By Adam Pagnucco.
Other than the county executive race, the hottest race in MoCo might just be for sheriff. First-term incumbent Maxwell Uy faces challenger Will Milam, a Poolesville resident and former Chief Assistant Sheriff in Prince George’s County. Races against incumbents are normally tough, but Milam has the backing of MCGEO – the union representing employees of the sheriff’s office – and former County Executive Ike Leggett. MCGEO, headed by its fearsome President Gino Renne, is determined to take Uy out.
Uy and Gino have sharply competing narratives about what is happening in the sheriff’s office. Gino says the office has “a leadership crisis,” a “toxic culture,” and plummeting morale. The union claims, “The Sheriff’s Office is struggling to fulfill essential public safety duties, including courthouse security, prisoner transport, and domestic violence response.” As evidence, Gino points to an overwhelming vote of no confidence by office employees.
Uy says that turnover in the office has been driven by “normal regular retirements” and that other law enforcement agencies have faced staffing shortages. He told Bethesda Today that he has “modified and eliminated shifts in certain areas, [and] reassigned personnel to ensure that critical functions are fully staffed,” but that “there is no basis to any allegation that the [office] has not met (or is not meeting) its statutory mandates.” He told the Banner that the vote of no confidence was contrived “to create an environment more advantageous to my opponent.”
What makes it hard to evaluate these competing allegations is that they refer to management and staffing issues. The conventional tools we use for issue analysis – examining legislation and associated impact statements; budget data; economic data; reports from agencies like MCPS and the Planning Department and so on – don’t apply here. Deprived of those resources, how do we measure issues relating to staffing and management?
The answer is to have in-depth reporting by county government analysts. Consider the police department. The county council has an excellent analyst who reports on police staffing trends – the great Susan Farag – whom I have quoted over and over and over again. Thanks to Farag, we know a significant amount about turnover, recruitment and vacancies in that department. And when the county council’s Public Safety Committee holds briefings based on her work, police department leadership attends and comments – in public. Such meetings occasionally get covered in local media and then residents get to read about them.
We don’t have that level of information on the sheriff’s office. The most recent data on its staffing came from this council packet from last year’s budget process. Here is what it said.
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In March 2025, the Public Safety Committee conducted a briefing on the recommendations of the State Task Force to Ensure the Safety of Judicial Facilities. Sheriff Uy participated in the discussion alongside members of the circuit court judiciary and building security staff from the District Court. The discussion included acknowledgment of the ongoing staffing challenges faced by the Sheriff’s Office.
Staffing. Like other law enforcement agencies, MCSO [Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office] faces challenges in recruiting sworn staff. The Sheriff’s Office has taken a number of steps address these challenges, including:
- Seeking to reclassify certain vacant sworn positions as non-sworn roles. This would facilitate filling these roles and also lead to financial savings relative to employing sworn staff in these positions.
- In FY25, securing a $31,000 State Police Recruitment and Retention grant to facilitate presence at recruitment events and distribution of promotional items.
- Recruiting new sworn staff, with the incoming recruit class expected to partially address the department’s staffing challenges.
Overtime. As staffing challenges have continued, MCSO has continued to rely on overtime to address crucial operational needs. In FY25, the Council approved an increase in the overtime budget. In FY25, overtime needs have continued to increase, with the result that projected additional unbudgeted overtime costs are comparable to FY24 even after taking into account the approved budget increase. The department has implemented internal shift changes and reorganization to partially address overtime costs, and notes that the aforementioned personnel reclassification would also decrease overtime costs in future years.
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This is useful but inadequate. Uy could accurately point out that both the police department and fire department use overtime to cover for staff shortages. We don’t know if this data is unusual, particularly compared with other sheriff’s offices in Maryland. We also don’t have a historical tabulation of vacancy and recruitment trends as we do with the police department. How do we know whether these things or getting better or worse?
Unlike police chiefs, Maryland’s constitution mandates that every county elects a sheriff. Whether he’s right or wrong, Gino is using the upcoming election to effectively put the office’s management issues on the ballot. But this is not just about politics. The sheriff’s office handles important public safety functions related to domestic violence, courthouse security, service of summons and warrants, transporting inmates, responding to 911 calls and handling evictions. The public safety dimension makes the condition of the sheriff’s office a bit more urgent than many other issues that typically arise in MoCo elections. And without impartial analysis, the above competing narratives will be consigned to politics.
That’s not good enough.
The county council’s Public Safety Committee, comprised of Chair Sidney Katz, Dawn Luedtke and Kristin Mink, should hold a briefing on staffing in the sheriff’s office. They should give the council analysts a lengthy amount of time to gather the data they need. The format should be identical to what they already do with the police department. They should invite Sheriff Uy to comment. There should be no discussion of politics or elections. Just tell the public, with the cameras rolling, the documents printed and the press watching, exactly what’s going on in that office. That way, we can get closer to the truth.
If they don’t do that, the issues will get buried in negative mailers, he-said/he-said, social media and press coverage in which both sides are quoted but no determinations are made. We can do better. It’s up to Council Members Katz, Luedtke and Mink to act.