Sierra Club endorses challenger over veteran Sen. Nancy King in Dist. 39
Group also backs Contreras-Donello in contest for open Dist. 14 House of Delegates seat
By
Louis PeckApril 21, 2026 5:39 p.m.
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Make a ContributionThe Maryland Sierra Club has endorsed engineer and entrepreneur Amar Mukunda of Germantown in his bid to deny renomination to District 39 Sen. Nancy King—the senior member of the Montgomery County Senate delegation—in the June 23 Democratic primary.
In its latest round of endorsements, announced Monday, the Sierra Club also said it is backing Alicia Contreras-Donello of Cloverly, a former official of the U.S. Agency for International Development, for the open House of Delegates seat in District 14. Contreras-Donello is vying in the Democratic primary with Matt Post of Olney, a former student member of the county Board of Education, to fill the seat of retiring Del. Pamela Queen.
The Sierra Club endorsement in District 39 is the culmination of long-running differences between King—currently the Maryland Senate majority leader–and the environmental organization over transportation policy. Four years ago, the Sierra Club declined to endorse King, but stopped short of endorsing her primary challenger at the time, Adam Cunningham.
King is part of a nine-member Senate delegation representing portions of Montgomery County in Annapolis. All of the incumbent senators are seeking re-election this year; the Sierra Club had previously endorsed the county’s other eight incumbent senators.
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In a press release, the Sierra Club’s Maryland chapter said it “strongly supports” the 33-year-old Mukunda, who is making his first run for elected office.
“Mukunda’s solution to traffic congestion on I-270 is to urge dramatic investments in public transportation such as Metro and rail. He also champions creation of clean energy opportunity zones to accelerate decarbonization and create a new base of local employment,” the release said, without mentioning King.
According to sources, the Sierra Club interviewed both Mukunda and another primary challenger to King — Destiny Drake West of Germantown, a former federal employee and founder of a policy institute.
In a phone interview Tuesday, King said: “The Sierra Club doesn’t endorse me because, in my part of the state and my part of the county, we need roads. I’m not against transit but we need more of a mixture than they’re talking about. They only want buses and bicycles, and my constituents want roads.”
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“…My people are tired of sitting in traffic on I-270,” added King, 76, who is seeking re-election to a fifth full term from an Upcounty district that includes Germantown and Montgomery Village along with portions of Clarksburg and Gaithersburg.
King has been a proponent of a public-private partnership (P3)—first proposed by then-Gov. Larry Hogan (R) nearly a decade ago—to widen the Capital Beltway and I-270 via construction of toll lanes. The Sierra Club has been vehemently opposed to the project, and has gone to court in an effort to block it.
Hogan’s successor, Gov. Wes Moore (D), came into office disavowing the P3 strategy for rebuilding the American Legion Bridge and widening the Beltway and I-270. But Moore earlier this year reopened the door to that approach after a meeting with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy.
Additional differences on transportation policy between King and the Sierra Club surfaced during the recently concluded 2026 session of the General Assembly—when the organization again pushed for what has been a top legislative priority, the Transportation and Climate Alignment Act.
The bill “would require the state to offset pollution from highway expansion projects by investing in public transit, walking, and biking projects,” the Sierra Club said in a recent memo to its members. This year, the measure failed to reach the Senate floor after passing the House of Delegates and the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee—where King, a former chair of that panel, voted against it.
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“People that I talk to who understand the situation in our part of the state said that if that bill passed, it would pretty much end any kind of road projects for us in the foreseeable future–and I just wasn’t willing to go along with that,” King said when asked about her vote.
While another leading environmental group in Maryland, the League of Conservation Voters, has yet to weigh in with its choice in the District 39 Senate primary, King has picked up the influential endorsement of the local teachers union, the Montgomery County Education Association. King is a former county Board of Education member first elected to the House of Delegates in 2002 before moving to the Senate in 2007.
Reports filed in January with the State Board of Elections showed her with a 3-1 advantage in her campaign treasury: She reported nearly $225,000 on hand, as compared to about $75,000 for Mukunda.
King, a Montgomery Village resident, is also at the head of a District 39 slate of candidates that includes two incumbent delegates, Lesley Lopez of Germantown and Greg Wims of Gaithersburg, as well as Gaithersburg City Councilmember Robert Wu. Wims is seeking his first full term after being appointed to fill a vacancy in 2023.
The slate was formed in an effort to oust the district’s other incumbent delegate, Gabriel Acevero of Montgomery Village. There have been continuing philosophical and personal tensions between Acevero—first elected in 2018—and the rest of the District 39 delegation.
The Sierra Club previously endorsed Acevero for re-election this year, in part due to his sponsorship of climate change legislation backed by the group. According to knowledgeable sources, the organization is not expected to make further District 39 endorsements for the seats now occupied by Lopez and Wims—at least until after the primary.
In the open seat contest in District 14 – which encompasses northern and eastern portions of the county—the Sierra Club received questionnaires and interviewed both Contreras-Donello and Post. Of the two candidates, sources described Contreras-Donello as displaying the greater knowledge of and enthusiasm for environmental issues.
Post entered the contest several months before Contreras-Donello, and, in January, reported a campaign treasury of $160,000—a hefty haul for a non-incumbent state legislative candidate. A month later, Post was added to the slate formed by the District 14 incumbents seeking re-election: Sen. Craig Zucker of Brookeville and Dels. Anne Kaiser of Brookeville and Bernice Mireku-North of Fairland.
Zucker, Kaiser and Mireku-North were previously endorsed by the Sierra Club for re-election this year.
Louis Peck, a contributing editor for Bethesda Magazine, can be reached at lou.peck@bethesdamagazine.com.
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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine