College Park City Councilmembers spent 45 minutes at a June meeting talking about speeding cars racing down the 9000 block of Autoville Drive, frightening pedestrians and running over pets. Most of the councilmembers agreed that traffic-calming measures like speed humps are a solution.

Their colleague, John Rigg (District 3), disagreed.

“My colleagues know that I am anti-speed control devices,” the four-term councilmember told his colleagues, explaining that the better solution for the residential street is a sidewalk.

The reason: When he’s not sitting on the dais or working at his day job as a health policy administrator for the federal government, Rigg is a paramedic who knows “from direct experience how painful it is for patients to be in an ambulance and bumping over speed bumps. And so I tend to be very critical of speed bumps … as a result of that experience. When you have a long bone fracture, especially like a hip or a pelvis, which happen more often than you think, speed bumps can cause pain.”

Rigg, who has volunteered for 16 years with Calvert Advanced Life Support (CALS), an ambulance service in Prince Frederick, Maryland, said his expertise in emergency health care has influenced many of his decisions as a city official.

For example, he offered informed advice when the council was deciding whether to take its meetings online during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rigg, who has announced he will not run for a fifth term, said.

Rigg, who lives in the College Park neighborhood of Calvert Hills, was elected to the city council in 2017, 20 years after he started his first career as an emergency medical technician, then a paramedic and then a paramedic firefighter. Now, he volunteers as a paramedic, administrator and chair of the board of directors of the paramedic service.

“I just closely identify with being a paramedic,” Rigg said. “It was my first career before I changed careers under public policy and public administration.”

Usually volunteering between 30 and 40 hours per month, he oversees the organization’s overall governance, sustainability and membership matters, ensuring CALS meets the needs of the Calvert County community.

CALS Chief Christian Shannon, who has worked alongside Rigg at CALS for 15 years, said he often turns to Rigg for advice on difficult administrative decisions.

Shannon considers Rigg both a mentor and a leader at the paramedic service, crediting him with using his policy background to guide the organization through administrative decisions informed by policy and documentation.

“It’s invaluable for a small organization like ourselves to be able to have access to a person who has all this real-life knowledge on the administrative side of what it takes to run a small city government,” Shannon said.

When Rigg decided he wanted to drive more change in the community through policymaking, he ran for the District 3 seat on the city council in 2015 in the community where he has lived with his wife, Jennifer, since 2007.

Though he lost his first race, Rigg won his second election in 2017.

Rigg said his extensive experience as a paramedic has helped him in his role as a councilmember.

“With some on-the-ground medical knowledge and an informed opinion … I am able to help advise my fellow city council members and even city staff” on issues like speed bumps and fire station staffing, Rigg said.

Rigg said he identifies as much as a paramedic as he does as a councilmember.

“I continue to serve as a paramedic because it became a part of my identity,” Rigg said. “It keeps me in touch with why it is that I do public health work.”

Throughout his 17-year career as an emergency responder, Rigg has been recognized as a dedicated leader in community service, and not only for saving hundreds of lives during his time at CALS.

Self-employed copywriter Molly MacLaren of Front Porch Creative has lived in the Calvert Hills neighborhood for 15 years and has known Rigg for a decade.

MacLaren said she regards Rigg as a “really good” voice for the neighborhood and an advocate for community improvement.

“There [are] a lot of loud talkers, and he is a loud talker, but it always has a purpose behind it,” MacLaren said.

During his 18 years in the neighborhood, Rigg has advocated for several community improvements, including the transformation of an abandoned elementary school on Calvert Road into the University of Maryland Childhood Development Center.

As a father of two sons, Rigg said he understands the importance of affordable, quality childcare for residents and played a key role in advocating for a daycare center.

“I think his legacy is someone who listens and cares, and is highly responsive and wants to make our community as a whole better,” MacLaren said.

Rigg explained his motivation: “If there’s a way you can serve, you need to serve.”