Bob Cassilly: A Harford Life of Service

Harford County Executive Bob Cassilly did not arrive in the corner office as a transplant or a career politician looking for the next rung. He was born in Havre de Grace on July 8, 1958, raised in Bel Air and Belcamp, and never left the county that raised him. His family’s roots here run more than two centuries deep. That is not campaign color. It is the through-line of his life.

He grew up working summers on Harford farms, canoeing Deer Creek, playing varsity football at Bel Air High School, and sitting in the orchestra. He married a high school classmate, Deborah Russell of Fallston. They raised five children here. Most of those children—and now a growing number of grandchildren—went through Harford County public schools. Cassilly still attends St. Ignatius in Hickory. He belongs to American Legion Post 39 and Jarrettsville VFW Post 8672. The county is not an abstraction to him. It is home.

Schooling and the making of a soldier-lawyer

After Bel Air High he went to Johns Hopkins University, earned a bachelor’s degree in international relations, wrestled, and completed ROTC as a Distinguished Military Graduate. He then served five years on active duty as an infantry officer with the 7th Infantry Division. He earned the Ranger Tab. He was airborne. He later added Army Reserve service as a Judge Advocate and Civil Affairs officer. In all, more than a dozen years in uniform, active and reserve.

When the country needed people who could operate in a war zone and then help stand up civil government, Cassilly went. He spent three years in Iraq with the 101st and 82nd Airborne and with the State Department—senior governance adviser in Karbala, strategic planner at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. He came home with the Bronze Star and State Department honors: Superior Honor Award, Meritorious Honor Award, Expeditionary Service Award. Those are not résumé lines. They are proof he has already done the hard, unglamorous work of holding a line and then helping people rebuild after the shooting stops.

He earned his law degree with honors from the University of Baltimore School of Law, clerked for Maryland judges, and has practiced in Bel Air since 1988. The Maryland Bar has recognized him repeatedly for legal work on behalf of people who could not otherwise afford it. He is a small-business owner who understands payroll, regulation, and the difference between a real job and a warehouse that pays poorly and generates truck traffic.

What he has actually done

Cassilly’s public service ladder is local and earned: Bel Air Town Commissioner and Mayor, Harford County Council (District C), Maryland State Senate (District 34) where he chaired the Harford Senate Delegation and served as ranking Republican on Judicial Proceedings, then County Executive since December 2022.

The record as executive is concrete. He inherited a $90 million structural deficit. He did not raise tax rates. He has now proposed a fourth consecutive budget that holds the line on tax rates while putting record money into public safety and schools. Harford kept its AAA bond rating. Procurement reforms have saved taxpayers tens of millions. The Sheriff’s Office received significant funding; EMS coverage expanded to 17 units with response times under eight minutes. Starting teacher pay is on track for the state-mandated $60,000. Thousands of acres of farmland have been preserved. Open space and parkland have been added. Mega-warehouse distribution centers that consume land and deliver low-wage jobs were curtailed. Harford became the first county in Maryland to ban data centers.

His stated priorities have not changed: keep taxes low, cut waste, keep families safe, fund schools without writing blank checks, recruit quality manufacturing and skilled jobs instead of the next big box, and protect the rural character and agricultural base that still define much of the county.

Why vote for him

Because results matter more than slogans. Cassilly has already shown he will take politically uncomfortable votes—on spending, on land use, on public safety—rather than follow the path of least resistance. He knows the difference between growth that adds value and growth that loads costs onto existing taxpayers and existing neighborhoods. He has worn the uniform, practiced law for ordinary people, run a small business, and held every level of local office without leaving the county.

Harford does not need a theorist. It needs someone who grew up here, raised his family here, served here and overseas, and has spent four years proving he can keep the books balanced while investing in the things that actually make the county livable: deputies, ambulances, schools, farms, and open land.

That is Bob Cassilly.

Democratic

Address: 701 Beards Hill Rd

Aberdeen, MD 21001-1756

Phone: (410) 272-3831

Email: barbarao.kreamer@gmail.com 

Barbara Osborn Kreamer is the Democratic nominee for Harford County Executive. That sentence should end the conversation.

She is 77. She last held elected office more than three decades ago. Maryland’s Court of Appeals — unanimously — stripped her law license in 2008 after a decade of sanctions for the same pattern: she took people’s money and then failed them. The state’s highest court wrote that she had “engaged in a pattern of conduct over her legal career which threatens the public’s confidence and trust in the legal profession.” That is not opposition research. That is a published opinion.

Harford does not need a county executive the courts already decided could not be trusted with six private clients. It does not need one whose own house on Beards Hill Road has become a neighborhood eyesore. And it does not need another leftover name from the 1980s asking for the largest fiduciary job in the county.

Do not vote for her.

The résumé she wants you to remember

Kreamer was born December 8, 1948, in Aberdeen. She taught English and creative writing at Bel Air High from 1971 to 1976. She became the first woman on the Harford County Council, District E, from 1978 to 1982. She sat in the House of Delegates for District 34 from 1983 to 1991. She later collected terms on the Harford Democratic Central Committee and kept running after the voters stopped saying yes: Congress in 1990, lieutenant governor on an all-woman ticket in 1994, County Council again in 2002 and 2014, Aberdeen mayor in 2009, clerk of the circuit court in 2022.

She won the 2026 Democratic primary for county executive by 170 votes, 7,606 to 7,436, over Matthew Brown. She faces Republican incumbent Bob Cassilly in November.

That is the highlight reel. The rest of the record is why she should not get near the county’s budget, contracts, personnel, or legal exposure.

How she lost the right to practice law

Kreamer did not go to law school first and then enter politics. She served on the Council and in Annapolis, then earned a J.D. from the University of Maryland and was admitted to the Maryland bar on December 18, 1991. She ran a solo civil practice out of her home at 701 Beards Hill Road in Aberdeen.

The discipline started eight years later and never stopped.

February 2, 1999. The Court of Appeals indefinitely suspended her for failing to communicate with clients and Bar Counsel, failing to deposit unearned fees into escrow, and misrepresenting the status of client matters. She was reinstated June 10, 1999, on the condition that another lawyer monitor her for two years.

November 19, 2002. Public reprimand, with her consent, for lack of diligence in a guardianship matter.

June 21, 2005. Indefinite suspension again, with the right to reapply after six months. The case centered on Benchamas Sporay’s divorce. Kreamer took thousands in fees, filed papers, then did almost nothing for a year and a half while the client kept calling. She delayed turning over the file. She delayed refunding unused money. She was late answering Bar Counsel. She told a hearing judge that her 2002 campaign for County Council had pulled her attention off the case. The Court noted that the misconduct was the same conduct she had already been punished for. She never applied for reinstatement.

April 17, 2008. Disbarment. Unanimous.

The petition covered six former clients: Patricia Goodwin, Courtney Anderson, David Ferrara, Gregory Dudok, Michael Boone, and Sarah Caldarelli. Divorce, custody, a company dissolution. Hearing judge Emory A. Plitt Jr. of the Harford County Circuit Court sat through six days of evidence and found violations of the rules on competence, scope of representation, diligence, communication, fees, terminating representation, and misconduct — including dishonesty.

The Court of Appeals accepted those findings. In all six matters, the Court said, she “accepted fees and then failed to represent her clients competently or diligently.” She billed clients separately for “accounting services” — time spent filling out her own timesheets and calculating her own bills, work that is supposed to be overhead, not a line item on someone else’s invoice. She made misrepresentations to clients. Michael Boone hired her for a divorce; she was thirty minutes late to a master’s hearing and then failed to tell him a judge had ordered child support and a wage lien of $3,000 a month.

She told the Daily Record she was “stunned and saddened” and insisted she had communicated with each of those clients. The Court was not stunned. It was finished with her.

This was her fourth formal trip through the Attorney Grievance Commission. The pattern was neglect, silence, sloppy money handling, and then another chance. The last chance ended with the most severe sanction the profession has.

The house she will not keep

The law office was the house. The house is still the house: 701 Beards Hill Road, Aberdeen — a 1926 brick dwelling on eight-tenths of an acre that she has owned since a 1999 intra-family transfer.

Neighbors have lived with that property for years. The complaint is not complicated. She does not take care of it. People who drive Beards Hill and people who live next to it have said the same thing for a long time: deferred maintenance, an overgrown lot, a house that looks like the owner stopped treating it as a responsibility. That is not “character.” 

That is neglect in public view.

A candidate who wants the keys to county government is asking voters to believe she will keep roads, parks, schools, and county buildings in order. The evidence sitting on Beards Hill Road is that she cannot — or will not — keep her own house in order. The people who have to look at it every day have already rendered that verdict. They do not like living next to it. They should not have to live under a county executive who treats her own property the way she treated client files: take possession, then let it sit.

If she will not mow, maintain, and present her own lot, she has no business lecturing anyone about “quality of life” in Harford County.

Why you should not vote for her

County executive is not a ceremonial title. The office signs contracts, proposes the budget, hires and fires department heads, negotiates with Annapolis, and sits at the top of a government that handles other people’s money every day. Diligence is the job. Communication is the job. Competence is the job. Honesty about what has been done and what has not been done is the job. Stewardship of property is the job.

Maryland’s highest court already found that Kreamer failed those duties as a private lawyer — repeatedly, after warnings, after a monitor, after a reprimand, after two suspensions. She took retainers and then left people hanging. She billed them for making out their bills. She did not tell a client about a court-ordered lien on his wages. She blamed a campaign for ignoring a divorce file.

That is not “old news from a different era.” That is a documented habit. The Court said the habit threatened public confidence in an entire profession. Harford is being asked to hand her the largest fiduciary job in the county.

There is also the matter of what she has not been for thirty-five years. She left the House in 1991. The county she would now run is not the county of comparable-worth platforms and 1980s procurement workgroups. It is a county fighting density, school capacity, public safety, and state mandates. Her campaign finance report as of June 7, 2026 showed $446 raised, $351 spent, and $185 on hand. Name recognition from a generation ago is not a governing plan. It is a leftover.

Voters already rejected her for Council in 2002, for Aberdeen mayor in 2009, and for clerk of court in 2022. The clerk’s office is the last place a disbarred lawyer should have been asking to sit. County executive is worse.

A first-woman résumé from 1978 does not erase a 2008 disbarment. Party loyalty does not erase six client files the Court of Appeals read and condemned. A campaign slogan does not mow the lawn on Beards Hill Road. If she could not be trusted to finish a divorce, answer a phone, keep unearned fees in escrow, tell a client the truth about his own case, or keep her own house from becoming a neighborhood complaint, she should not be trusted with a $700-million-class local government.

Do not vote for Barbara Osborn Kreamer.

The Court already told you why. The neighbors already told you the rest.