What Bowie’s new Mayor Michael Estève wants

Michael Estève may be considered on the younger side for Maryland mayors. But he’s no newcomer to politics.

The lifelong Bowie resident has been involved in local government since high school. He began serving on city committees when he was still in college.

Estève had already been reelected to the Bowie City Council twice when Mayor Tim Adams stepped down to join the Prince George’s County Council in January.

More than 6,600 people cast their votes for Estève, despite it being an off-year special election in April. That was about double what Estève’s team expected.

When the polls closed, Estève came away from a crowded field with more than half of the votes, cruising to a major electoral victory.

We sat down with the newly installed mayor to talk about his vision for Bowie.

What do you see as your mandate as mayor?

Estéve: In just about every local government on the face of the Earth right now, people basically have the same complaints, which is they’re concerned about public safety. In Bowie, that’s mostly right now speeding on residential streets. That’s probably been a top issue for a couple of years now. The city is slowly expanding programs to address day-to-day speeding, trying to improve pedestrian safety a bit more. So that’s definitely something we’re already taking a stab at. We expanded our speed camera locations just this week. We’re going to continue to expand on our existing contracts to come up with more clever, forward-looking ways to address residential speeding.

There are a lot of concerns about business quality. A lot of residents, especially newer folks to the city, they’re buying, in some cases, $900,000 homes, moving in, and then discovering that the typical restaurant offering near them is a fast food place or a gas station. So you have a lot of folks that are feeling frustrated that what they’re paying for their homes, what they’re paying in property taxes, isn’t consistent with the types of businesses they’re seeing. So, really just trying to find ways for the city to assert itself more to try and get some better businesses in the area.

On that note, what can Bowie do to regulate the business space? Or is that mostly done on the county level?

So, Bowie doesn’t control zoning or land use. In states like Maryland, it’s counties that control the major decisions that impact what can go where. And it’s the county that controls the permitting, which ultimately really sets the tone and the culture for the kinds of business you’re going to get. So, for Bowie, a lot of it is just constant advocacy: getting on the phone with CEOs, getting on the phone with those retailers and those restaurateurs that we want to see more of, and very often, it’s going to involve incentives.

When we talked to folks who owned any number of businesses in the region, they’ll often tell us: “In Prince George’s County, it’s very hard for us to tell how long it’s going to take to open up our doors.” In other jurisdictions — Anne Arundel, Calvert, Charles — it might take six weeks to pull a permit, depending on what you’re trying to do. In Prince George’s, that same process can take months or years. There’s an unpredictability to the permitting length. And when you’re trying to raise a couple million dollars to open a brick-and-mortar place, and you can’t tell your investors or your bank how long it’s going to be before you can start getting customers. And on top of that, most businesses don’t even generate a profit in the first year. That’s a killer.

We’re just losing tons of opportunities to other jurisdictions that make this easier. And so because Bowie doesn’t control the rules or the process that businesses ultimately have to go through, for us it really just comes down to essentially paying an additional tax in the form of having to pony up incentives to try and get places to be interested in coming here, and in some cases, trying to convince people to stay here.

What else do you hope to accomplish? How do you see Bowie’s future shaping up?

I’m serving with a really wonderful and talented City Council — four of us at one point were running for the mayor’s job — and so really, my job these next few months and going forward is to make sure that we’re bringing the City Council together, that we’re harnessing the legislative talent that we have on the body, that we’re exploring ideas, we’re trying things, and we’re just maintaining a forward-thinking, collegial, step-by-step forward.

We’re all pretty united on what the issues are and how we want to address them, but we’re operating at a time where everything is going to get harder. ... I tend to call it like it is, and the reality is that federal, state, county level, and even at the local level, budget situations are just going to get harder and harder.

Dealing with AI, dealing with changes in the global economy, things are going to get incrementally more expensive, and services aren’t necessarily always going to improve, even as things get expensive for reasons that are often going to be out of our control.

So my big thing is, just making sure that we have a city that’s connecting people, making people feel heard and engaged, ensuring people understand what the city is doing and why we’re doing it. Just because we have hard times ahead doesn’t mean that it has to be acrimonious.