Along with selecting who they want in office, Montgomery County, Maryland, voters will get to decide how long their county executive should serve. Question A on the November ballot proposes limiting the county executive to only two terms.
Currently, Montgomery County executives are limited to three terms.
Reardon Sullivan, a Republican and chairman of the Committee for Better Government, pushed to get Question A on the ballot.
The measure, if passed, would apply to County Executive Marc Elrich, who plans on running for a third term and opposes the move.
Sullivan, who ran for county executive in 2022, said 62% of those who signed the petition to get the issue on the ballot were Democrats: “So it’s definitely not a Republican initiative.”
Instead, Sullivan told WTOP, “At some point we have to say, ‘look, we need fresh blood, fresh ideas,’ and again, the executive branch of most government agencies is two terms, or eight years.”
Sullivan said a two-term limit should be seen as “basic good governance.”
“I’d say the modality is not to have term limits in many of these kinds of offices, but we’ve seen these types of issues pop up a lot in recent times,” added UMBC associate professor of political science Ian Anson.
And in regions where term limits are proposed and approved, Anson said, “you end up getting replications in other places.”
Former County Executive Doug Duncan, a Democrat who served three terms, disagrees with the two-term limit proposal.
“I always thought three terms was the better solution. It gives you enough time to finish projects you started, it gives you time to lay a course and make sure things happen,” Duncan said.
When Duncan was in office, from 1994 to 2006, there were no term limits for the office of the county executive.
Duncan noted that county council members can serve three consecutive terms: “It’s particularly not fair for the (executive) to have a limit of two terms and the council to have a limit of three terms. They need to be the same.”
Sullivan responded, saying, “For right now, we’ll just settle with the county executive. And again, with the same logic, that the executive branch is the branch that’s typically limited to two terms and right now, the council is term-limited to three terms.”
Former County Executive Ike Leggett, who also served three terms from 2006 to 2018, is actively opposing the initiative. Leggett and a slew of elected Democrats, including Sen. Chris Van Hollen and Rep. Jamie Raskin, lent their names to “Against Question A,” urging voters to vote against it.
The language of the ballot explains it would amend the county charter to decrease the term limit for the county executive from the current three consecutive terms to two consecutive terms. Voters are asked to vote for or against the measure.
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