By SHARON O’MALLEY

Three candidates are running for the District 1 Prince George’s County Council seat left open by four-term Councilmember Tom Dernoga, including Dernoga’s chief of staff and a former Laurel City Councilmember who was convicted of misdemeanor assault in 2014.

Primary Election Day is June 23.

District 1 covers North College Park, Laurel and Beltsville.

Dernoga, a Laurel resident and Democrat who served from 2002 to 2010 and again from 2018 to 2026, is unable to run for re-election this year because of term limits on councilmembers.

Candidate Martin Mitchell, a political and public affairs consultant, was a city councilmember for one term from 2021 to 2023 and ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2023. About a decade earlier, while he was a student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, he was charged with a sex offense and assault. In 2014, he entered an Alford plea to misdemeanor second-degree assault—in which a defendant does not admit guilt but acknowledges the prosecution has sufficient evidence to convict. As part of the plea agreement, prosecutors dropped the more serious sex offense charges.

In a 2023 interview with The Laurel Independent, Mitchell said he had not committed the crime.

Mitchell also pleaded guilty in April 2013 to driving while impaired and acknowledged to The Laurel Independent that he had smoked marijuana before police pulled him over for a traffic violation. And when he ran for mayor of Laurel in 2023, the city’s Board of Elections Supervisors fined him $1,000 and forced him to remove election signs after claiming he had not yet been approved as a candidate and ordered him to stop campaigning.

He said the order was politically motivated.

Mitchell has two opponents for the District 1 seat.

Michelle García has worked as Dernoga’s chief of staff since 2018, overseeing the day-to-day activities of his office and coordinating legislative initiatives and constituent services. Before that, she served as chief of staff to Joseline Peña-Melnyk when she was a District 21 state delegate. Peña-Melnyk became speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates in December 2025.

The Beltsville resident campaigned for Attorney General Anthony Brown when he ran for governor and for U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin when he sought re-election. She also served as a community liaison for state Sen. Jim Rosapepe (District 21) and was the first executive director of the Maryland Legislative Latino Caucus. In addition, Garcia was elected twice to the Prince George’s County Democratic Central Committee and served from 2018 to 2025.

García is enrolled in the county’s public campaign financing program and has pledged to accept no money from lobbyists or special interests.

The third District 1 candidate, Laurel resident Darwin Romero, has not published any biographical information on his website. His social media pages indicate he once lived in Silver Spring and ran for the Montgomery County Board of Education in 2020 and for Montgomery County Council in 2018. He did not win either of those elections.

While Dernoga serves north College Park, the rest of the city is part of the county’s District 3, where Eric Olson, the vice chair of the county council, is running for re-election with no opposition.

Olson, a long-time resident of College Park, served on the College Park City Council from 1997-2006.

Olson’s district includes much of College Park, and Greenbelt, Berwyn Heights, New Carrollton, Bladensburg and Edmonston.

Olson was elected to the county council in 2006 and served eight years, and then won his seat again in 2022. County rules do not allow councilmembers to serve more than two consecutive terms. Between those terms, he was the executive director of the College Park City-University Partnership, a community development corporation focused on homeownership, walkability, local business and public spaces.

In his time on the council, Olson helped secure more than $450 million in smart growth redevelopment and advanced the Purple Line. He passed the Walkable Urban Streets Act to reshape road design in the county’s most urban areas and made the county bus system fare-free, increased funding for bus shelters and advanced forest conservation.

In other county council elections, College Park resident Laura Gilchrest is running for one of two at-large council seats.

Gilchrest’s campaign website does not offer any biographical information; her LinkedIn profile describes her as a “researcher, writer, methodologist and critical medical anthropologist” who has been a contract lecturer at The George Washington University and the University of Maryland.

Gilchrest is one in a field of eight candidates vying for two at-large council seats.

Incumbent Jolene Ivey, a long-time county councilmember and former council chair, is running for re-election to her seat, which she won in a special election in November 2024 to fill a vacancy left by Mel Franklin, who pleaded guilty to a felony theft scheme involving campaign funds. Ivey was a Democratic state delegate from 2007 to 2015.

The other incumbent is Wala Blegay, who was appointed in December 2025 to replace Calvin Hawkins, who resigned to take a job in the county administration. She is not running for election to the council because she is a candidate for the 5th Congressional District seat being vacated by long-term Rep. Steny Hoyer, who is retiring.

Among the at-large candidates:

Sean A. Floyd of Suitland founded Nomadic Solutions, a political and project management consulting firm. He is a former chief of staff for the senior adviser to Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, overseeing agency operations.

Sydney Harrison lives in Cheltenham and has represented District 9 in southern Prince George’s County as a councilmember since 2018. Because term limits prohibit members from serving more than two consecutive terms in their districts, Harrison is running for an at-large seat in the upcoming election. Before taking office, he served as clerk of the county’s Circuit Court for four years.

Jeana Jacobs, who lives in Upper Marlboro, is a former chair of the county Board of Education and has more than 30 years of experience in education, law and public safety. During her time on the BOE, Jacobs was a lieutenant colonel working for the county Department of Corrections.

Jennifer Rios of Upper Marlboro, a veteran, is president and founder of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Prince George’s County. She is the CEO of three companies, including two for service-disabled, veteran-owned small businesses.

Keith Washington of Accokeek is a former police officer and deputy director of homeland security, both for the county. He was convicted in 2008 of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of first-degree assault and two counts of use of a handgun after shooting two furniture deliverymen at his home, one of whom died. Washington served 13 years of a 45-year sentence before a group of Georgetown University students helped him secure an early release. Washington ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2022 against Hoyer.

Noah Emmanuel Waters of Brandywine, a former mayor of Eagle Harbor, has said he would like to focus on bringing tourism to the county. Waters, who has a Ph.D. in business administration, is a public finance candidate who has said he will not accept money from special interests or political action committees.

Across the county’s nine council districts, 31 candidates have registered to run in addition to the eight at-large contenders. All are Democrats, except for two Republicans in District 6 and one in District 9.

At the polls, voters may select one candidate from those running in the district where they live, and two at-large candidates.