Lone woman in the Baltimore County executive race wants to be residents’ ‘Mama Bear’

Kimberley Stansbury seems comfortable in front of the microphone.

At a meeting in Lutherville earlier this year, the 61-year-old community advocate began as she often does: telling the crowd of her devotion to her husband, a military veteran; to her children; to her grandchildren; and to her county.

Crime is out of control, she said. Schools are not improving. People are leaving. Who better to lead the way to a better future than a longtime PTA member who taught citizenship to Boy Scouts?

In her campaign literature, Stansbury said she is a “Mama Bear” who will “fight for your family.” She stresses her family ties and background as the wife and daughter of veterans born and raised in the county.

Her priorities include supporting school choice, encouraging business growth, fully funding the Police Department to adequately respond to community concerns, and increasing transparency and accountability in county government. She also favors county law enforcement cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — a view she shares with her Republican primary opponent, Pat Dyer.

She repeated these points at a campaign forum at Goucher College that was sponsored by the Baltimore County chapter of the League of Conservation Voters. Stansbury said she attends community events every week to lay out her vision.

“This is where I get most of my ideas, where I interact with the public, where people can see me and I can understand what they want in their communities,” she said at the Goucher forum. “I can only make you one promise, and that is that I will listen to you. I’m not so set in my ways that I can’t take what you tell me and try to make it work for everyone.”

Stansbury has been doing a lot of listening.

She ran for the Republican nomination for county executive in 2022 and came in a distant second to former Del. Pat McDonough. Johnny Olszewski Jr. went on to soundly beat McDonough and win a second term.

County registrations favor Democrats by about 2-to-1 and the county has never elected a woman executive. The first woman in the job since the county adopted the executive form of government in 1956, Kathy Klausmeier, was appointed in January after Olszewski was elected to Congress in November 2025.

Those odds never deterred Stansbury, who told her father when she was 14 that she would run for office someday. College, motherhood, work — she manages a physical therapy practice — and breast cancer all got in the way of those plans.

In 2022, her husband, William Benton Stansbury III, told her that now was the time. Unsure of where she might fit best, her husband told her to go big or go home. So she ran for county executive. He died of complications of Agent Orange exposure several weeks after the 2022 primary.

When she returned to the attic to take inventory of her signs and decide whether or not to file again, she found her husband had left her a note: “for your next run.”

What she’s concluded through two campaigns and many community meetings is that county residents need fewer tax increases and fees, more police officers, and more ways for parents to weigh in on their children’s education.

Increasingly, Stansbury’s also spoken out about Gov. Wes Moore’s desire to create more housing, which would put Baltimore County on track to welcome thousands of new residents. The county has been losing population, recent census figures show, in part because of rising costs of living and a decline in immigrant residents amid the Trump administration’s nationwide crackdown.

Some politicians — including Democrat Nick Stewart — are running on a pro-housing platform and advocating for less council control over growth in their districts.

Stansbury is not. She chastised Annapolis politicians for making laws that impact the county instead of letting county residents decide.

“When we give up that power in local government, we’re never going to get that back,” Stansbury said.

Stansbury radiates positivity and loathes sparring with other candidates on the debate stage. But she said she was troubled when Stewart referred to the Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance that Councilman Izzy Patoka championed as “a racist housing ban in Baltimore County.”

“We have to make sure that we are taking into consideration our roads, our schools. We’re talking about numbers, having enough resources,” she said. “These are not racist things. These are issues and problems that we cannot ignore.”

Stansbury raised her family in Towson and sent her two children to public schools, but she’s disappointed with the system now. She said the children “deserve better” than the current low reading and math proficiency rates.

Like other candidates, Stansbury groused about the fact that the school system’s budget is close to half of the roughly $5 billion county budget, but that it’s not accountable to the council. She supports expanding the county inspector general’s role to oversee the school system, though enabling legislation did not pass in Annapolis this term.

Dyer, who works in finance, has raised $24,900 as of January. Almost all came from individual donations.

To her, government should be about people it serves.

After her husband died, Stansbury said she needed some paperwork from the courthouse, but workers there put her call on hold. It took days, she said, to get a document that should have taken 15 minutes.

She said she doesn’t want anyone else to go through that.

“We need to make sure that government is accountable to the people,” she said, “because sometimes, in the worst time in their lives, they rely on their government to see them through.”

Correction: A photo caption on this story has been updated to correct the spelling of Stansbury's first name.