the street: sidewalks, dedicated bike lanes, and a better Harford Transit Link. District A is not downtown Bel Air. People here walk to bus stops, cut across incomplete sidewalks, and live with a commercial corridor that has been allowed to look tired. A Council member who talks about multimodal access is talking about whether a kid can get to school and a parent can get to work without gambling with traffic.
He supports housing that middle-income earners can actually buy. He has been clear that this is not a slogan for subsidized projects dumped into the district. It is about homes working families can purchase. That distinction matters in a part of the county that has been asked, over and over, to absorb other people’s ideas of “affordable.”
He has also said current leadership harmed residents by killing Bill 26-004, the charter amendment that would have clarified qualifications for holding elected office. He would have taken that question to the voters. A Council that is afraid of a clean rule on who may sit in the seat is a Council that has forgotten who the seat belongs to.
Overdevelopment, responsible government, and taxes. Those are the three issues he named when he entered the race. They are still the three issues District A lives with every day.
Why you should vote for him
Council District A covers Joppatowne, Edgewood, and the southwest of the county — the places that feel state pressure first and county attention last. The person you send to Bel Air will either be a resident who treats vacant storefronts, sidewalks, parks, and public safety as his own neighborhood’s business, or an appointed incumbent defending a record voters never first chose at the ballot box.
Jeff Beck lives here. He chose this district and stayed. He is raising a large family here. He works in the private sector, where results are not optional. He coaches. He volunteers. He sits on the Human Relations Commission. He filed early, ran a clean primary, and is asking for the job without pretending he has already been a politician.
You should vote for him because District A deserves a representative who actually represents the district. You should vote for him because he wants growth that fills empty buildings before it eats open land. You should vote for him because he wants the Council to act like adults. You should vote for him because sidewalks, transit, parks, and a tax base that is not just residential rooftops are not abstractions on Chell Road. They are the difference between a corridor that works and a corridor that is managed from somewhere else.
He is not selling drama. He is offering a neighbor who will show up, listen, and try to get something done.
Stephanie Flasch
Profile
Republican
Committee Name: Elect Stephanie Flasch
Address: PO Box 151
Fallston, MD 21047-
Phone: (443) 567-1421
Email: flaschforcountycouncil@gmail.com
Website: www.stephanieflasch.com
Social: www.facebook.com/flaschforDistrictB
Stephanie Flasch: Protect, Plan, Preserve — Ready for District B
District B does not need a Council member who discovered land use when the filing deadline arrived. It needs someone who has been in the room for more than a decade — reading the bills, explaining the maps, organizing neighbors, and refusing to treat Fallston, Abingdon, and the rural edge as someone else’s growth experiment.
That is Stephanie Flasch.
She is the Republican nominee for Harford County Council in District B. In the June primary she won the Republican nomination cleanly: 2,739 votes to 1,534 for appointed incumbent Alison Imhoff and 448 for Russ English Jr. In November she faces Democrat Isabela Dela Cruz. The choice is not a personality contest. One candidate has spent fifteen years doing the unglamorous work of responsible land use. The other has not.
Vote for Stephanie Flasch.
The life she built here
Stephanie and her husband, Adam, are prior military officers. They have called Harford County home since 1994 and have lived in Fallston for more than twenty years. They raised their sons, Alex and Nick, in that community. That is not a campaign biography written for a mailer. It is a family that stayed.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Illinois State University. She served twelve years in the Army National Guard, advancing through leadership roles and leaving as a Captain. That service trained the habits she still brings to county work: do the homework, take responsibility, and do not flinch when the problem is complicated.
Adam’s own service is part of the same household. He served decades in the National Guard, rose to brigadier general, and later continued in a homeland-security and public-safety role before resigning at the end of 2025. The Flasch family talks about faith, service, and integrity because those are the rules they have lived under, not slogans they discovered in an election year.
She has never held elected office. That is not a gap. It is the reason she is ready. For more than a decade she has already been doing the work a District B Council member is supposed to do — showing up, studying the code, and putting residents in front of the people who vote on their neighborhoods.
The record she already has
Stephanie Flasch is president of Friends of Harford, the volunteer nonprofit that exists to keep land use, zoning, and quality of life from being decided in the dark. She has held that role for years. The organization analyzes zoning legislation, publishes updates, organizes public forums, and treats civic participation as a duty, not a hobby. That is proactive land-use advocacy in the only form that matters: before the map is already drawn.
She chairs the Fallston Community Advisory Board. That board is the liaison between Fallston residents and county government. She runs the meetings. She carries local priorities to the Executive’s office. She does not wait for someone in Bel Air to notice that traffic, school capacity, and overdevelopment arrive first in the places people actually live.
She sits on the Harford County Planning Advisory Board. That is the body that reviews master plans, zoning maps, and related regulations and makes recommendations to Planning and Zoning. She has been there since 2022. When the next HarfordNEXT update and the next comprehensive zoning cycle arrive, she will not be learning the vocabulary on the dais. She already speaks it.
She has also served on the Greater Fallston Association board, working with residents and officials on infrastructure and growth. She was on the community outreach team for the “Build It Now” campaign that helped get the new Youth’s Benefit Elementary School funded and built — a modern school that opened in 2017. Her own children were not going to sit in those classrooms. She did the work anyway. In 2019, when Harford County Public Schools faced a $15 million shortfall, she helped launch the “Fund 15” campaign. Residents, including high school students, pressed for classroom funding. The result was a $5 million addition that reduced cuts.
She has tracked the bills most residents never see until a sign goes up: comprehensive rezoning, zoning-map adoptions, accessory dwelling units, agricultural preservation changes. She has written Council sponsors on behalf of Friends of Harford when a bill would change the character of a neighborhood. She testified before the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee against SLAPP suits that try to punish residents and community groups for speaking. She has stood with neighbors when a large-scale data-center concept was floated for land around Mountain Branch and when a moratorium needed bodies in Council chambers.
She produces “Flasch Facts” — short, plain explanations of the master plan, the development envelope, and how a Council vote years ago becomes a traffic jam today. That is not branding. That is teaching people how their county actually works.
Keep Fallston Rural did not start as a slogan in 2026. It started in the 2016 Master Land Use Plan fight over development-envelope expansion. Stephanie was in that fight. A developer sued her. She did not leave the field. Ten years later she is still the person neighbors call when they need someone who already knows the process.
She does not accept developer contributions. That is a line she has drawn in public and kept. When a PAC funded in part by developer money spent against her in the primary, she answered with her record, not with a matching check.
What she will do on the Council
Her program is three words she has used long enough to mean them: Protect. Plan. Preserve.
Protect neighborhoods by putting growth where infrastructure already exists and keeping incompatible development off farmland, forest, and the rural edge.
Plan so roads, schools, public safety, and water keep pace with whatever is approved — instead of approving first and apologizing later. She has said that in her first 100 days she would review the 2016 Master Land Use Plan for the gap between what was planned and what was built, then use that work as the county updates HarfordNEXT.
Preserve agricultural heritage and the look of District B so the place still has farms, open space, and a reason families moved here in the first place. Growth is not the enemy. Growth that outruns the roads and the schools is.
She wants accessible leadership: a Council member who answers, who explains the vote before it happens, and who treats District B as a community rather than a district number. She has already practiced that standard as a board chair and as president of Friends of Harford. The Council seat would simply give that work a vote.
Why you should vote for her
District B covers Fallston, Abingdon, and the western communities that live with the consequences of land-use decisions made years before a house is framed. Those decisions determine whether a two-lane road stays two lanes, whether a school stays over capacity, and whether a farm stays a farm.
Stephanie Flasch has already been the adult in those conversations. She is a thirty-year Harford resident and a twenty-year Fallston neighbor. She is a National Guard captain who finished her service and then kept serving. She leads Friends of Harford. She chairs the Fallston Community Advisory Board. She sits on the Planning Advisory Board. She helped get a school built and a school budget patched. She has read the zoning bills, testified against efforts to silence public participation, and refused developer money so that the people who live here remain the client.
You should vote for her because District B needs a representative who already knows how the development envelope works. You should vote for her because she has spent fifteen years asking “How did that happen?” and then answering it in public. You should vote for her because Protect, Plan, Preserve is not a slogan invented for a primary. It is the work she has been doing while other people were waiting for a title.
Vote for Stephanie Flasch for Harford County Council, District B, on November 3.
Isabela Dela Cruz
Profile
Democratic
Committee Name: Dela Cruz for Harford
Address: 418 Amelanchier Ct
Bel Air, MD 21015-
Phone: (443) 256-3063
Email: delacruz.harford@gmail.com
Website: www.delacruzforharford.com
Social: www.facebook.com/delacruzforharford
instagram@delacruzforharford
Isabela Dela Cruz: A Thin Résumé Asking District B to Trust the Slogans
District B is Fallston, Kingsville, Baldwin, Abingdon, Emmorton, and the west side of the county that has spent a decade fighting crowded schools, jammed two-lane roads, and developers who treat the development envelope like a suggestion. It is not a starter office for a first-time candidate whose own website leads with commission art, “secular spiritual direction,” and judging card-game and esports tournaments.
That is Isabela Dela Cruz. She is the Democratic nominee for Harford County Council, District B. She is 30. She lives at 418 Amelanchier Court in Bel Air — Country Walk, off Wheel Road near Route 24. She filed February 23, 2026. She ran unopposed in the June Democratic primary and collected 1,879 votes because nobody else on her side wanted the race. In November she faces Republican Stephanie Flasch.
Do not vote for her.
Who she is
Dela Cruz describes herself as a long-time Harford resident, a freelance and commission artist, an art tutor, and a “secular spiritual director” who helps people with personal growth and guidance. She also volunteers to organize and judge card-game and esports tournaments. That is not a paraphrase. That is how she introduces herself on her own campaign site.
County Council is not a studio critique. It is not a tournament bracket. It is not a listening circle. It is the body that passes the budget, sets the tax rate, and votes on planning, zoning, and the growth that either wrecks Fallston and Kingsville or does not. Nothing in that biography shows she has ever sat on a planning board, a community advisory board, a civic land-use group, a budget work session, or any elected body at all.
She calls herself “a regular resident who wants to be part of the solution.” Every first-timer uses that line. The difference is that District B already has people who have spent years in the rooms where the actual fights happen. Dela Cruz is asking voters to skip that part.
How she got here
She did not survive a contested primary. She inherited a vacant Democratic line. That is not a mandate. It is a walkover. The party needed a name on the November ballot in a district it does not usually win, and she was available.
When The Baltimore Sun and Capital Gazette sent the standard voter-guide questionnaire that every serious candidate is expected to answer — budget, land use, economy, housing, qualifications — Dela Cruz did not complete it. Russ English skipped it too. Stephanie Flasch did not. A candidate who will not answer the county paper before asking for a Council vote is already telling you how she intends to handle hard questions after she has the gavel.
The League of Women Voters guide is where her own words show up. She grew up in Bel Air South. She cites racism in school as a reason she wants “inclusive youth programs.” She cites a nearby gas explosion that damaged her home as the reason she is “focused on safer housing.” Those are personal stories. They are not a land-use record, a budget record, or a record of standing in front of angry Fallston residents while a concept plan is on the table.
What she actually proposes
Her slogan is “Practical Leadership. Shared Progress.” Her three pillars are responsible growth and environmental stewardship, community resources for children and teens, and “reliable infrastructure and practical transportation solutions.” Read the fine print.
On land use she supports agricultural easements — fine — and then “directing growth to existing communities through transit-oriented development.” That is density language. Transit-oriented development is how you stack rooftops next to a bus stop and call it smart growth. District B has already watched “existing communities” get the next subdivision, the next apartment pad, and the next school-capacity fight. She is not promising to hold the envelope. She is promising to manage the overflow with transit talk.
On the budget her top three fiscal priorities, in her own words, are expanding youth programs including after-school and workforce training, funding environmental protection, and investing in public transit. Not public safety. Not school construction that matches actual enrollment. Not holding the property-tax rate. Youth programs and buses. That is a state-Democrat checklist dropped onto a district whose daily complaint is Route 152, Route 24, Wheel Road, and classrooms that were full before the last plat was approved.
On the economy she wants grants and streamlined permitting for “small businesses and green industries,” plus more transit to “attract employers.” Green-industry grants are not how you keep a machine shop or a farm supplier on Harford land. They are how Annapolis talks when it wants a press release.
She wants “increasing public transport options” to reduce congestion. Anyone who drives Fallston Road at 7:15 a.m. knows the bottleneck is not a missing bus. It is too many rooftops on roads that were never rebuilt. Selling transit as the fix is how you avoid saying no to the next project.
Why you should not vote for her
First, she has no record. No elected office. No appointed land-use seat. No years chairing a civic group that actually stopped or reshaped a bad plan. The campaign is a website, an ActBlue button, a Google volunteer form, and slogans. District B cannot afford on-the-job training from someone whose professional life is commissions and “secular spiritual direction.”
Second, the primary proved nothing. Unopposed is not tested. It is unopposed.
Third, she would not fill out the Sun questionnaire. If she will not answer voters in print in May, she will not suddenly become accountable in a Tuesday night work session when a developer’s attorney is at the table.
Fourth, her platform is the opposite of what this district has been screaming about. Transit-oriented development, public-transit investment, youth-program spending, and green-industry grants are how you grow government and grow density. They are not how you protect what is left of rural and semi-rural District B.
Fifth, the job is votes on money and land. An artist-tutor-spiritual-director-esports-judge can be a decent neighbor. That is not a qualification for the Council. Treating “I stepped up” as a substitute for competence is how districts get represented by people who discover APFO, the adequate public facilities ordinance, after the damage is done.
Sixth, this is a partisan placeholder race. Harford Democrats needed a District B name. They got one. That does not obligate Fallston, Kingsville, Baldwin, or Abingdon to pretend the résumé is thicker than it is.
November 3 is not a seminar on personal growth. It is a choice about who sits in the seat that votes on your taxes, your schools, and the next map amendment. Isabela Dela Cruz has not earned that seat. She has not done the work that would even put her in shouting distance of it. Do not vote for her.
Nolanda Robert
Profile
Democratic
Address: PO Box 111 2290 Hanson Rd
Edgewood, MD 21040-
Phone: (443) 739-4124
Email: Vote4nolanda@friendsofnolandacampaign.com
Website: www.friendsofnolandacampaign.com
Nolanda Robert: Appointed, Unlicensed, and Asking District A to Confirm Her
Nolanda Y. Robert did not win District A. The Democratic Central Committee handed the County Council three names, and a Republican-majority Council put her in the chair on January 7, 2025, after Dion Guthrie was removed. She had already lost the 2022 Democratic primary to the same man. Now she wants voters to ratify an appointment she could not earn at the ballot box.
She markets herself as the counselor who will fix Edgewood and Joppatowne. She does not hold a Maryland license to practice professional counseling. She has driver’s-license problems. And people in the district are saying she may not even live there anymore.
Do not vote for her.
The résumé she wants you to remember
Robert came to Maryland in the late 1980s for the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. Bachelor’s in psychology and criminal justice, 1992. Master’s in criminal justice from the University of Baltimore, 1999. She spent 18 years as Family Support Services Coordinator at the Cecil County Circuit Court — Cecil County, not Harford — doing mediation, parent coordination, and child interviews in custody cases. She left that job in 2023.
She then opened Voice of a Child, LLC, advertising child and adolescent “counseling,” play therapy, divorce coaching, mediation, and parent coordination from 16 Bel Air South Parkway in Bel Air. She also works as a training contractor for an online parenting-program vendor. She is a Clinically Certified Forensic Counselor — CCFC — through the National Association of Forensic Counselors, a private membership group. She is a notary. She sits on AFCC committees, including as co-chair of its national Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity committee. She was vice chair of the Harford Democratic Club and an executive member of the Harford NAACP.
In 2022 she ran for this same seat from Edgewood, listed no prior elected office, and lost the primary. The party put her back in after Guthrie’s removal. She filed for a full term in June 2025. District A this cycle also has Jeff Beck on the Republican side.
That is the highlight reel. It is a party résumé and a vendor résumé. It is not a record of being elected by District A, and it is not a state license to treat children.
The counseling practice without a Maryland license
Read her own sites. Voice of a Child sells “counseling services to children ages four to eighteen.” Cognitive behavioral therapy. Play therapy. Depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism, child abuse and neglect, grief. Adults get “counseling” through contested divorce. She charges cash for it; no credit cards or payments through insurance.
Maryland does not treat that as a hobby. The Board of Professional Counselors and Therapists licenses people who independently practice clinical professional counseling. The ordinary credentials are LGPC and LCPC. Those licenses require a qualifying graduate counseling degree, thousands of supervised hours, a national exam, and a Maryland law exam. Robert’s master’s is in criminal justice. Her public credential is CCFC — a private certificate from a national association, not a license from the State of Maryland.
Psychology Today lists the practice as “Counselor, MS, CCFC” and verifies a certificate from the National Association of Forensic Counselors. It does not list an LCPC or LGPC number. Directory listings that say “Counselor — Verify — Maryland” still do not produce a Board license. The county’s own staff page repeats the same formulation: she “provides counseling to children and adolescents.” The county is advertising an unlicensed practice on a government biography.
Call it coaching and mediation if you want the gray zone. She does not. She calls it counseling, therapy, and treatment of diagnosed conditions in children as young as four. Parents in a custody fight are the last people who should be sent to someone the state has not licensed to do that work. A Council member who cannot clear the basic occupational rule for her own shop has no standing to lecture anyone about standards, children’s services, or “mental health.”
If she wanted the title, she could have sat for the Board. She sold the title instead.
The license that actually moves a car
Then there is the driver’s license. That is not a private certificate. That is the card that lets you operate a vehicle on Maryland roads, the same roads District A residents use to get to work, school, and the grocery store.
Robert has had issues with that license. A Council member who cannot keep a clean driving credential is asking you to trust her with public safety policy, transportation talking points, and the appearance of competence. People who cannot manage the most ordinary state document should not be writing the rules for everyone else.
Residency: the question she should have to answer in public
District A is Edgewood, Joppatowne, and parts of Abingdon. In 2022 she ran as an Edgewood resident. Her campaign site now says she has lived in Harford County “for the past 8 years” with a husband who retired from Baltimore City law enforcement. Her counseling office is in Bel Air — 16 Bel Air South Parkway, ZIP 21015 — which is not District A.
Residents are reporting that she may not live in the district anymore. That is not a technicality. The Charter does not give District A to whoever the Central Committee likes. It gives it to a person who lives there and answers to the people who do. If the person in the chair has one foot in Bel Air and a campaign biography that keeps sliding, voters are entitled to treat that as disqualifying until she proves otherwise with an address, not a slogan.
An appointed member who will not put the residency question to bed is telling you exactly how she intends to treat oversight.
What she has actually done with the gavel
She did not arrive with a mandate. She arrived with a vacancy. In roughly a year and a half she has been the reliable Democratic vote, the DEI biography on the dais, and the member who moved to kill introduction of the “No Double Dip” bill that would have barred school, sheriff, and county employees from sitting on the Council. That is party protection, not district representation.
Her stated priorities — economic development, homelessness, affordable housing, “community development,” Route 40 storefronts — are the same generic list every appointed Democrat recites. District A’s problems are concrete: crime, schools that cannot hold the load, aging commercial strips, and a development machine that treats the Route 40 corridor as leftover capacity. She has not shown she can say no to Annapolis, no to her own committee, or no to the density politics that keep landing on Edgewood and Joppa first.
Why you should not vote for her
She lost this district when voters had a choice. The party put her in when they did not. She sells counseling to children without a Maryland counseling license. She has had trouble with the license that lets her drive. People who live in District A are saying she may not live in District A. Her professional office is in Bel Air. Her political home is the Central Committee, the Democratic Club, the NAACP board, and a national DEI chairmanship.
County Council is not a therapy brand and it is not a participation trophy for the runner-up. It is a residency, a vote on other people’s money, and a public standard. Robert fails the first test on the table and papers over the rest with initials after her name that the State of Maryland did not issue.
Jeff Beck is on this ballot. So are other people who actually live the district they want to represent. Robert is the appointment. Do not confirm her.
Do not vote for Nolanda Robert.
Jessica Ryley Hammond
Profile
Democratic
Committee Name: Citizens for Jessica Ryley Hammond
Address: PO Box 115
Churchville, MD 21028-
Phone: (301) 776-0404
Email: jrh4countycouncil@gmail.com
Social: www.facebook.com/JessicaRyleyHammond4CountyCouncil
Jessica Ryley Hammond: Slogans, Unions, and a Block Button
District C does not need a first-time candidate who treats County Council like a counseling session and treats disagreement like a personal attack. It needs someone who has already run a town, written county law, and can take a hard question without reaching for the block button.
Jessica Ryley Hammond is the Democratic nominee for Harford County Council in District C. She ran unopposed in the June primary. In November she faces Republican Paula S. Etting, the mayor of Bel Air and a 27-year Harford County Department of Law attorney. One of those two has a record voters can inspect. The other has a website, a slogan, and a list of progressive endorsements.
Do not vote for Jessica Ryley Hammond.
Who she is
Hammond grew up in Harford County, graduated from Bel Air High School, attended Harford Community College, and earned a psychology degree from Towson University. She will be 49 on Election Day. She lives in Bel Air with her husband, three rescue dogs, and three retired horses.
She works as Counseling Administrator for the Maryland Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association, providing mental-health and social services to people in the racing industry. She also runs the state’s aftercare program for retired racehorses — sometimes called Beyond The Wire. That is real work. It is not County Council work. It is not a budget. It is not a zoning map. It is not a sheriff’s staffing plan. It is not four years of votes that will decide how fast Bel Air, Forest Hill, and the rest of District C get paved over.
She has never held elected office. Asked about political experience, she offered helping with a family member’s campaign about eighteen years ago and lobbying the Maryland House of Delegates on issues tied to the communities she serves — meaning the racing industry she works in. She calls not being a career politician a strength. In this race it is a vacancy. District C is not hiring a program manager. It is hiring a legislator.
How she got here
Hammond filed early — August 2025 — and was the first name on the District C board. Incumbent Tony “G” Giangiordano left the seat to run for Council President. She faced no Democrat in June. That is not a mandate. That is an empty primary. The first real contest of her political life is November, and she is asking District C to hand her the gavel on a résumé of meetings attended, surveys shared, and slogans repeated.
Her committee is Citizens for Jessica Ryley Hammond, P.O. Box 115, Churchville. Early in the cycle she was the District C candidate who had raised the most among those who had filed reports — a little over five thousand dollars at the January 2026 snapshot — and she has been passing the hat through ActBlue ever since. First order of business, she said when donations opened, was seven thousand dollars for a website and brochures. That is a campaign. It is not a governing record.
What she actually sells
Her site is three words: Preserve. Protect. Represent. Underneath it is the standard Democratic package for a Republican-leaning county.
She wants to “greatly slow the pace of new development.” She talks open space, farmland, data centers, warehouses, poorly placed solar, power lines, light pollution, bike lanes, and “environmental justice is social justice.” She is endorsed by the Sierra Club and Maryland NOW. That is not a secret. That is the coalition. In Annapolis those words usually mean more process, more restriction, and more cost for the people who already live here. In Harford they are how you import statewide ideology into a local land-use fight and call it charm.
She wants more money for Harford County Public Schools and is proud of the Harford County Education Association endorsement. Of course she is. The union does not endorse the candidate who will ask whether the extra dollar is buying results. She told Patch the system is “doing the best it can with the resources it has” and that educators should not spend their own money. Fine. The Council does not run the schools. It writes the check. Hammond’s answer is always the same check: bigger.
She wants more funding and more routes for Harford Transit LINK, more mental-health and substance-use services, and “positive recreational opportunities for youth.” She talks fiscal responsibility in the same breath. That is the oldest trick in local politics: promise more of everything and swear the money is already sitting in the sofa. She even told a budget meeting there is money for schools, transit, and land preservation “without raising property taxes AND while still saving money.” If that were true, the people who already sit on the Council would have found it.
She says she will not take developer money. Good. Voters should still notice who did endorse her and who is writing the platform. Teachers’ union. Maryland NOW. Sierra Club. ActBlue. That is not a neighborhood ticket. That is a party ticket with a horse-farm backdrop.
She shows up. Give her that. She has spoken at Council budget hearings, Bel Air commissioners’ meetings, Friends of Harford sessions on HarfordNEXT / Harford Forward, and the Red Pump Crescent townhouse fight. Showing up is the job of a candidate. It is not the same thing as having decided anything that bound this county.
The temperament problem
Hammond markets herself as approachable, easy to talk to, good-humored, a listener who will “work with people of all backgrounds and political affiliations.” Then you question her.
She is thin-skinned. If you press her — on the platform, the endorsements, the gap between slogans and a vote — she does not answer. She blocks you. A candidate who cannot stand a hard question on Facebook will not stand one in Council chambers. District C residents will not get to mute their Council member when a rezoning, a tax rate, or a sheriff’s budget lands on the table. The block button is not transparency. It is the opposite of the “open communication” she printed on her own website.
A person who runs on listening and then disappears critics is telling you exactly how she will govern: applause in, dissent out.
Why you should not vote for her
Do not vote for her because she has never been elected to anything and wants the whole district on the first try.
Do not vote for her because her governing experience is counseling race-track workers and placing retired horses. That is decent work. It does not prepare you to mark up a county budget or rewrite a zoning bill.
Do not vote for her because her coalition is the education union, NOW, and the Sierra Club, and her language — environmental justice, slow the pace, more transit, more school money — is Annapolis talking through a Bel Air mailbox.
Do not vote for her because “fiscal responsibility” paired with a longer list of new spending is not a plan. It is a brochure.
Do not vote for her because an unopposed primary is not proof she can persuade anyone who is allowed to talk back.
Do not vote for her because the first tool she reaches for when challenged is the block button. Thin skin is a character flaw in a neighbor. In a Council member it is a method. You will not get representation from someone who treats scrutiny as an attack.
District C already has a candidate who has run Bel Air, sat as mayor, prosecuted cases, and spent twenty-seven years inside Harford’s law department. Hammond is asking you to skip that record and take the slogans on faith.
Do not.
Vote accordingly. Do not send Jessica Ryley Hammond to the County Council.
Paula S. Etting
Profile
Republican
Committee Name: Committee to Elect Paula S. Etting
Address: 507 N Shamrock Rd
Bel Air, MD 21014-3349
Phone: (410) 404-8854
Email: electpaulasetting@gmail.com
Website: www.PaulaSEtting.com
Social: www.facebook.com/ElectPaulaSEtting
Paula S. Etting: Proven in Bel Air, Ready for District C
District C does not need a lecture about how county government works. It needs someone who has already sat at the table, balanced a budget, funded the police, and told a developer no when the project would have changed the character of the town.
That is Paula S. Etting.
She is the Republican nominee for Harford County Council in District C — Bel Air and the adjoining parts of Forest Hill and Abingdon. In June she won a three-way primary. In November she faces Democrat Jessica Ryley Hammond. The choice is not complicated. One candidate is the sitting mayor of Bel Air, a lifelong Republican, a former prosecutor, and a lawyer who spent twenty-seven years inside Harford County government. The other is not that record.
Vote for Paula Etting.
The life that prepared her
She first knew Bel Air as a teenager. She entered The John Carroll School in 1973, finished as valedictorian of the Class of 1977, and never lost the habit of doing the work before she asked for the microphone. She was the first in her family to graduate from college. Her father, one of eight Irish children, left school to work. He still found the money for a Texas Instruments calculator when she was in eighth grade. She repaid that bet with honors from Johns Hopkins University and a law degree from the University of Maryland.
She passed the Maryland bar in 1985. She spent three years in the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office, prosecuting everything from traffic cases to robberies, kidnappings, and homicides in Circuit Court. In 1989 she joined the Harford County Department of Law. For the next twenty-seven years she advised county agencies and tried cases in District Court, Circuit Court, and Maryland’s appellate courts — contracts, zoning, accidents, workers’ compensation, the unglamorous work that keeps a county from being sued into a corner. She retired from county service on October 1, 2016.
She did not retire from Harford. She and her husband, Errol, have been married forty-five years. They raised two children here. They still live on North Shamrock Road in Bel Air. Errol retired as a lieutenant in the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit. Their son is a Baltimore police officer assigned to SWAT. Public safety in this household is not a press release. It is the family business.
In 2021 she ran for the Bel Air Board of Town Commissioners and won. In 2023 her colleagues chose her as mayor. In November 2025 Bel Air voters sent her back. That is not a résumé padded with appointments. That is a town looking at the person already in the chair and saying, keep going.
What she has already done
Every budget she voted for in Bel Air has been balanced. No tax increase. No cut in essential services. Raises for town employees. That is not a slogan. That is four years of votes.
She strengthened green-space requirements so growth could not eat the last open corners of town. She backed updates to density rules to keep high-density projects from rewriting Bel Air’s character. She fully funded the Bel Air Police Department’s budget request every year.
Those are the same fights waiting on the County Council: land use, the development envelope, water and sewer, data centers, industrial solar, battery storage, and an Annapolis habit of treating Harford as a density dump. Etting opposes expanding the public water and sewer service area because expansion is how high-density growth gets a pipeline. She supports the County Executive’s proposed ban on data centers. She wants the 2027 Comprehensive Master Plan written around infrastructure capacity and the communities people already live in, not around the next statewide housing target.
She is not anti-growth. She is anti-growth that arrives before the roads, the schools, and the sheriff can catch it.
Why you should vote for her
District C is the county seat and the neighborhoods around it. The person you send to the Council will vote on the tax rate, the budget, and the map. Those three votes decide whether Bel Air stays a town or becomes a corridor.
You should vote for Paula Etting because she has already done the job at the next scale down. Balancing a municipal budget without raising taxes is the same muscle as holding the line on a county tax rate. Funding the police department every year is the same instinct as keeping the Sheriff’s Office competitive on pay and equipment. Saying no to density that does not fit is the same judgment the Council will need when the next application lands on the table.
You should vote for her because she already knows how county government works from the inside. Twenty-seven years in the Law Department is not theory. It is how ordinances get written, how agencies get sued, and how a sloppy land-use decision becomes a decade of litigation.
You should vote for her because she is a prosecutor who later sat on the other side of the table as counsel to the county. She understands both the case file and the budget line.
You should vote for her because education, in her telling, still means reading, writing, and mathematics. She will fund classrooms and teachers and ask hard questions about administration. She will back conservative Board of Education appointments who treat parents as partners instead of obstacles.
You should vote for her because public safety is not abstract on Shamrock Road. She will keep Harford competitive for deputies and officers. She will fund the cameras, the technology, and the staffing that keep this county one of the safest places in Maryland instead of a cautionary tale borrowed from a neighbor.
You should vote for her because she is a lifelong Republican who did not discover the party the year she filed. Consistency is not a personality quirk. It is how you know what she will do in year three of a term when the pressure is coming from Annapolis instead of from a campaign flyer.
Harford is home, she says. She means it. She came here as a high-school student, built a career in the county law office, raised a family, served the town, and is now asking District C for the next assignment.
The assignment is straightforward. Hold the line on taxes. Keep growth from outrunning the roads and the schools. Back the people who wear the badge. Put the schools back on their core mission. Protect the character of Bel Air, Forest Hill, and Abingdon.
Paula S. Etting has already practiced that job. District C should give her the gavel that matches the record.
John B. Carl, Jr.
Profile
Republican
Committee Name: Friends of John Carl Jr.
Address: PO Box 12
Pylesville, MD 21132-
Phone: (410) 836-0419
Website: www.johnbcarljr.com
Social: www.facebook.com/JohnBCarlJr
John B. Carl, Jr.: Joe the Plumber for District D
District D is the northern farm-and-crossroads slice of Harford — Pylesville, Street, Darlington, Whiteford, Norrisville, Jarrettsville, Level. It is not a place that needs another résumé polished in Annapolis. It needs someone who already knows the roads, the wells, the volunteer fire halls, and the difference between a promise and a bill that actually gets paid.
That is John B. Carl, Jr.
He is the Republican nominee for Harford County Council in District D. In June he beat Jay Evans in the GOP primary, 4,922 to 1,290. In November he faces Democrat Jean M. Salvatore. Incumbent James Reilly did not run again. The seat is open. The choice is a working plumber from Pylesville against a Bel Air Democrat whose political résumé is a term on the Democratic Central Committee.
Vote for John Carl.
The life he built here
The Carl family settled in Harford County in 1977. John is the seventh of eight children of Joan and John B. Carl Sr., and the only boy — a package deal with his twin sister, Jeanne. He graduated from Harford Vocational-Technical High School in 1983 and went to work with his hands.
He has been a self-employed plumbing contractor in this county for more than thirty years. He runs J.B.C. Plumbing Services out of Pylesville — licensed, insured, master plumber, the guy northern Harford actually calls when a line breaks on a Saturday. He is not a franchise. He is not a consultant. He is the independent tradesman who has to show up, quote a price that holds, and leave the house working.
He has been with his high-school sweetheart, Diane, for about forty years. They raised three children. Diane homeschooled all of them. They are grandparents. That is not campaign garnish. That is a household that has lived inside a school calendar, a payroll, and a church pew without a press secretary.
He is a lifelong conservative Republican and not a career politician. He says government should be run the way a small business is run: integrity, and you deliver what you promised. That is not a slogan he borrowed. That is how he has kept customers for three decades.
The 2022 near-miss
Carl has run this race before. In the 2022 Republican primary he finished eleven votes behind James Reilly after a recount — 2,851 to 2,862. He led on Election Day. Mail-in ballots flipped the result. He asked for the recount because eleven votes is not a mandate; it is a rounding error with a gavel attached. He lost cleanly and came back.
That matters. A lot of people who lose by eleven votes disappear. Carl filed again, raised money the old-fashioned way, worked the strawberry festivals and fire-company pits and library meetings, and this time Republican voters in District D sent him through by nearly four to one.
Why you should vote for him
Call him Joe the Plumber if you want. The 2008 version of that label was a working man who asked a candidate a straight question about taxes and got treated like a prop. Carl is the local version without the national circus. He is the man who has been under your neighbor’s house. He knows what a property-tax bill does to a family that already pays for parts, insurance, and a truck. He knows what overdevelopment does to a well, a farm lane, and a volunteer company that is already stretched.
His issues are the ones northern Harford actually lives with: agricultural land preservation, fiscal responsibility, common-sense policy, funding for police, fire, and EMS, and personal freedom. He has said he believes in individual property rights so long as they do not wreck the people next door — a useful sentence in a district staring at solar proposals and growth pressure from people who do not live on Rocks Road.
You should vote for him because District D is still country, and country dies when the Council starts treating it as leftover land for someone else’s climate target or density quota.
You should vote for him because a plumber who has met a payroll for thirty years will read a budget the way a homeowner reads an estimate: what does this cost, who pays, and what do I get.
You should vote for him because he already lost the closest race in modern Harford Council history and did not become bitter or theatrical. He came back, won his primary, and is asking for the job on the same terms he asks for work — show up, tell the truth, fix what is broken.
You should vote for him because “man of the people” is usually a phrase consultants staple onto lawyers. In this race it is literal. John Carl is a husband, father, grandfather, Vo-Tech graduate, and master plumber from Pylesville. He is not asking District D to trust a theory. He is asking it to trust a neighbor who has been fixing pipes in this county since before most of the current Council was on a ballot.
Vote for John B. Carl, Jr. for Harford County Council, District D, on November 3.
Jean Salvatore
Profile
Democratic
Committee Name: Citizens for Jean Salvatore
Address: 2007 Ruffs Mill Rd
Bel Air, MD 21015-
Phone: (443) 617-1875
Email: jean4harford@gmail.com
Jean M. Salvatore: Third Try, Same Thin Case for District D
Jean M. Salvatore is the Democratic nominee for Harford County Council District D. She is 71, lives in Bel Air, and is asking the farms, villages, and two-lane roads of the county’s rural north to send her to Bond Street. This is her third run at the same seat. District D already told her no twice. Nothing in the record says the third answer should be different.
Who she is
Salvatore came to Harford as a Department of the Army intern at Aberdeen Proving Ground and spent most of a 34-year federal career there as a logistician, team lead, and chief logistician. She holds a bachelor’s in English from Fitchburg State and a master’s in administrative science from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. In retirement she has taught as an adjunct at Harford Community College and has been involved in animal-welfare work. She lists one four-year term on the Harford County Democratic Central Committee as her political experience.
That is a respectable civilian résumé. It is not a record of representing anyone. She has never held elected office. The committee seat taught her, in her own words, “a basic understanding of local government operations.” District D is not a seminar.
The scoreboard she keeps ignoring
2018 general election, Council District D: Republican Chad Shrodes 15,959 (78.8 percent). Jean Salvatore 4,161 (20.5 percent).
2022 general election, same seat: Republican James Reilly 15,212 (75.6 percent). Jean Salvatore 4,715 (23.4 percent).
2026 Democratic primary: Salvatore ran unopposed and took 1,589 votes. That is not a surge. That is the party putting a name on the November line because someone had to.
She will face Republican John B. Carl Jr. of Pylesville, a longtime plumbing contractor who lives in the district he wants to represent. Reilly is not seeking reelection. The seat is open. Salvatore’s argument is that this time the same district will finally warm to the same candidate. Rural Harford has already given that theory two fair hearings.
Bel Air asking to speak for Jarrettsville
Salvatore lists her residence as Bel Air — campaign filings put her at 2007 Ruffs Mill Road, Bel Air 21015. District D is Jarrettsville, Norrisville, Whiteford, Darlington, Level, Pylesville, Street, and the northern fringe. Some Bel Air precincts clip the district on the map. That does not make a Bel Air Democrat the natural voice of the county’s agricultural north.
The people who live on those roads worry about the development envelope, ag preservation, volunteer fire companies, school capacity, and Annapolis telling the county where to put solar. Salvatore’s questionnaires talk about expanding public transit and “more frequent trips” on the Link system, rooftop solar on government buildings, tax incentives for solar, geothermal, and wind, and a county that “should lead the way” on renewable energy because, she says, “many in our area seem misinformed about the benefits of sustainable power.”
That last line is the tell. District D is not confused. District D has watched statewide energy policy and density talk roll north from Annapolis and said no. A candidate who treats local resistance as a communications problem is not listening. She is lecturing.
The virtue pledges that do not fill a gavel
Salvatore’s main contrast with her opponent is that she is taking no campaign donations and, if elected, will donate her council salary to county nonprofits. Fine. Voters can admire the gesture and still notice what it does not prove. It does not prove she can pass a budget, hold the line on taxes, or stop a zoning map the district does not want. It does not prove she understands volunteer EMS in Whiteford or farm preservation in Norrisville. “I have no financial stake in this position” is a slogan. Representation is a job.
On schools she repeats the standard line that Harford has “underfunded HCPS for years” and that the county–school relationship must be rebuilt. Every Democrat in this cycle says that. None of them explain how the council writes a bigger check without raising the levy on the same households already carrying assessments. On crime she calls Harford “extremely safe,” which is true relative to the region, then pivots to more funding for addiction, mental health, and homelessness. That is a social-services agenda wearing a public-safety hat.
In 2018 she told The Baltimore Sun she believed a county of Harford’s size “should move to paid professional fire and EMS services.” Volunteer companies are not a hobby in District D. They are the first truck on a farm lane at 2 a.m. Telling those companies the future is paid career staff is a fast way to find out how the district actually works.
Why you should not vote for her
Because she has already lost this race twice by landslides and is running again on party infrastructure, not a new mandate.
Because her political résumé is a Central Committee term and two general-election wipeouts.
Because she lives in Bel Air and is asking a rural district to trust her on land, energy, transit, and growth — the issues where Bel Air instincts and District D instincts most often collide.
Because “no donations / donate the salary” is a branding exercise, not a governing plan.
Because expanded transit, rooftop-solar leadership, and a paid fire-and-EMS future are Annapolis talking points in a district that elects people to keep Annapolis at arm’s length.
District D does not owe anyone a participation trophy for showing up a third time. If you live in that district and want a council member who lives the map, works with his hands in the county, and has already fought inside the Republican primary that actually decides this seat in most years, Jean Salvatore is not that person. She is the name the other party puts on the ballot so the line is not blank. Leave it that way on November 3.
Douglas J. Phillips
Profile
Republican
Committee Name: Douglas Phillips Conservative for Harford
Address: PO Box 573
Churchville, MD 21028-1515
Phone: (443) 791-6215
Email: phillipsforharford@gmail.com
District E does not need another Council member who treats Churchville, Aberdeen, and the east-central towns as a line on a zoning map. It needs someone who lives at the crossroads of the district, raises children there, coaches there, and already knows what happens when roads, schools, and farms absorb someone else’s growth plan.
That is Douglas J. Phillips.
He is the Republican nominee for Harford County Council in District E. In the June 23 primary he defeated incumbent Jessica Boyle-Tsottles, 1,954 votes to 1,605. In November he faces Democrat Hunter Baker. The choice is straightforward. One candidate is a Churchville father, attorney, and business owner whose campaign slogan is three words he has not watered down: put residents first. The other is not that neighbor.
Vote for Douglas Phillips.
The life he built in District E
Phillips grew up in a military family that treated discipline as a household rule, not a campaign talking point. He was born at Walter Reed Army Hospital shortly after his father graduated from West Point. His first steps were at Fort Meade. Early years included Fort Belvoir. That is how you learn that work comes before comfort and that service is something you do, not something you announce.
He earned an economics degree from Princeton and a law degree from Seton Hall University School of Law. He is 43 on Election Day. He has lived in District E for the past decade. He and his wife, a lifelong Marylander, are raising two children in Churchville. District E runs through parts of Bel Air, Aberdeen, and Havre de Grace. Churchville sits in the middle of that map the way it always has. Colonial maps called it Lower Cross Roads because you could not get from one Harford town to another without passing through it. Phillips still lives there.
He is not a career politician. He has never held elected office. What he has done is the private-sector work that actually teaches a person how a county stays solvent. He founded Phillips Law Group, with its main office at 221 Maitland Street in Bel Air. The practice covers business law, estates and trusts, and criminal defense. He has represented thousands of Marylanders and argued cases in nearly every court in the state. He has represented clients in 20 of Maryland’s 24 counties. He is admitted to the Maryland Supreme Court, the U.S. District Court for Maryland, and the United States Supreme Court. He is fluent in Spanish. He has taken cases to trial for clients who needed Spanish, French, Persian, Arabic, Korean, Vietnamese, Nepalese, and Urdu interpretation. That is a working lawyer’s résumé, not a consultant’s.
He has also built several businesses. He represents local and regional companies — industrial firms, medical providers, federal and state contractors — on formation, financing, sales, acquisitions, and the lawsuits and investigations that decide whether a shop stays open. He belongs to the Route 40 Business Association, the Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce, and the Harford County Chamber of Commerce. A Council member who has had to make payroll understands a budget the way a resident understands a grocery bill.
The record that is already public
In 2021, Baltimore high school football player Elijah Gorham died after a medical emergency on the field. Phillips represented the family. He reached a settlement with Baltimore City Schools. He also helped the family turn a private grief into a public rule. In the spring of 2022, Governor Larry Hogan signed the Elijah Gorham Act, which upgraded emergency procedures for schools across Maryland. The Senate passed it 47-0. Under the settlement, Baltimore City Schools hired full-time athletic trainers and put sport-specific emergency plans in place. Phillips still serves as general counsel and sponsor for the 7 Strong Foundation in Elijah’s memory.
That is not a press release about “youth.” That is a lawyer who took a family through a courtroom and then through Annapolis and came back with a statute.
He coaches youth lacrosse and wrestling. He was a high school varsity head lacrosse coach at Patterson High School. He attends Churchville Presbyterian Church and teaches Vacation Bible School. He is a member and corporate sponsor of the Churchville Lions. He volunteers at the Welcome One / Harford House shelter in Belcamp. His firm sponsors Char Hope Foundation, Harford Family House, Churchville rec baseball, and Harford Community College’s 91.1 FM. Those are the habits of a man who already treats District E as home.
Protect Perryman Peninsula recommended him. Former Governor Bob Ehrlich has stood with the campaign. Those endorsements match the platform, not the other way around.
What he will do on the Council
Phillips’s program is local because District E’s problems are local.
He will fight industrial uses on agricultural land and forest. He wants solar farms and data centers handled in the zoning code, in public, with residents in the room — not dropped onto farmland after the fact. He is against data centers in this county. He wants the zoning code overhauled so the next fight is not an ambush. He opposes overdevelopment that crowds schools, packs roads, and overloads water and sewer. Growth, if it comes, should follow infrastructure and community input, not the other way around.
He opposes new taxes. He supports cutting the county property-tax rate. He wants the surplus and the bond rating protected by watching every expenditure, not by treating the surplus as a slush fund. He wants Harford County Public Schools accountable for results and for the money they already receive. He has said he would restructure school funding so increases are tied to specific projects and measurable improvement, not to another blank check. He will vote for Republican school board nominees who share the district’s values and push a system parents can trust.
He supports law enforcement and first responders. He wants more preserved land and parks, not fewer. He opposes bus lines that hitch Harford to Baltimore City or Baltimore County as if our traffic problem were a missing connector to someone else’s congestion. He will resist Annapolis preemption on high-density housing and high-intensity industrial uses. Governor Moore and the General Assembly are not a neighbor in Churchville. They are a threat to local control. Phillips has said so in plain language.
His written promises to the district are equally plain. Show up prepared and speak for District E, not for donors. Talk clearly enough that residents can trust the government again. No new taxes or bonds for insider projects. No industrial conversion of farms and woods. No overdevelopment that breaks the schools and the roads. Work with anyone the voters send, because the voters are the boss.
Why you should vote for him
District E is Aberdeen Proving Ground, Ripken Stadium, Harford Community College, Towson University-Northeast, Churchville’s crossroads, and the neighborhoods that still look like Harford when you drive them at dusk. The person you send to Bel Air will either treat those places as a quality of life worth defending or as leftover capacity on a map.
Douglas Phillips lives here. He chose this district and stayed. He is raising children here. He built a law practice and other businesses here. He already did the hardest kind of public work a private citizen can do — he helped a grieving family change the emergency rules for every school in Maryland. He coaches. He teaches Vacation Bible School. He shows up at the Lions and the shelter. He beat an incumbent in a Republican primary because District E voters wanted a different voice.
You should vote for him because “put residents first” is a governing rule, not a slogan. You should vote for him because a Council that cannot say no to industrial farms, data centers, and Annapolis density will not protect what is left of east-central Harford. You should vote for him because taxes stay low only when someone on the dais treats other people’s money the way a small-business owner treats his own. You should vote for him because the next Master Land Use Plan and the next zoning fight will reward the member who already knows the courts, the code, and the neighborhoods — not the member who discovers them after the plat is approved.
November 3 is not a personality contest. It is a vote on who sits in the seat that decides your roads, your schools, your tax rate, and whether Churchville still feels like Churchville in ten years.
Hunter Baker
Profile
Democratic
Committee Name: Friends of Hunter Baker
Address: PO Box 100
Aberdeen, MD 21001-
Phone: (443) 752-8436
Email: hunterbaker4md@gmail.com
Website: www.hunterbaker.org
Social: www.facebook.com/hunterbaker4md
Hunter Baker wants a seat on the Harford County Council. District E — Aberdeen, Churchville, and the Fountain Green side of Bel Air — is the prize. He is the Democratic nominee. He ran unopposed in June and collected 2,158 primary votes because nobody else in his party filed. In November he faces Republican Douglas J. Phillips, who beat incumbent Jessica Boyle-Tsottles for the GOP nomination.
Baker has never held elected office. He has never run a department, passed a bill, or been responsible for a county budget. What he has is a protest calendar, a party-committee title, and a platform that reads like it was written for Brooklyn and then taped onto Aberdeen.
Do not vote for him.
Who he is
Baker was born at Franklin Square Hospital in Baltimore and spent his earliest years in Aberdeen — Washington Street and James Avenue, George D. Lisby Elementary, tee ball. His family moved him to East Prospect, Pennsylvania, then Perryman, then back into Aberdeen. He graduated Aberdeen High in 2012. He picked up an associate’s degree in history from Harford Community College in 2016, a bachelor’s in history from Towson in 2020, and a master’s in public policy from American Public University in 2026.
He tells his own story of a hard stretch. His mother struggled with addiction. In 2014 the family lost a house after an uncle’s DUI. Baker bounced from couch to couch, lost a job, lost a car, and has said he was homeless for a time. That is a human chapter. It is not a qualification to set rent policy for other people’s property.
He worked restaurants. He became a long-term substitute in Harford County Public Schools — Churchville Elementary, Edgewood High, Riverside Elementary — then an assistant teacher at the Arrow Center for Education in Belcamp, then a special education social studies teacher there. He has said he no longer works for HCPS. He is an associate member of the Harford County Democratic Central Committee. Committee name: Friends of Hunter Baker. Address: a P.O. box in Aberdeen.
That is the whole public résumé. Teacher. Party officer. First-time candidate. No private-sector executive record. No elected record. No legislative record.
The politics he chose
Baker dates his “first real political awakening” to 2016. He looked at people living better than he was and decided the super-rich were the problem. That is not a Harford diagnosis. That is a slogan.
In June 2020 he went to the Black Lives Matter protest in Bel Air and wrote that it felt good to stand up for something. He has since worked the circuit that progressive Democrats treat as a farm team: Hands Off Rally in Bel Air, No Kings protest in October 2025, Progressive Maryland, Young Democrats, the Harford Democratic Club, the NAACP. A few days after No Kings he stood before the County Council to push binding arbitration — the union demand that takes a contract fight out of the elected government’s hands and hands it to an arbitrator.
On Ballotpedia he named his political inspirations without blushing: Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani. Those are not moderate Maryland Democrats. Those are national democratic socialists. Mamdani is the New York socialist whose brand is rent politics, public ownership, and class language. Baker put that name on his own survey. Voters do not have to guess.
Governor Wes Moore endorsed him. He has shared stages and fundraisers with Dan Schwartz, the Democrat trying to flip Maryland’s 1st Congressional District, and with Terrence Rogers, the Democrat running for sheriff on a “real change in how we police our communities” line. Baker’s Instagram used the slogan “turn District 1 and District E blue.” That is the project. Local office is the vehicle.
What he would do to District E
Read his platform the way a landlord, a small builder, or a taxpayer would read it.
He wants rent stabilization — a cap on apartment increases and trailer lot rent, year over year, “to minimize landlord greed.” That is rent control by another name. Cities that tried it got less housing, worse upkeep, and a waiting list. Harford is not New York. Aberdeen is not a laboratory for Mamdani’s housing theory.
He wants publicly owned housing and more county-funded shelter. He wants more low-income units and less “red tape.” He wants it “harder for landlords to screw people over.” He talks about hedge funds and corporations buying homes. Some of that language has a kernel of a real complaint. The remedy he offers is the government as landlord and price-setter.
He wants a blanket ban on data centers and a six-month moratorium while the county “considers the risks.” He has told the Council not to “sell us out to Big Tech.” District E sits on the Route 40 corridor and next to Aberdeen Proving Ground. Jobs, tax base, and power infrastructure are not abstractions there. A first-time councilman whose instinct is a ban is not managing growth. He is performing opposition.
He wants more buses, later hours, weekend service, and “fully funded” schools without “shifting the burden onto working families.” He has said the county has a surplus and a rainy-day fund and should spend them to meet the school system’s request. That is how every activist talks until the surplus is gone and the next assessment notice arrives.
He has no unpopular positions, he told a questionnaire, because his voters already want the schools, the buses, the housing, and the environment. That is a base. It is not a county.
Why you should not vote for him
County Council is not a rally. District E is not a seminar on democratic socialism. The person in that seat votes on zoning, tax rates, the school appropriation, public safety money, and whether Harford remains a place where a working family can own a house and a small landlord can keep one.
Baker’s answer to those questions is more government: own the housing, cap the rent, ban the industry he dislikes, bind the county to union arbitration, spend the reserve, expand transit, and treat landlords as the enemy. He learned that language from Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani, and he has been practicing it at No Kings and on the Central Committee. He is 32 on Election Day. He has never been asked to live with the consequences of a vote he cast.
Call it socialist. Call it democratic socialist. Call it the national left’s junior varsity trying on a county seal. The label is less important than the program. Publicly owned housing and rent caps are not “working-class” policy in a county built on private lots, private employers, and people who got off the couch without a Council vote. They are an ideology looking for a jurisdiction that has not yet said no.
Aberdeen does not need a councilman whose first instinct is a protest and whose second is a price control. Churchville does not need publicly owned housing as a campaign plank. Fountain Green does not need a data-center ban as a personality.
Phillips is the alternative on the Republican line. Baker is the experiment.
Do not vote for the experiment.
Vote no on Hunter Baker for Harford County Council, District E, on November 3.
Glen Glass
Profile
Republican
Committee Name: Friends of Glen (Roy) Glass
Address: 311 Fords Ln
Aberdeen, MD 21001-4201
Phone: (443) 617-9700
Email: glenglassworks@gmail.com
Website: www.glenglassworks.com
Social: www.facebook.com/DelegateGlenGlass
Glen Glass: A Proven Voice Ready to Serve Harford County Again
Harford County voters have a familiar and trusted name on the ballot this cycle: Glen Glass, the Republican candidate running for Harford County Council District F. For anyone looking for a candidate with a genuine record of public service, military discipline, and hands-on constituent work, Glass’s résumé speaks for itself.
A Life Built on Service
Glen Glass was born in Riverdale, Maryland, in 1965. Before he ever entered politics, he served in the United States Army from 1987 to 1989, where he earned three promotions in just fourteen months, qualified as a sharpshooter with the rifle and an expert with the grenade, and received an Army Accomplishment Award before an honorable discharge. That kind of early discipline and drive has stayed with him throughout his career.
After the Army, Glass didn’t stop building his foundation. He earned an associate’s degree in business management from Howard Community College and went on to complete a bachelor’s degree from the University of Baltimore. He spent time as a certified public school teacher in Baltimore City, where he was recognized with a Best Teacher Award at Northeast Middle School, and he later worked as a licensed home improvement contractor and an environmental services specialist. In other words, before he ever asked for a single vote, Glen Glass had already spent years working directly with people, in classrooms, on job sites, and in his community.
A Track Record in Annapolis
Glass represented District 34A, covering Harford and Cecil counties, in the Maryland House of Delegates from 2011 to 2019. During his time in Annapolis, he built a reputation as one of the hardest-working members of the Harford delegation. He introduced more bills than any other Harford County delegate during his tenure, sponsoring or co-sponsoring dozens of pieces of legislation. He earned a Blue Ribbon Award from Maryland Businesses for Responsive Government along with a 100 percent roll call attendance score, and he was recognized as a Patriotic Employer and Supporter by the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Glass didn’t just show up, he delivered. He passed legislation giving tax breaks to small businesses that hire disabled veterans. He worked to expand hunting opportunities for Harford County sportsmen. He led a referendum effort that put three important measures directly in front of Harford County voters, trusting the people rather than politicians to make the call. And he championed a no-cost opt-out option for Smart Meters, standing up for residents who wanted more control over their own homes and privacy.
Why Harford County Should Vote for Glen Glass
Glen Glass has never been a career politician content to sit quietly on the sidelines. His record shows a legislator who worked across the aisle when needed, but who never lost sight of who he was working for: the people of Harford County. He has military discipline, a teacher’s patience, a small business owner’s practicality, and a legislator’s understanding of how to actually get things done in government.
For Harford County Council District F, that combination matters. Local government isn’t about big speeches, it’s about roads, zoning, public safety, responsible spending, and being available when a neighbor calls with a problem. Glen Glass has already shown, over years of service, that he answers that call. He has the experience of having served in Annapolis, the humility of someone who has worked ordinary jobs alongside his neighbors, and the track record to prove he follows through.
If you’re looking for a County Council member who will show up, work hard, and represent Harford County’s interests first, Glen Glass has earned another chance to serve.
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Tamie M. Wainwright
Profile
Democratic
Committee Name: Friends of Tamie Wainwright
Address: 11 Spesutia Rd
Aberdeen, MD 21001-
Phone: (410) 688-8450
Email: tamie.wainwright@gmail.com
Meet Tamie Wainwright: District F's Test Case for Progressive Politics in Harford County
Tamie M. Wainwright is the Democratic nominee for Harford County Council District F, having led Jacob David Bennett in the Democratic primary, and she'll face Republican Glen Glass this November. Before Harford County voters decide, it's worth looking closely at who she is and what she'd bring to the council dais.
Wainwright presents herself as a pragmatic, data-driven candidate. She describes herself as a lifelong Harford County resident, part of a family of educators, the wife of a military veteran, a caregiver for her aging parents, and the mother of three former Harford County School students, one of whom is developmentally disabled. She rose to local prominence through the Perryman neighborhood's fight against warehouse development and truck traffic, and the 3P Protect Perryman Peninsula steering committee has endorsed her as a recommended candidate for 2026.
That biography is designed to sound moderate. But her public record tells a more ideological story. In 2023 testimony before the Harford County Council — under the name "Tammy Wainwright," almost certainly the same person given the matching activism and address details — she framed a routine vocational-school program dispute in the language of systemic racism, telling the council that "for centuries minorities, immigrants and the poor have been forced to sit back and watch mostly male, mostly white, mostly professionals" make decisions, and that "environmental racism" was to blame for outcomes in her community.
That's not a slip of the tongue. That's the vocabulary of Critical Race Theory and DEI orthodoxy applied to a county zoning dispute. It's the instinct to reach for "systemic racism" and "environmental racism" as the explanation for a vocational program's enrollment boundaries — the reflex of someone who has absorbed the woke framework that sorts every local dispute into a story about race and power, rather than into the more boring, more accurate story of budgets, capacity, and bureaucratic inertia that actually governs how county programs get allocated.
Now pair that instinct with her actual platform. Wainwright says the single most important issue facing District F is "how we manage growth," and that she wants to "modernize Harford County's zoning and land use policies" through a "full code and policy audit" and a formal "zoning modernization initiative." Translation: more county bureaucracy, more permitting friction, and — if her council testimony is any guide — a policy framework filtered through an equity lens rather than through what actually works for taxpayers and property owners.
This is the same pattern playing out in county governments and school boards across the country: candidates who sound reasonable on lawn signs but who bring DEI administrative bloat, CRT-inflected policy language, and "critical race studies" framing into decisions about roads, zoning, and schools. Harford County doesn't need another local government office staffed by someone who reaches for the language of systemic racism when the actual problem is a traffic bottleneck or a vocational-program seat count.
And frankly, her party label alone tells you plenty. She is running as a Democrat in a county where the statewide Democratic platform has pushed DEI mandates, curriculum fights over CRT-adjacent content, and "equity audits" into local governance everywhere the party holds power. A vote for Wainwright is a vote to bring that same machinery to Harford County's council chamber.
To be fair to readers: Wainwright's supporters would push back hard on this. They'd point out that her core campaign message is about traffic congestion, warehouse overdevelopment, and protecting Perryman's quality of life — concerns that plenty of conservative homeowners share. They'd argue that one comment at one council meeting about environmental racism doesn't define her whole record, and that her platform, read plainly, is about zoning clarity and infrastructure funding rather than ideology. Voters in District F should weigh that defense themselves before they cast a ballot in November.
