‘I’m best for this moment’: Q&A with county executive candidate Will Jawando

Third of Bethesda Today’s interviews with the three top Democratic contenders

May 29, 2026 6:00 a.m. | Updated: May 28, 2026 6:12 p.m.

At-large Montgomery County Councilmember Will Jawando is seeking the Democratic nomination for county executive in the June 23 primary election. Credit: Jacqueline Kalil

Editor’s note: Bethesda Today government and politics reporter Ceoli Jacoby and contributing editor Louis Peck recently sat down with the three leading candidates for the Democratic nomination for Montgomery County executive to discuss their views on major issues and their visions for the county. This week, Bethesda Today is running each candidate’s interview in Q&A format, in alphabetical order of the candidates’ names. (Each Q&A has been edited for length and organization.) For more information on the candidates, check out our 2026 Primary Election Voters’ Guide.

Wednesday: Andrew Friedson

Thursday: Evan Glass

Will Jawando

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Age: 43 (born Jan. 2, 1983, Montgomery County)

Home: Ashton, married, four children

Education: Catholic University of America, B.A. (sociology), 2004; Columbus School of Law, Catholic University of America, J.D., 2007

Professional background: director of Congressional Relations, Democratic Party National Convention, 2012; director, Corporate and Government Affairs, Discovery Communications, 2012 to 2013; of counsel, The Raben Group, 2013 to 2015; founder, Our Voices Matter, Maryland, 2014; co-founder, African Immigrant Caucus; founding director, Summer R.I.S.E., 2017

What differentiates you most from your opponents? What do you believe makes you the most qualified in the current field of candidates to be the next county executive?

I often tell people, primaries are about choices. They’re very rarely about good and evil. You choose who’s the best for this moment, and I think there’s a few reasons why I’m best for this moment. I’ve experienced the full diversity of Montgomery County. I grew up low-income in the Long Branch area in an apartment that was poorly maintained. So when I work on things like rent stabilization or troubled properties, I used to live in a troubled property.

Now, I moved up New Hampshire Avenue. I live in Ashton with my four children, my wife of 20 years and my in-laws, and so we’ve got a big intergenerational, crunch generation house. My dad immigrated to this county from Nigeria in 1970 fleeing civil war — that’s a big part of who we are. I’m bi-racial, my mom’s white and my dad’s black. Both [my mother and step-father] are small business owners in the county.

I just think I bring a unique set of experiences to this role at a unique time in history when a lot of things are under attack.

What do you see as the biggest policy issue or political challenge facing Montgomery County? If elected county executive, what steps would you take to address it?

The ability to access what I call the Montgomery County promise — a great school in every neighborhood, a job that pays a living wage, an affordable home that’s maintained, and to be able to retire with dignity. All those things are in question here right now.

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We have to make it more affordable for people to thrive here. And I think those are things like investing in actually affordable housing, as opposed to subsidizing luxury housing. Helping small businesses get off the ground and making it easier for them to start and grow. Making sure seniors can stay in their home.

I think that’s the challenge of our time — can Montgomery County be a place where everyone, no matter where you come from or who you are, has an opportunity to move up the economic ladder?

You’ve spoken during the campaign about subsidizing affordable housing, not luxury housing. What exactly are you talking about when you say that?

I’ll give you two very different examples. I was at a groundbreaking for a 100% affordable property in North Bethesda that’s 268 units. They’re going to be affordable to people between 30% and 80% of [area median income]. It’s in a great area with access to great schools, great amenities, the Metro is right there. The county put like $37 million into it. That’s a great investment of our money to subsidize that.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the [Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority] pilot where we are subsidizing apartments at Grosvenor that are going for [$10,000, $11,000, $12,000 or $13,000] amonth. They’re not paying property tax in that building for 20 years, and they have no more than the minimum requirement of affordability that everyone has. So I think that’s a bad deal.

Then there’s obviously stuff in the middle, where it’s more 50-50, which I think are also good deals. I’ve supported the Housing Production Fund, where we give the [Housing Opportunities Commission] $100 million in bond capacity, they leverage it on the private market and they produce units — some affordable, some market. That’s also a good investment, because we only need 5% return to replenish that fund.

There are units around here that are open and available because people can’t afford them. The question is not just a supply and demand issue, it’s the supply of the right level of affordability.

Affordability gets us to the tax issue. What is your response to those who argue now is not the time, given what’s happened with the Trump administration, to impose additional taxes on Montgomery County residents?

I totally get it. If affordability is the issue, raising taxes on people in a regressive way — which is what the property tax is in Montgomery County right now, unfortunately — is not a good idea.

That being said, one of my top priorities as county executive would be to move us out of this regressive tax system we have. I think you have to talk about that, because people need to see a vision of where you want to go with this. It’s easy to say “I’m against tax increases.” No one likes tax increases, but how are we going to do the things we need to do to produce the quality of life that people want? And growing the economy certainly is a part of that, but that takes time. You have to have fair taxes and a growing economy. You have to do both things.

I think we have to change the property tax system to be more like Virginia and Washington, D.C., where commercial properties pay more than residential. We have a flat system, so the Marriott down the street pays the same property tax as your home. That’s just not right. We talk about data centers — one of the reasons we need to slow down on that is because right now a data center would pay the same property tax as your single-family home, which is insane. I was at a debate, and not even the Republicans agree with that.

Speaking of progressive taxation — Maryland passed a law in 2021 allowing local jurisdictions to implement different brackets for different income levels. Is that something that you would be open to implementing if elected county executive?

In 2019, when I first got on the council, I did a press conference with Del. Julie Palakovich-Carr (D-Dist. 17) and we talked about a set of twin bills. One would have allowed for differentiation between commercial and between large mansions and [other] residential.

The other bill was this progressive income tax that would have allowed [counties] to go up to 3.7% and then create brackets.

The problem is, it wasn’t until last year that we got the authority to go from 3.2% to 3.3%. We were already maxed out. The only way we would be able to use it in 2021 is lowering tax rates for the lower end, and that would have lost us revenue.

(Editor’s note: After this interview, the County Council voted to adopt a progressive income tax structure for fiscal year 2027 and make up for lost revenue by eliminating a property tax credit for county homeowners. Jawando, along with fellow county executive candidates Andrew Friedson and Evan Glass, voted against the proposal. Jawando and Glass still voted for the overall operating budget plan).

Next year, when the state will have to raise taxes with the deficit that they’re facing, I’m going to push really hard that they give us the authority to have a progressive income tax and a progressive property tax. That’swhat [Palakovich Carr’s] initial bill would do. If we went to 3.7% on millionaires — this was a couple years ago — it would produce like $80 million a year. We need that next year in Annapolis.

Wanting more local authority over taxes is something that current County Executive Marc Elrich has repeatedly talked about, but his efforts on that front have not been fruitful. Do you think you’d have a better chance of swaying the legislators in Annapolis on this issue if elected?

Absolutely. Timing is everything. Next year, the state is going to be in a horrible fiscal situation, and they’re going to be looking to transfer costs. It’s going to be hard for them to justify doing that without giving the locals tools to deal with it.

I don’t think [Elrich] has been effective in his communication style with legislators, even with how much he goes up there. We’re just different people in that regard.

There’s really no new ideas in the world. Someone’s usually said it before. But how you do it, when you do it, the relationships you build leading up to it — all that matters.

Elrich in 2018 campaigned heavily on reorganizing and downsizing the current government bureaucracy, but there’s been little progress in this area. Do you feel that’s a goal worth pursuing?

Yes, I do. We have to do it, for a couple of reasons. One, the unions are willing to engage in the conversation. Two, with the rise in [artificial intelligence] and other forms of technology that are changing the working landscape right now, it’s happening in the private sector and we need to be a part of that transition.

And, we have a third of our workforce eligible for retirement. All these things lead towards — through attrition and not firing anybody — rightsizing government over time. There’s this issue of middle management, having too much of a buffer between direct supervisors and line employees, so I do think there’s a lot of progress to be made here.

We’re about a 10,000-person government now. Can we get down 500 [or] 1,000 positions over the course of four years? I think so. That will be real savings. And not just savings, I think we can also pair it with utilizing technology in a better way to achieve efficiencies.

One half of what Montgomery County spends is on schools. Do the council and the executive need to take a more active role in overseeing and scrutinizing that half of the budget?

I will say we have taken a more active role. When I started eight years ago, and I was on the Education and Culture Committee, I was frankly shocked with how little role we played in pushing back and asking questions with the school system. That has totally changed. Not just because I’m the [committee] chair, but I think that has something to do with it.

Now we have a line-by-line clickable budget. You can get to every sub item. That didn’t exist, you know, it just started 2 years ago. We pushed for that. We’ve also put more money into the inspector general, which I know one of my colleagues will talk about, but we all did that.

So I think we’re heading in the right direction. There’s always more oversight when you have that big of an item. But one thing I know with schools — having four kids that have attended public schools here and having attended myself — you’re not going to do more with less. The answer is increased investment and increased accountability. It’s both and not either or.

There seems to be a misperception among the public about how much of that budget is fixed costs, and how much discretion you really have.

They just hear it, and it’s a big number. But when you think about all the things — 211 schools, 155,000 students, the amount of transportation and food. Special education is our fastest growing group, you know? And then we have 70,000 kids in poverty.

MCPS recently approved a six-year, $2.7 billion capital improvements program. Superintendent Thomas Taylor has said the district’s capital needs are actually closer to $5 billion. Going forward, how can the county avoid such a large backlog of maintenance and facilities upgrades? Are there ways to cut that $5 billion price tag down to a manageable amount?

It’s a shared failure from previous county councils, previous school boards, previous superintendents going back 25 years. I will give Dr. Taylor credit — his budget reflected what people are seeing on the ground. I’vebeen in more than half of our schools. I’ve seen the poor conditions. We let it get to a point where we can’t kick it down on the road anymore. It took us a long time to get into the mess, it’s gonna take us a long time to get out.

How do we do it? We start making investments. It’s one of the reasons I proposed increasing our spending affordability guidelines. Some colleagues have argued that we can’t increase because they’re worried about the bond rating. That’s good debt, and it’s one of the ways we’re gonna solve the problem.

Public-private partnerships, we have to look into those, and the school system is. Prince George’s County was able to build 10 schools in half the time by partnering. That gives you a lot of capital right away, and that allows you to accelerate not only the building of schools, but also the rehab of schools. There’s trade-offs with that. You gotta make sure it’s a good deal. But because we’re in such a backlog, we’re going to have to accelerate it.

We need a 20-year time horizon. Right now, it feels so overwhelming. I think you have to set that vision and then be honest with the public. You want your schools to be in good condition? This is what it’s going to require to do it. I think if you do all those things, we can start making progress year over year.

You mentioned affordable housing earlier. What are your plans for increasing the amount of workforce housing we have, so that people who work in the county can live here?

Our program for workforce housing is broken. First-year teachers, first-year police officers, they don’t use the program because it doesn’t actually meet their level of affordability. It’s nice to say you’re investing in it, but it’snot even really being used.

The Housing Production Fund is something we need to dramatically expand because it’s a market-based way that minimizes the speculation that drives up prices. That’s something that there’s agreement on in this race.

I supported the Nonprofit Preservation Fund. That’s when you take an older building that’s not under any kind of [income] restriction, and you get partnered with a nonprofit so that they can put it under restriction. We have to put money into that.

You are the only councilmember in this race who did not support the University Boulevard Corridor Plan last year. That measure was presented as something that would increase workforce housing. Could you explain why you decided not to support that measure?

The reason I didn’t support [the University Boulevard Corridor Plan] is not because I don’t think duplexes, triplexes and small apartments aren’t part of the solution. Zoning changes like that can be a part of the solution and are.

The University Boulevard Corridor is the corridor that has the highest homeownership for Black and Latino residents in this county — almost 50%. And these are modest homes that are affordable.

What the majority did in this plan is going to displace renters and potentially low-income homeowners that are there. You’re going to incentivize the redevelopment of those homes where people are accessing homeownership that typically haven’t had it.

Moving on to rent stabilization, you were in the forefront of the push to enact it. One recent report by the county Planning Department suggested the law has had an adverse effect on housing construction in the county. As county executive, are there changes you would seek in the current law?

Our bill is overly generous. I’ve had developers even admit to me privately that the math is not the problem.

If you think about what you can do, you can charge rent for 23 years, any amount. You can raise it 3% plus inflation, capped at 6%. You can bank your [rent increase]. If you only raise rent by 2% one year and could have raised it by six, you can take the other four and add it to the next year. If you have a renovation, you can apply for an exception. There’s a lot of compromise that went into this bill, so the idea that we roll it back — absolutely not.

I meet with families regularly that are being evicted or displaced because of a $50 to $75 rent increase. I talked to a mom who was living with her 12-year-old son, and she [moved] from a two-bedroom to a one-bedroom in the same apartment complex because of a $75 increase, and people are making those decisions. So you have to weigh this against that. And what are we weighing against? Developer profit, which I just explained, is not inhibited by this in any way. It’s a perception issue.

I will concede that in the short term, there has been a kind of a capital strike. Like, “we don’t like it, so we’re not going to move forward with projects.” We’ve seen that start to rebound. I just think any attempts to roll it back are short-sighted, and just based on a speculative, greedy system and not protecting folks who need protection.

One of your opponents has said the average year-over-year rent increase since rent stabilization passed has not really changed much. What’s your take on that argument against rent stabilization?

I don’t think that’s accurate. If you look at the report that the [Department of Housing and Community Affairs] put out on stabilization, and if you just look generally in the market, rents are coming down.

Because our bill was overly generous, you could argue our stabilization is just guarding against the worst actors. The average rent increase over 30 years was 2.5%, and now you can go up to 5% or 6%. I proposed a hard cap at 3%, but it was a compromise to go to 3% plus inflation.

The other thing I’ll say is we’ve improved habitability. We had a 70% reduction in properties on the troubled properties list in one year, because we tied your ability to raise rent to being on that troubled properties list. Troubled properties are when there’s roaches, rodents, mice, really bad situations.

We hadn’t seen any properties move off that list in 15 years. Because they wanted to raise rent, they brought in all these crews and they fixed a bunch of stuff. And they improved the quality of existing housing. So that’s another thing with the bill that has been really positive.

We have to be about investing in the root cause of problems. And that doesn’t mean we don’t invest in police. We absolutely need an appropriate level of response. I’ve been there for a $20,000 bonus for police officers, property tax credits so they can buy homes here, all that stuff.

But we do need to invest in the things … on the front end, whether that’s early childhood education, the recreation department, wraparound services. It’s why I pushed for therapeutic recreational services and schools. This is why I worked on mental health in the schools. I think every school needs a school psychologist. Every kid should have a place to go after school.

If you look at who’s arrested, who’s incarcerated, it’s disproportionately falling on kids of color, particularly young black children. So that’s not working. You look at the horrible school shooting that just happened at [Thomas S. Wootton High School] — it was two young black men, one who was getting bullied by the other. That’s a failure of us not getting to that interpersonal conflict. We just don’t have enough of that going on.

Obviously, when we need our kids to be safe — I have kids in the schools — you gotta have a good response. Police are a part of that, but they are mostly a response entity. You have to have a good balance in that preventative work and response.

Realizing you say it’s not an either-or kind of thing, can we expect the first Jawando budget if you’re elected to propose some reduction in funds for the police?

I don’t see it as a reduction. I want to maintain our support. I don’t need less police officers. I’m not in support of reducing our police size, but I don’t think we need to dramatically increase it either. And I think we can fill the spots we have.

One of the things I think that will help police a lot is, not only do we need the right people in the jobs who have the right background training, experience and cultural competency, but we also need the right mission. And the mission right now is too broad. They’re doing everything from getting a cat up a tree, to dealing with someone peeing on the side of a building, to a violent murder. There are some places in this country, and I will work to do this, that divert up to 40% of their 911 calls to non-police response.

The police themselves, they don’t want to be dealing with the person experiencing homelessness. They don’t want to have that responsibility. They’re not trained. It’s not their job. And that’s really a societal failure. And that’s not necessarily a shift of resources, it’s a shift of responsibilities. I’m looking to change their workload so that they can focus on the more urgent things.

You and [former County Councilmember] Hans Reimer were at the forefront of the push to replace the school resource officers (SROs) with community engagement officers (CEOs). Given episodes like what happened at Wootton, any second thoughts?

I think it’s important to understand what really happened. The CEO program and the SRO program really aren’t that different. The police — and I’m in our schools all the time — they’re there every day. They are in the buildings, they’re walking around. The thing that’s different is that the [memorandum of understanding] says that you should not be involved in discipline. You shouldn’t be patrolling, you shouldn’t be escalating situations.

But they are not stationed at one building. You used to have an officer assigned to each high school.

Well, they are still assigned to each high school and cluster. But even before it was a cluster, there were still only 25 of them and they were responsible. If something happened at a middle school in their cluster, they left the high school and went there.

That aside, one officer in a building of 2,000 or 3,000 is not going to prevent these types of things in and of itself. And I do think it’s important for our police to have a role. One of the things I’ve said is we need to minimize the disciplinary engagement. They’re law enforcement officers. They’re there to enforce the law.

Programmatic things, like having them teach [a] class, basketball, engaging with kids, relationships — that’s all great. But what we really need is trusted adults and fully staffed buildings where every kid feels they have somewhere to go.

You are endorsed by Marc Elrich. If you had to give him a letter grade for his performance in office over his eight years, what grade would you give him?

I’ll say this, I’m glad to have his support. Because we’re in the addition business here, not subtraction, I’m very honored to have the support of the executives from the two largest counties in the state, County Executive Aisha Braveboy [in Prince George’s County] and Marc Elrich. I agree with Marc on some things, I disagree on others.

Can you give some examples?

Sure. I think he doesn’t believe zoning has any role to play in housing — I introduced the zoning text amendment More Housing for More People, which was a zoning change, and I still think that was a good approach with the caveats that we talked about earlier.

That’s one big one.

One thing we do share is that we need to rebalance. Homeowners and residents have been asked to foot the bill for too much of what the services are here. That’s out of balance. I do agree with that.

Look, dealing with Trump 1, COVID, and Trump 2, it’s tough for any county executive. Were there things to do differently? Absolutely. That’s why I’m running for the job. But he’s running for office. I’ll let the voters decide if they want him back on the council. (Editor’s note: Elrich cannot seek re-election due to term limits and is instead seeking the Democratic nomination for one of four council at-large seats).

I will say, I do think — around areas of communication with the council and with the public, management and executive leadership — those are areas for growth.

Fair enough. There have been seven county executives since the present form of charter government took effect in 1970. You would be the eighth. Do you see any of them as a role model?

I think I’m kind of naturally connected to Ike Leggett in the sense that he was the first African American to serve in anything. He’s the first at-large African American. I’m the second at-large African American. I’d be the second African American county executive. So there’s obviously a connection there. We’re both lawyers. He’s a mentor.

But I knew Doug Duncan a little bit. And one thing I appreciate about him was that — whether you agreed with everything he did — he had a vision for what he wanted to see and was enthusiastic about it. I do think that Montgomery County is at a moment where it needs a clear vision, and I plan to achieve that vision and go forward. So I’ll give you those two.

Unlike your two leading rivals for the Democratic nomination — all three of you were elected at the same time — you’ve never served as council president. Are you concerned that never having held the role might hinder or impede your working relationship with your former colleagues and moving legislation forward?

I’m not concerned about it at all. And I’ll give a couple reasons why.

The first bill that I introduced on the council was the Law Enforcement Trust and Transparency Act. It required independent investigations any time the police killed a resident, and it passed unanimously. Rent stabilization — very contentious, passed with a supermajority. If you look at my record, what I’ve done on the council, they’ve either been unanimous or supermajority votes, and they’ve been on big issues that aren’t easy.

I was vice president. And the vice president is basically the president-in-waiting. The only reason I’m not president [right now] is because they didn’t want to give me the extra lift in running for county executive.

And you agreed?

Yeah, I did. I said I won’t even go for it. Because even though it was a double standard — you know, [former Councilmember] Tom Hucker was president when he ran for executive, Roger Berliner was president when he ran for executive — no big deal. I think they’re just worried that I’m going to win.

But I got elected vice president, which is really the harder vote, because that’s the one that puts you in line. And if I would have not run for executive, I would be the president right now.

You have, at different times, participated in the county’s public campaign finance system and also used traditional financing. What prompted the shift, and why did you decide to leave the public financing system in 2022 and then return to it this year?

I’m a big proponent of public financing. I think all elections should be publicly financed from the president on down. That’s why I was proud to use it in 2018 and raise the most money out of anyone and max out the system with small donations. It has all the right incentives. It makes a room of 20 people much more powerful than, or at least close to being on equal footing with a $6,000 developer check, for example.

I didn’t use it in [2022] because there was a possibility that I was going to run for a state office.

And you wanted to be able to roll the funds into that?

Yeah, I think we should have state public financing. But anything that you would have raised in the public system, you would have had to give back and start over, which would have put me at a disadvantage. I ended up running for re-election, so that didn’t happen.

This year, it was very clear. I’m running for county executive, so I got back into the system. I prefer this. I would like to use public financing in every election, but if you run for a state office, the systems don’t talk to each other.

What was that state office?

Well, there were some people that were trying to encourage me to run for attorney general, and then I was actually formally being vetted for lieutenant governor. I would have been hurting my potential governor [candidate] if I didn’t have any money to roll over.

You’ve also run for U.S. House and Senate. If the right opportunity arose between now and 2034, which would be the end of your second term if elected, would you consider leaving the county executive’s office in pursuit of a spot on Capitol Hill?

Look, I want to help the most amount of people. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do, whether it’s my 15 years working in government as a staff member, or my last eight as an elected [official], or any race I run for, it’s been all the same thing — to represent this community that I love, and to help people here do well.

So my intention is to serve two terms as county executive, and just like any other job I’ve ever had, we’ll see what happens after that.

I don’t need to be elected. Like, I want to just help people. There’s other ways to help people. So, I think elected office is a powerful way. We need good people at the federal, state, and local [levels]. And I think I have a good skill set. I’ve been successful up until this point. But you just have to do a good job where you’re at, and then the next thing takes care of itself.

Given your connections to Barack Obama — it’s obviously one of the chapters in your book, My Seven Black Fathers — have you asked him to endorse your campaign?

Wait and see, how about that? He knows I’m running, I still stay in touch with him. He has typically not involved himself in a lot of Democratic primaries. But you never know. We’re in unique times.

Louis Peck, a contributing editor for Bethesda Magazine, can be reached at lou.peck@bethesdamagazine.com.   

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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine