Four-term College Park City Councilmember John Rigg (District 3) announced on Aug. 4 that he will not seek re-election in November when his term expires.
Rigg, who has advocated for four-year terms for the mayor and councilmembers instead of two-year stints as city law requires, said in an email to “friends and neighbors” that he “want[s] to place a much higher priority on … family events, see my friends and neighbors more often and spend time on personal pursuits. I have determined that running for council every other autumn is a trade-off that I am no longer willing to accept.”
The position of mayor and the seats of all eight councilmembers are up for election in November. Candidates have until Sept. 12 to register with the city.
Rigg said he will serve out his term, which will end on Dec. 2 when the new council is sworn in.
The other District 3 councilmember, Ray Ranker, was elected in March in a special election held to replace former Councilmember Stuart Adams, who resigned in January, 10 months before his term would have ended.
Ranker ran against Mike Meadows of Old Town and Gannon Sprinkle, a University of Maryland student who lives near the campus.
“I feel strongly that the time is right for new leadership in District 3, and as the most recent special election demonstrated, there are a number of excellent candidates with new voices and new ideas who are eager to serve our city in this regard,” Rigg said in his email.
He noted that Ranker “has come up to speed extraordinarily quickly” and endorsed his colleague for re-election in November.
Rigg said he will continue to be an “active and engaged resident of our city.” Still, he said his eight years of service have “not come without a bit of a personal price.” He noted that running a campaign every other year is “tremendously expensive, mentally taxing and time-consuming,” and because elections are in the fall, they coincide with family milestones and activities like his children’s sports games.
In a footnote, Rigg pointed out that College Park voters in 2023 expressed interest in switching to four-year terms for elected officials, a move Rigg said would “continue a common-sense approach to alleviating the substantial personal burden imposed by our current system of elections every other year.”
He urged the newly elected council to push for that change.
Rigg, who lives in College Park’s Calvert Hills neighborhood, works as a public health policy administrator for the federal government. Councilmembers work for the city part time.