Before she was the speaker of Maryland’s House of Delegates and before she was a member of the College Park City Council, Joseline Peña-Melnyk was a stay-at-home mom in College Park Woods, a community she calls “beautiful.”

So when the University of Maryland and the state in 2001 proposed a road connecting I-95 with the University Boulevard entrance to the campus—via Metzerott Road—Peña-Melnyk realized the plan would cut through the urban forest bordering her neighborhood. She went door to door to collect 447 signatures from neighbors to block the project.

She also picked up dozens of white T-shirts from Target and wrote “Stop the Road” on each one. She led a group of neighbors to Annapolis—where she had never been before—to testify before the state Legislature about the road’s potential “to destroy that beautiful community of College Park Woods.”

“I decided to organize the community and we fought hard,” Peña-Melnyk, who at the time had three small children at home, tells College Park Here & Now.

That’s when former Mayor Anna Owens, the only woman ever elected to serve as College Park’s mayor, convinced her to run for city council.

And she did, winning a District 4 seat in 2003.

Nine days after she was sworn in, Peña-Melnyk, armed with her 447 signatures and accompanied by Owens, testified before the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board in opposition to the connector road.

The connector was never built.

“We killed the road,” Peña-Melnyk says.

Twenty-three years later, with three years on the city council and 19 as a District 21 state delegate under her belt, Peña-Melnyk says the scope of her job, now that she is speaker, has changed. Still, she says, it’s the same at its core: “It’s really just finding resources to help” people with problems.

“We have 23 counties and Baltimore City, 23 different local governments, and they have different issues,” she says. “However, they all have problems that you have to try to solve. … The job that I have here is to make government work for people.”

Peña-Melnyk attributes her people-first mindset and her political drive to a childhood spent in the Dominican Republic in a wooden home with a metal roof and a latrine—a hole—and toilet paper fashioned from dry corn husks and newspapers.

“When you grow up that way, you have that fire,” she says. “You don’t ever want to go back there. … I wanted to get out of poverty and make a difference. So I organized the community.”

Peña-Melnyk left the Dominican Republic as a child and lived with her mother and sister in Washington Heights, a neighborhood in Manhattan, until leaving in 1983 for Buffalo State College and later the University at Buffalo Law School.

She worked at the Defender Association of Philadelphia before moving to the District, where she worked as a defense attorney and a federal prosecutor. She later moved to Hyattsville, where she lived for seven years with her husband and eventually her two daughters and son.

The family moved to College Park Woods in 2001, and Peña-Melnyk progressed from community activist to city councilmember to state delegate by 2007.

Her College Park colleagues use words like “hard worker,” “fantastic,” “dynamic” and “dedicated” to describe her.

Prince George’s County Councilmember Eric Olson (District 3), who served alongside her on the city council, says she “has a huge heart.”

He recalls several occasions when she sat with a constituent at the hospital “or she’s been at someone’s house into the wee hours of the night dealing with something that the family needs help with. She’s hands-on. She goes above and beyond. She’s just always ready to go to do the right thing for the community.”

Peña-Melnyk says her status as speaker isn’t going to change that.

“We get so many calls,” she says. “People have a lot of needs. … That’s not going to change because I’m speaker … I’m not going to neglect my district.”

Former College Park Mayor Steve Brayman, whose terms overlapped with Peña-Melnyk’s city council service, says he’s not surprised his former colleague has become the state’s most powerful female politician.

“She’s been working her way up,” Brayman says. “Looking back on it, she’s a perfect pick for that position.”

State Sen. Jim Rosapepe (District 21), who lives in College Park’s Berwyn neighborhood, points out Peña-Melnyk’s success in co-founding the Maryland Legislative Latino Caucus in 2014 and organizing the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines for Latinos through Latino grocery stores and laundromats. As a member and later chair of the House Health and Government Operations Committee—on which she served during her entire tenure as a delegate—Peña-Melnyk partnered with Rosapepe to require Maryland doctors and hospitals to keep digital medical records.

“We wound up with one of the strongest medical records bills in the country,” Rosapepe said, even before the Obama administration imposed stiff penalties on health care providers who did not keep digital records.

But Rosapepe’s warmest words for Peña-Melnyk came when he described her work on one of his pet projects—the revitalization of Route 1, College Park’s de facto Main Street. In another grassroots effort, she rallied her city council colleagues and the community to press the state to fund safety improvements.

Peña-Melnyk organized a walk from downtown College Park to Cherry Hill Road early in her city council career to protest unsafe conditions that led to a cluster of deaths of pedestrians, including two University of Maryland students, crossing the state highway, which had few sidewalks at the time. City officials, students and residents joined in.

Since then, the city has pushed for sidewalks, bike lanes, better lighting and other improvements along the state-owned road. The first phase of that project, from south College Park to Greenbelt Road, finished in November 2024. The next two phases will improve the highway from Greenbelt Road to the Beltway exit.

Peña-Melnyk says that project is one she would like to see finished.

“You can tell the differences in College Park right now,” she says.

“It feels like a college town. People can cross Route 1 safely and not risk their lives.”

She adds: “I want it to be a walkable, vibrant community. When Route 1 is fixed and the Purple Line is finished, we will see a difference. We can already see a difference.”

Peña-Melnyk says she plans to stay in College Park.

“I love College Park, and you can tell,” she says. “My kids grew up here. That’s where we live with our dog. We love our community, our neighbors. It’s such a diverse community. It’s like America. It’s beautiful.”