Casey Anderson, 45, was appointed Tuesday by the County Council to chair the Planning Board. The position is a powerful, if not always high profile position. In the new role, Anderson, who lives in Silver Spring, will oversee the five-member board that makes zoning and planning decisions that affect the future of the county.
Anderson said this week he’ll be finishing up a few things at his litigation consulting business (Kauffman Anderson Consulting) before he heads to New Mexico for a 10-day vacation with son’s Boy Scout troop. He said they plan to hike 80 miles.
To get to know him better, we asked Anderson these questions:
1. Where did you grow up?
Anderson: I grew up in Greeley, Colorado, halfway between Denver and Cheyenne. In the book On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, it’s obvious he’s traveling from Cheyenne to Denver, but he never mentions Greeley so that should give you some information about it.
My Dad taught at a small state university in Greeley. The major source of jobs there was Giant Feed Lot, a Kodak plant and then the university.
I lived there from late elementary school through high school, then came to D.C. to go to college
(Anderson has an undergraduate and law degree from Georgetown University and a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University)
2. What’s your favorite food?
Anderson: Empanadas – I used to love Sabroso in downtown Silver Spring, but the owner passed away and then it folded, so I’ve been in search of the perfect empanada ever since.
3. How did you get into the planning profession?
Anderson: Well I was about 35, and my son was 5, and I had an old friend who had a son about the same age, living in Northern Virginia, who kept calling me up to go on a bike ride with our kids. I didn’t own a bike, but he kept pestering me, so I went and bought a bike. From then on I would load the bike up in the back of a car to go here or there and I started thinking “Why do we have to put a bike in the car just to go for a ride?” I thought it really should be easier to ride a bike in Silver Spring and Montgomery County and at some point a light bulb went off.
That’s what got me interested. One thing led to another and here we are.
(Before joining the Planning Board in 2011, Anderson served on the board of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association and the Citizens League of Montgomery County)
4. What’s one thing people probably don’t know about you?
Anderson: I think anybody who knows me well knows my kids are the center of my life. People that have never met me, I try not to bore with stories about my kids. I have so much pride in them and they give me so much happiness, I have a great time with them.
Both of them are just fantastic. That’s what gets me out of bed every morning, thinking about them and trying to do my best to keep them entertained and engaged. When I think about what we’re trying to do in planning for the future, I think of them.
That’s the overarching principle of my existence. My son Kelly is 14 and going into 8th grade and my daughter, Tyler is 9 and she’s going into fourth grade.
Another thing people may not know about me is I have a serious back problem. I had back surgery about five or six years ago. That’s probably my most major physical problem. It’s not anything that happened in a bike accident. It’s just my back is degenerating as I get older. That’s one reason that I ride my bike is because I can’t really run, it has too much impact. But I find I can ride my bike as much as I want.
5. As someone who bikes regularly, would you say drivers break more road laws or cyclists?
Anderson: I think non-compliance of traffic laws is pretty much universal among all users of the road. I think pedestrians jaywalk, bicyclists roll through stop signs, drivers speed and fail to signal before turning.
I don’t think anyone is without sin.
I think when you ride a bicycle you get more of a perspective of what other people are doing on the road. You’re obviously vulnerable so you’re much more aware of what everybody else is doing and more focused on other users of the road. So you see people engage in all kinds of careless behavior.
I think that more people ought to try to ride their bike to work at some point so they can have that experience and see that perspective. I think it makes you a better driver to see it from that point of view.
6. What was your most significant bicycling injury?
Anderson: I’ve been tapped by a couple cars. I’ve never been in a serious collision. I’ve certainly had some close calls. The most harrowing experiences have been when I’m obviously invisible to drivers. Like when you’re approaching a car, you’re going one direction, they’re going another, and they turn left in front of you. It’s obvious that they just really did not see you. Not because you weren’t visible, but because mentally they failed to account for the possibility that there might be something other than a car coming at them. I think that’s usually the way accidents happen.
7. What is your favorite local development project going on right now?
Anderson: I think what’s going on in Wheaton is exciting. The Wheaton Safeway project’s success in leasing out is really great because I think it shows there is demand for market-rate housing and new market-rate housing in Wheaton. Obviously that project received some help from the government, but I think it’s a good sign that they seem to be attracting tenants.
I love the White Flint development, North Bethesda Market, Pike & Rose, those projects are also a sign that Montgomery County continues to be a place that attracts people and that we can compete against Northern Virginia, D.C., other jurisdictions and their most high-profile, high-end projects, we can compete toe-to-toe with them.
What I’m really looking forward to the most is some of the projects that are going to come out of the White Oak Plan in the east county. That’s where we really have not seen a significant amount of investment over the past few decades and that part of the county is really overdue for more jobs, amenities and I think that White Oak Plan will help the east part of the county come into its own.
8. What do you eat for breakfast?
Anderson: I usually have a chocolate protein shake with a banana. It just goes downhill from there. That’s really the only time I eat anything healthy. As my wife would tell you, ‘it goes straight to heck from there.’
9. If you didn’t live in Silver Spring, where would you live?
Anderson: I was on that site – Zillow – where you can put a make-me-move price on your property.
At the time [2001] my house was probably worth $600,000 or $700,000, and I think I put down almost a million dollars as the make-me-move price. Someone contacted me and said “I’m not sure I’m ready to pay your make-me-move price, but really what would you take?” And I said, “Even if you pay me a million bucks, I’m not excited about moving.”
That was kind of a reality check. In the abstract it’s easy to say, “well, you know I’ll take X,” but then when someone comes to your door and says “alright, I’m willing to write you a check, what’s it going to take?” that’s a good gut-check. I could take the money and go to some of the neighborhoods that are more expensive, that in the past have been considered highly desirable, but I’m happy where I am.
10. There’s no other place that could attract you?
Anderson: I mean there are plenty of places that would be great to live. But for me, Silver Spring has a combination that isn’t offered anywhere else. I have a single-family detached house built in 1892. It’s old Victorian. It’s four blocks from the Metro, I can walk to restaurants, in addition to transit. I have a yard, we’re across the street from a park. When I think about that, how can I possibly match that? There just aren’t many neighborhoods in the D.C. region that have that combination of things, at any price.
Even if you paid me more than any reasonable appraisal would show its worth, I’d rather be here than anywhere else
11. What cities do you look to as examples of great planning?
Something that might surprise some people, I have a soft spot for a lot of the cities in the Southwest that are not particularly transit or bike-friendly that were developed in sort of a more sprawling pattern. I really like Phoenix. I love Denver, although Denver is much more walkable and bikeable than Phoenix. Atlanta has a lot of great restaurants and some really cool historic neighborhoods, even though in some ways the way the transportation network has been laid out is a mess. I can find something to really admire in a lot of different types of places. I think Arlington has got a lot going for it, Bethesda, I think what’s happening with White Flint is really cool. But I think that there’s a lot of areas that are more suburban, or at least less centered on really intense development that I also enjoy.
If you asked me to pick some cities that are not in Montgomery County, I’d say: Arlington, Denver and Austin, Texas. Those are some of the ones I find most appealing.
12. What do you think is missing most in Montgomery County?
I think we have a lot of emerging urban places, some classic suburban types of neighborhoods and we preserved substantial rural areas. But I think there’s a danger in trying to go halfway. We don’t want to have mediocre urban, mediocre suburban and mediocre rural, because we’ve compromised everything. I think that we want to in some ways commit to the idea that there are parts of the county that are going to be very substantially urban and do that right. And also commit to the idea that there are areas that are suburban and we want to preserve that intact without compromising the things that make that work. I think there’s a value sometimes to not accepting half measures or try to stand the edges up, but to say diversity means that we should have distinctive patterns of development in different places and not try to make it all melt together.
13. Do you know a good joke?
Anderson: My daughter is my source of all my material, so here, “Why does the cookie go to the doctor?”
“It felt crumby.”
14. Anything you’d like to add?
Anderson: I really enjoy meeting people and talking to them about what they love and what their concerns are about their community. I’m just really looking forward to jumping into this and working with all these people who are involved and trying to get more people involved. I think that’s what makes it fun.