The First Job
“Let’s get it DONE.” That is the slogan John Carroll has offered Kent County in his campaign for commissioner. Sam Shoge launched on schools, housing, and growth. Thad Bench wants a more diversified economy, more housing, and a board expanded from three members to five. Done, across these tellings, is activity. A farm county is entitled to the next question: done to what, and done to whose land?
All three seats on the Kent County Board of County Commissioners are on the November 3 ballot. Every voter may mark three names. The people elected will levy the tax, borrow for schools, set water and sewer rates, and decide where houses, solar arrays, and commercial buildings are permitted to go. That is the whole job. Everything else is commentary.
The Republican incumbents — Ron Fithian, Albert Nickerson, and John Price — have treated the first job as containment. Grow where the pipes already are. Keep the working landscape working. Do not spend the county into a corner. The Democratic nominees have treated the first job as production. Both sides will tell you they love farms. Only one side has made the farm the starting point.
Fithian, the commission president, is the longest-serving of the three. In this year’s candidate questionnaires, he did not offer a branding exercise. He offered a map. Finish the senior housing in Millington. Finish the wastewater plant outside Millington. Use the Route 301 corridor so Kent can take the growth it needs “while at the same time protect the heart of our farming community.” He has been blunt about state-approved solar on agricultural land. He called it a slap in the face to the people who have tried to protect that land. In September he voted against placing the new middle school in Chestertown and argued for Worton. A voter may disagree with that vote. No voter can say he hid his vision of the county.
Nickerson is a first-term commissioner and at least a sixth-generation Eastern Shore name. He talks like a man who has stood in a field. Preserve open space. Support agriculture, watermen, tourism, and small business — do not replace them. Keep the board at three members. Keep industrial solar off productive ground, because a state override of local zoning is not “economic development.” It is the confiscation of a land-use decision the county thought it still possessed. He went to Annapolis and testified for a larger state share of a new middle school, rather than leave Kent with the bill. On September 15 he voted yes to build the new middle school in Chestertown, as proposed. He did it with a warning attached: Maryland is a hard state in which to run a business and pay taxes, and the state had better remain a partner.
Price, the former sheriff, is the one who will talk about the money. At the Republicans of Kent forum in May he said the county is in strong financial condition “because we are conservatives and do not waste.” In that forum and in his answers to the Kent County News questionnaire this spring, he argued for smart growth. Housing for seniors and young families, he said, belongs in the places already designated for it. He wants a staff job inside Economic Development whose only assignment is to walk new businesses through planning, zoning, and permitting. And he wants farmland reserved for farming. Agritourism, yes. Large solar on agricultural land, no.
This board is not a stained-glass window, and I will not pretend it is. It raised the local income-tax rate from 3.20 percent to the 3.30 percent cap, effective in 2026. The state had raised that cap. It did not order the increase. Part of the new money was set aside for the middle school, and the Blueprint will require the county to spend more on schools over the next decade. The rate itself was this board’s decision. The fiscal 2027 budget kept the real property-tax rate at $1.022 and raised water and sewer charges. Two incumbents voted to advance a school project whose total cost has been discussed in the tens of millions, with a local share they argued would stay under $30 million. If the test is “never spend,” they fail it. If the test is “will they treat a farm county as a farm county,” they still pass it more clearly than the people running to replace them.
Look at the other slate in its own words. Shoge is a Chestertown development consultant and a former director of the Chamber. He launched on four pillars: invest in schools, build more housing, grow the economy, and support the most vulnerable. He says preservation and growth are not opposites. That sentence is doing a great deal of work. He wants the middle school built as planned. He wants infill, site readiness, water and sewer, broadband. He has proposed an agriculture specialist inside Economic Development, which is a sensible idea and also an admission that the center of gravity in his campaign is development, with the farm attached as a staff position.
Carroll, the former mayor of Galena, is selling speed. His site tells voters Kent has been “Can’t County,” and that he is tired of kicking the can. The can, in his telling, is education infrastructure and affordable housing. In the League of Women Voters questionnaire he supported expanding the commission from three members to five. That is not a footnote. A five-seat board is two extra votes on every rezoning and every tax. Kent kept a three-member board for a reason. Three votes can be watched. A larger board is easier to manage than to answer for.
Bench, a first-time candidate, wants a wider economy: people who work from home, medical and biotech firms, farm-related business, and the arts. He also wants more affordable housing. He says he would do this without a tax increase. He has supported five commissioners and staggered terms. On the middle school he wanted the new building in Worton, beside the high school, and the old Campus Avenue school in Chestertown put to another use. The Democratic slate is not of one mind about the school they celebrated together in September. What they share is the pace. More activity, sooner.
People will say agriculture is no longer “the economy.” In the narrow sense they are right. Education, retail, and health care employ more residents than the fields do. That is the wrong census. Kent still has about 141,662 acres of farmland and 396 farms. Tourism, much of it rural and waterfront, reached $74.3 million in 2024. Land is the county’s endowment. Commissioners are the trustees. A board that campaigns first on housing supply will be the board that votes on the map. Sewer lines follow maps. Assessments follow sewer lines. Solar developers follow weak zoning. A candidate does not have to say he is against farmers. He only has to put housing ahead of the farm. Three votes drawn from a slate whose first sentence is housing is a majority with a purpose. The politics are not mysterious. Democratic and Republican registration in Kent is close, with a large unaffiliated bloc. Presidential margins here are measured in hundreds of votes. A three-seat, at-large board can turn over completely when one side stays home. That is the only turnout arithmetic that matters.
Re-elect Fithian, Nickerson, and Price. Then argue with them in public for four more years. That is cheaper than discovering, after the fact, that the first job changed — and that “get it DONE” meant the map.
Tatiana Croissette, Former Chair, Kent County GOP
5 Responses
I want to thank Tatiana Croissette for providing a helpful overview of our six candidates for Kent County Commissioner and for clarifying some of her key points:
1) Ms. Croissette has artfully ignored the fact that while Mr. Fithian and other Republicans have largely controlled the Kent County Commission since the year 2000, during most of that time, Kent County’s Real Economic Growth Rate has consistently been one of the worst in Maryland. Consequently, our Tax Base, the source of funds for providing county services and maintaining county schools, also lags behind.
2) While Commissioner Nickerson has rightly pointed out that “Maryland is a hard state in which to run a business and pay taxes,” he neglects to mention that under Republican leadership, Kent County has consistently imposed some of Maryland’s highest county property taxes on all of our municipalities — the very areas designated by Kent County as priority growth areas and the areas where young families and new businesses are most attracted. In fact, the Kent County property tax in our municipalities is currently 52% higher than the property tax in nearby Centreville.
3) While Ms. Croisette looks to Price, Nickerson, and Fithian as the saviors of our farms, it is precisely those gentlemen who place the heaviest tax burdens on those towns, thus encouraging investors and home builders to bypass the towns and encroach on the very farmland they claim to protect.
David Foster
Thank you for the letter. Three clarifications.
The growth claim is larger than the record. Kent’s real GDP barely moved in 2024, up 0.09 percent. That is a weak year. It is not “consistently one of the worst in Maryland.” On GDP per person, Kent ranked 15th of 24 counties. The assessable base rose 6.4 percent in the latest state tables, in line with the statewide 6.7 percent. A county that does not convert farmland into subdivisions will post smaller total growth. That is the choice, not a hidden failure.
The 52 percent figure belongs to a different comparison. Kent’s county rate is $1.022 per $100, inside towns and outside them. Queen Anne’s charges Centreville $0.670, a discount off its own $0.800 county rate. Kent at $1.022 is about 52 percent above that discounted Centreville rate. A letter in this paper in June had a different pair: Centreville 46 percent lower, Easton 52 percent less. Kent is also one of the few counties that does not reduce its rate inside town limits. That is a fair argument about a setoff. It is not a tax the commissioners levy on towns and spare the fields. The county rate is the same in both places. Town rates are set by the towns. A builder who skips a town skips the town tax.
I did not call anyone a savior. I said the incumbents start from the farm, and I said they spent. A missing municipal discount does not show they are steering houses onto farmland. Houses go where the zoning lets them go.
Thank you, Ms. Croissette. We agree on some points and differ on others.
You are right that I paraphrased, and you did not use the word “saviors” to describe our current Commissioners. You are also right that one year of data proves little. However, from 2001–2024, data from Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and based on Bureau of Economic Analysis figures, show Kent’s real GDP growing about 0.4 percent per year, compared with about 1.9 percent for Maryland as a whole. Kent’s average GDP growth rate is the second-lowest in Maryland, and output today remains below our 2010 level.
This is critical for our tax base. Rising values of existing homes have not made Kent wealthy. The State now treats Kent as it does poorer counties, paying 80 percent of the cost of our new middle school instead of 50 percent. A county whose output has barely grown in 23 years cannot count on rising assessments alone and may need to increase tax rates if we cannot improve our real rate of growth.
On taxes, your arithmetic matches mine. Kent County’s property tax rate on our municipalities is about 52% above Queen Anne’s effective rate for Centreville and 48% above Talbot’s rate for Easton. You are also right that Kent is one of the few counties that give municipalities no property tax set-off. Only two others, Wicomico and Worcester, have not adopted a policy that Maryland began requiring of nine counties in the mid-1980s and that nearly every other county has since adopted, most recently Queen Anne’s about ten years ago. Even their municipalities pay substantially lower county taxes than Kent’s. Of Maryland’s 160 municipalities, only 10 pay a higher county tax rate than Kent’s five. That is my point. The Commissioners set the county rate, and they decided whether to offer a set-off. A home in town pays the county rate plus the town rate, while a home on a field pays the county rate alone. As you wrote, “a builder who skips a town skips the town tax.”
That is the incentive. Your letter describes the incumbents’ approach as “Grow where the pipes already are,” and says housing for seniors and young families “belongs in the places already designated for it.” I agree, because those are the places that already have the water, sewer, roads, and broadband. Yet our current county tax policy imposes an additional cost on every municipal resident or business, whether they own or rent, because virtually every landlord will pass the tax cost on to their tenants. I don’t claim this decides where every house goes, because zoning matters. But tax rates shape where investors want to build, and farmland and taxpayers pay the price.
Recent growth in some of our municipalities does not refute this pattern. It indicates where young families want to live and points to a larger tax base ahead if only we would stop penalizing growth where infrastructure already exists.
David Foster
Thank you. We now agree that I did not call anyone a savior, and that the 52 percent is Kent’s $1.022 against Centreville’s discounted county rate.
The school sentence does not hold. The state share is 80 percent of eligible construction costs, not 80 percent of the school. On the school system’s own May figures, the project is about $69.8 million. The state pays about $38.6 million. Kent pays about $31.2 million, because the extra square footage and the soft costs are on the county. That is closer to a 55/45 split than to a poor-county rescue. The higher eligible share was lobbied for. It is also lower than it might have been: the current middle school failed a state maintenance inspection in 2025.
On the set-off, you are right. Kent, Wicomico, and Worcester are the three counties with towns that grant none. A home in town pays the county rate plus the town rate. A home on a field pays the county rate alone. That is a real cost, and the commissioners could choose a discount. It is not a tax aimed at farmland. The county rate is the same in both places. The town rate is set by the town. Zoning still decides where the house is allowed to go.
Slow total growth in a county of 396 farms and a stable population is not a secret. It is what containment looks like on a chart. Rising assessments are not the same thing as wealth. Neither is a subdivision on a field.
Interesting insight into the local politics, very good article.