By Adam Pagnucco.
Former County Council Member Hans Riemer is by far the most prominent of five applicants to be the next chair of the planning board. With no one else remotely in his ballpark, the discussion will be whether any of the other applicants even has a chance against him. Do they?
Like a political race featuring an incumbent, the voters will have to decide whether the incumbent is acceptable. In this case, the voters are eleven council members. If they do find Riemer to be acceptable, it’s game over. If they have serious doubts about him, only then will the others get real consideration. That means they will first have to weigh Riemer’s pros and cons.
Pros
Riemer’s first pro is the depth of knowledge and experience he possesses. He is a three-term at-large council member and was once chair of the council’s planning committee. He knows the council and its processes, including its budget process. He worked on numerous master plans. He has introduced and passed land use measures such as zoning text amendments. He knows about housing policy, transportation and economic development. And he has a lot of relationships as well as many supporters.
Riemer is also aligned with a large majority of the council on land use and economic development issues. He was one of the first council members to align with the county’s new-ish smart growth movement which has largely taken over county politics in the last decade. Major policy disagreements with the council are unlikely to be a big factor in his candidacy.
Another positive is that he has a clear agenda. No one has to wonder what he might advocate as planning board chair because he has such a long record. He will be pro-economic growth, pro-housing, pro-transit, pro-pedestrian/bicycle modes and skeptical of big road projects. Some may disagree with those views but his policy predictability will play well among council members who agree with him on these things – and most do.
One thing I have seen is that the selection of a new planning board chair is in part a reaction to the immediate prior chair. Look at the succession of Derick Berlage, Royce Hanson, Francoise Carrier and Casey Anderson – the chairs over the past twenty years. Each of them was VERY different than their predecessors. Riemer and Anderson have similar policy views but different personalities. In this particular circumstance, that works to Riemer’s benefit as the council may not necessarily want a carbon copy of Anderson.
Finally, there is a HUGE stature gap between Riemer and the rest of the field. That may be Riemer’s biggest advantage. Most jobs advertising a $228,000 salary attract much larger applicant fields and there were some bigger names who thought about applying but did not. Perhaps the assumption that Riemer would get the job deterred some applications that might otherwise have come in.
Cons
Let’s start with the obvious: Riemer is a white male facing a council that values diversity. At least one of the other candidates – Artie Harris, a vice president with Montgomery Housing Partnership – is Black. In its nearly century-long history, the Montgomery County Planning Board has had one non-white chair – Arthur Holmes, a Black retired Army Major General who served for just one year from July 2001 through July 2002.
Another issue of concern is Riemer’s recent history of running for office. Planning board chairs have to be aware of politics but can never appear to be too political. If they do, they risk running afoul of the actual politicians. (The same rule applies to MCPS superintendents.) A problematic scenario is for a planning board chair to use the position as a platform to launch a future political campaign. That has happened a couple times – Royce Hanson and Gus Bauman both ran for county executive and lost, though the latter resigned before doing so. Riemer ran for executive a year ago and the council needs to believe that the agency won’t be used as a tool to pursue a political agenda.
The critique I have heard most from insiders who have worked with Riemer does not concern his personality – they generally like him – or issue disagreements, but rather his competence. They bring up his tendency to think out loud on the dais and speak off the cuff. They recall his botched zoning text amendment on solar panels, which he lost control of and ultimately voted against, and the fact that he sat on Thrive 2050 for months while he chaired the council’s planning committee. Who votes against their own bill? As planning board chair, Riemer must not send over messes that the council would have to clean up. In any council’s view, planning boards optimally should send over tidy packages that councils merely have to tweak.
Then there is the residue of the recent Craig Rice experience. Even though Rice dropped out of a newly created political appointment, the accusations of cronyism are still fresh and are being revived with Riemer’s name on the applicant list. Will that matter? There are two key differences between the current situation and the Rice situation. First, the position at hand is not newly created for Riemer. Someone has to serve as planning board chair. Second, the planning board chair was openly advertised and even extended. Rice’s position was never publicly advertised prior to his selection.
Finally, Riemer has relationships that are both bad and consequential. He is perhaps County Executive Marc Elrich’s most bitter enemy, at least in this current generation of politicians. He also has a poor relationship with some of the county’s unions, particularly MCGEO, which led a picket of his house three years ago and has members in Park and Planning. Could Elrich and a portion of labor team up to put together enough council votes to sustain a veto, thereby forcing the council to appoint someone else? Since nine votes are needed to override a veto of a planning board appointment, all Riemer’s enemies need are three votes to block him. Could that happen?
Put all of the above together and it’s easy to see Riemer getting appointed. My sources describe him as having the pole position in the race – the best starting slot without having a lock on victory. His path might be more complicated if bigger names were in the field, but for whatever reason, they decided not to get in. Let’s see what Elrich and labor do, but unless a series of unlikely events play out, Riemer looks like the favorite to be the next planning board chair.
Disclosure: In 2010-14, I was Riemer’s first chief of staff at the county council. In 2021-22, I worked for David Blair, one of Riemer’s opponents in the county executive primary.