During a meet-and-greet at Poolesville Memorial United Methodist Church, Evan Glass got his loudest applause of the night with a plan he acknowledged was decidedly unsexy.

“Day one, I’ll hire a director of permitting services,” the county executive candidate said.

Doing so, he added, is a step toward easing the regulatory burdens that can stifle small businesses in Montgomery County.

The only problem? At least one of his fiercest competitors is making a similar pledge.

In a race where the June primary all but guarantees the outcome, Glass is facing off against two of his Democratic colleagues on the County Council: at-large member Will Jawando and District 1’s Andrew Friedson. It’s going to be a tough political battle, fought in the blue margins.

To ascend to the county’s top elected post, Glass is branding himself as the progressive candidate who knows how to make progress. He’s leaning on his legislative record of pushing for equitable pay, safer streets and a cleaner environment.

In a race like this one, though, it’s difficult break through with a unifying message.

“It can be hard to win these races as the nice guy who holds issue positions that are perfectly acceptable,” said David Lublin, a political science professor at American University and former mayor of the Town of Chevy Chase.

In hopes of energizing voters, Glass is criss-crossing the county. The March event at Poolesville’s church was his 89th meet-and-greet. Shortly before, he’d mailed 1,500 postcards to thank the local donors who are helping fuel his campaign, which qualifies for public financing and rejects corporate money.

Glass has a history of turning out supporters. During the 2022 race for one of four at-large council seats, Glass scored the largest number of votes, with about 8,100 more than Jawando.

It’s hard to say if that support will translate in the executive race, where voters have to pick just one person they trust to lead Maryland’s largest county.

“Andrew and Will are seen as opposed to each other on sort of progressive versus business, even if objects in the mirror may appear farther apart than they actually are,” Lublin said.

Glass, meanwhile, “may well be the most widely acceptable candidate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you get the most votes. He has both a higher ceiling and a lower floor.”

To illustrate why he’s different from Jawando and Friedson, Glass points to the 2023 fight over raising county taxes.

At the time, County Executive Marc Elrich proposed a budget reliant on a 10% property tax increase.

Glass, then the council president, voted to approve the budget after compromises and negotiations brought the increase down to 4.7%.

Both Friedson and Jawando voted against that increase.

Inside that Poolesville church, Glass framed their decisions as indicative of the kinds of leaders they’d be.

“Three of my colleagues voted against the tax increase because it was not high enough,” Glass said, lumping Jawando into that group. “One of my colleagues voted against the tax increase, Andrew Friedson, saying we didn’t need a tax increase.

“The problem with that is he supported every labor contract,” Glass added. “He supported every spending initiative, but when time came to pay for it, he didn’t want to pay for it. That’s not leadership either.”

Fast forward to this year, and Glass said he won’t support the outgoing county executive’s most recent proposed tax increase, especially as thousands of families reel from federal job losses.

“We need a strong social safety net, and sometimes it does require revenue, but not year after year,” he said. “Those are the tough decisions that a leader needs to make.”

He knows that his opposition to the proposed tax hikes will come with hard choices in the coming weeks, especially regarding funding for the public school system, which accounts for nearly half of the county budget.

Glass plans to demand more transparency from district leaders on what’s requested.

“It is premature for me to respond to the school budget, because we have not even had one committee session on it yet,” he said. “I have to do my due diligence.”

What shaped Evan Glass?

After Glass was first elected in 2018, his chief of staff filled out the reams of paperwork required of new government employees.

Glass was shocked when she listed her salary history on one of the forms.

“When you base future pay on past pay, you’re perpetuating the wage gap,” he said.

So Glass introduced the Montgomery County Pay Equity Act, prohibiting this practice in local government. The most recent analysis from the Office of Human Resources determined that there’s virtually no pay gap between male and female county employees.

For Glass, the motivation behind that first piece of legislation was personal. He watched his mom, a single mother, work two jobs to afford their life in Long Island. Throughout elementary school, he was home late by himself, microwaving Chef Boyardee.

“If my mom only got paid fairly in her first job, maybe she wouldn’t have worked two jobs,” he said.

His 12 years as a CNN journalist shaped his approach, too. He’s known as a good listener, someone who will lock eyes with constituents when they’re criticizing him.

He’s also a digger who latches on to issues of transparency.

He wrote an op-ed in May 2023, saying Montgomery County Public Schools leaders needed to be more transparent in how they spend money, given that almost half the county’s budget flows to the district.

The day after it was published, school board members hit back with a rebuttal, in which they defended their budgeting process and questioned Glass’ motivations.

“We find it curious that an excellent school system with a highly diverse, all-female Board of Education (with the exception of the student member), duly elected by the residents of Montgomery County, led by the first appointed African American female superintendent, now somehow needs greater oversight and accountability for the management of its budget, spending and operations,” they wrote.

As he runs for county executive, Glass has doubled down.

“I will simply not rubber stamp the budget that the school board sends over,” he said.

Pushing for Pride

Glass’ office phone rang and rang. On the other end of the line were people furious with the county’s first openly gay councilman because of a Pride flag raised above the local government building in Rockville.

“The most vitriolic nastiness,” Glass recalled.

Staff sent the hate-filled messages straight to voicemail. Days later, the ringing finally quieted.

“We regrouped and started planning for Pride for the next year and the year after and the year after and the year after,” Glass said.

Glass said he’s dealt with homophobia and even threats because of his sexual orientation. He and his husband decided to install a Ring camera outside their Silver Spring home.

While he was council president, the county launched its Anti-Hate Task Force, which, among other things, led to the creation of a portal for residents to report incidents of hate and bias.

For LGBTQIA+ residents, Glass’s willingness to take on these issues feels meaningful.

Sarah Paksima, a Poolesville commissioner, said Glass is an inspiration for young people in need of queer role models. She pointed to a group of local teenagers who campaigned for their town to put up a rainbow flag of its own.

“And they cited, as one of the inspirations, the Pride flag that goes up in Rockville,” Paksima said.

Local fights

Glass stood at the podium in front of the Bethesda-based National Institutes of Health. During the latest round of No Kings protests, the council member promised to fight against ICE and defend science.

“When I say ‘no kings,’ you say ‘just vaccines,’” he shouted to the crowd.

Glass said a top priority is protecting what makes Montgomery County special, like its life sciences corridor.

His most prominent endorsement comes from the Sierra Club, an environmental organization.

“If the federal government is abandoning environmental regulation,” Glass said, “we have to pick up the mantle and fight for it here locally.”

Glass is aligned with his fellow council members on wanting to stand up to the Trump administration. But while he positions himself as a consensus builder, his colleagues recently delivered a stinging public loss.

Last month, he tried to create another task force, this time to study the risks and benefits of data centers. He said it was necessary to understand how these centers could impact the county’s climate goals.

A council committee rejected his plan.

Those who voted against it said it was redundant to efforts that other members, as well as state leaders, had already launched.

“I will not vote for this task force because we don’t need it,” Council President Natali Fani-González said.

“We’re already doing the work,” District 2 council member Marilyn Balcombe added.

Glass ended the meeting disappointed and frustrated.

Working for people

Glass knows not everyone in Montgomery County is a fan of those now-ubiquitous “No Turn on Red” signs.

He knows some people really don’t like new bike lanes.

But Glass’ response is simple: He doesn’t like hundreds of people getting hit each year on county roads. He doesn’t like his phone ringing with the news that a teenager was killed while crossing the street.

That’s why he worked on the Safe Streets Act, launching new traffic control measures countywide.

He also championed expanding the “Kids Ride Free” bus program, which led to an increase in youth ridership. Glass then advocated to eliminate fares for everyone who takes the county’s Ride On buses.

“There’s a guy in New York who wants to make buses free for everybody,” Glass said in reference to Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “I actually got it done here.”

Asked what he’s most proud of in office, though, Glass pointed to constituent services. Those kinds of personal interactions could help motivate voters to show up at the polls during an election without a high-profile federal race on the ballot.

Beth Rogers recalled when a county construction project inadvertently dumped huge mounds of dirt into her Bannockburn neighborhood’s community garden.

Rogers said she pestered county officials for months — including Friedson, who represents Bethesda — to seek assistance with rebuilding the garden. She said she didn’t hear back.

After she brought the issue to Glass, his office helped secure money so the neighborhood civic association could pay for replanting.

“Local government,” Glass said, “is supposed to work for people.”