Delegate Courtney Watson (D-9B) has been and continues to be a big part of RoCo’s discovery of HoCo. Her campaign to represent Maryland’s District 9B in the state’s General Assembly was one of the first we got involved in after moving here. Our friends, PaCy (Paul and Lucy) Steinberg told us we had to go to a meet-and-greet for Courtney and Senator Katie Fry Hester (D-9) at the home of Jennifer Silver Cavey. It turned out to be excellent advice, as we met Deeba Jafri, then-candidate for Board of Education Sabina Taj, and others who would become good friends of ours over the next year. We also began to get to know the passionate HoCo Dem, Del. Courtney Watson (D-9B).
Related: See what I learned during my day at the Little Patuxent Water Reclamation Plant.
Misty Watercolor Courtneys
So sang Barbra Streisand–except she said, “Misty watercolor memories”–in her 1970s hit, The Way We Were.
Both Robert and I have so many memories of our experiences with Courtney this past year, and they say a lot about what I want to convey about her. Courtney was dressed in red, white, and blue that day at the meet-and-greet, pacing back and forth in front of a fireplace like a mobile United States flag as she told us about her progressive vision for District 9B.
Soon after that day, Courtney suggested I go canvassing with her. I told her I didn’t like the idea of walking around in the cold, knocking on strangers’ doors, pitching something to them.
“You’ll come with me, Colleen. You’ll be fine. Trust me,” she said in her matter-of-fact, Courtney way. I met her and some of the other usual suspects–Sean Ford, Dan Berland, Najee Bailey, etc.–in the parking lot of Waverly Woods Elementary School a few days later. We split up into pairs. I held a clipboard with a list of the house numbers we needed to cover on it. Courtney was a great canvasser, moving along at a rapid clip as I fumbled with our list. She taught me that in addition to getting one-on-one time with the people on your list, you have to go with the flow when you’re canvassing so, for example, at one point we came across a couple walking their dog in between homes we were hitting. Courtney stopped to talk to them about her candidacy and even played with their pooch, joyously collapsing into a pile of leaves as she roughhoused with the pup.
Getting to Know Her
As I got to know Courtney better and better over the next 15 months or so, I realized it was so fitting that we launched our canvas that day from a school parking lot. Advocating on behalf of local schools, kids, and educational concerns, after all, has been a through line in the life of the Cochrans (Courtney’s family name).
“I don’t really see myself living forward my dad’s legacy as much as continuing a way of life in which we live what we believe in,” Courtney said of her famous father, Ed Cochran, Howard County’s second County Executive. Her parents moved here in the 1950s, specifically to Clarksville, when it was largely rural, to find a “primitive” school system. It was still segregated. Courtney’s father got on the school board his second time running (even though he was the top vote-getter both times).
“He went in and tried to get his fellow school board members to integrate immediately. As it was, they had a plan where they’d do it year by year over the next ten years,” she told me as I dug into my Bananas Foster crepes at EZ Cafe. That chow spot is just downstairs from the insurance company Courtney’s a sales exec at, Hub International Mid-Atlantic, so she has a lot of meetings there.
Anyway, the school board had that plan for piecemeal integration. Ed Cochran convinced to do it all at once during the following school year.
The Student Becomes the Teacher
Courtney credits an incident from when she was in fifth grade herself at Atholton Elementary School with setting up her life of activism.
“Some kids had misbehaved, so to punish us, the principal said, ‘You have to sit in alphabetical order,'” Courtney told me, moving her purse from her lap to the seat beside her. Courtney asked her mom to call the principal and convince her to reverse her decision. She declined, instead teaching Courtney how to put together a petition–complete with a cartoon of Snoopy that read, ‘Happiness is having lunch with your friends’–and gain signatories to it. The principal reversed her decision.
“I thought, ‘Wow! That worked!'”
Even though Courtney went on to study business, getting both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s in that field, she’s always kept service at the forefront of her mind.
“In college is where I became interested in insurance, which is basically protecting people from risk,” she said, turning to sit sideways as we talked. Later, when her youngest child with husband Richard, Elizabeth, was in grade school, she confronted that perennial HoCo predicament, overcrowded schools.
“I helped organize something called the Northeast Corridor Citizens for Education, and we advocated for a Northeast elementary school. We got it, and it’s Bellows Springs Elementary,” she told me with a little smile when I drew my neck back in awe, knowing how difficult it can be to get new schools built. It didn’t end there, though. Courtney also advocated to change APFO (Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance), forming another parents group, Countywide Citizens for a Twelfth High School that got Marriott’s Ridge High School built.
After that, Courtney ran for school board.
“I wanted to be in a decision-making position for educational policy,” she said. After her first term on the board, though, she decided to run for county council when she became concerned about overdevelopment. She realized on the council she could work on school-related issues in addition ones in other areas that concerned her, like growth.
Missions and Mantras
Courtney glanced down at her latte for a moment, thinking.
“I wanted to help make decisions for the community,” she said, her dark green eyes meeting mine. “I want to make sure that people are being heard. What’s always motivated me is what’s the best thing for all of us, not just the people who know how to advocate for themselves.” I thought it made perfect sense, then, that Courtney’s eternal passion was schools, because kids can’t always advocate for themselves.
In that vein, Courtney’s mantra, she said, has always been to be as well-informed as possible when making a decision.
“Whether it’s hearing from stakeholders, studying an issue, or learning about something another way, I don’t just take a popular position because everybody wants me to,” she said, moving her head slowly from side to side. “My advice to every newly-elected person is, ‘Be well-informed–and don’t make a decision if you’re not.”
Background and Forethought
Courtney’s great-grandparents come to the United States from Ireland. I said she’s a great example of what could be lost if we adopt the current administration’s xenophobic stance of closed borders. We might have lost a great public servant.
“That loss–well, Trump’s win–was a crushing, crushing blow for so many of us,” Courtney’s said, closing her eyes for a moment as if to steady herself. “Up until that point I thought my elected life was over. But then I realized, like so many others, what’s at stake if we let ourselves be lulled into a false sense of security.” She thought, in 2016, that it’s all hands on deck, she told me. She started a group called Do the Most Good to tackle the specter of Trumpism locally. The group had its first meeting at Kelsey’s and anticipated 10 to 20 people would be there. Instead, 300 people came. Courtney’s convinced the owners will never let her back in. We both laughed at this. I thought about how I’ve really learned this past year or so that all politics really is (or should be) local, and it seems like her family background in advocacy has just showed her how to, as she said earlier, live a local-politics way of life.
Fast forward to almost three years after the 2016 election and Courtney’s just wrapped up her first term as a state delegate. She thinks her voice is valuable in Annapolis in part because she’s held local office and knows how best to advocate for local communities. It’s one of the ways, no doubt, Courtney played a key role this past session in securing funding for Ellicott City flood mitigation.
“We were basically able to get 8 million dollars over three years, plus another three-and-a-half million, so 11 million dollars total,” she said. This was her proudest accomplishment from this past session, though she worked to get a 15-dollar-minimum-wage bill passed among other progressive ones.
Passing on her political savvy is important to Courtney, too.
“I think it probably takes at least a year or so to figure out how things work down in Annapolis, and there’s no guidebook,” she said. In fact, there never was in Courtney’s years of involvement. She relied on people like local political dynamo Carole Fisher to show her the ropes.
“She made me a list a while back of everything I needed to do,” Courtney said. “I want to mentor women especially, but any younger candidate, and it’s what I’m doing now more and more and more.”
Carole is a big Courtney supporter, clearly.
“Courtney and her family have given the county so much. In her time on the school board, in the county council, and now the general assembly, she’s produced results that will benefit the area now and in the future,” Carole told me during a phone call about her political protege.
Another long-time local politico, Ken Stevens, is a big Courtney supporter. I smiled as I thought of him braving scalding hot temps pre-primary in 2018 to hold a “Courtney Watson for State Delegate in 9B” sign at polling locations and then bundled up against the cold doing the same thing pre-general election.
“I noticed Courtney has a perfect voting record on the most controversial bills I tracked this year, and that leaves me feeling good,” he wrote in an email exchange we had on the topic this week.
Courtney told me part of what helped her in during this, her first term in the general assembly’s, was that body’s way of working together for the greater good.
“I was very, very impressed with the system of the House of Delegates, the way legislation is passed, the checks and balances in place. It’s hard to get a bill passed, and I think it should be. It’s a process that’s been refined over 439 sessions,” she said back at EZ Cafe.
Inside and Out
She told me, then, that however she may come across to people, she hopes they’ll always know she has the community’s best interests at heart. People tend to make a lot of assumptions, she said, based on how another person looks,–that they don’t smile enough, or that they’re too serious.
“I’d basically do anything to help me make the right decision and to help me help people,” she said.
If she had to decide now, Courtney said she’d say yes to running for another term in the general assembly representing 9B. She’s sure that there’ll be things she wants to accomplish. She circled back to education then.
“The school system is one of the main things that makes us so successful as a county, so that’s where we need to invest our dollars, but also in affordable housing and public safety,” she said. Cybersecurity and human trafficking are important issues to her, she said.
Down in Annapolis, Courtney’s days began at around 8:00 a.m, meeting with local advocates. Over the next few hours, she’d go to the floor of the general assembly to vote on bills or take care of other delegate business. Then her committee, Economic Matters, would meet. Somewhere among all that, she’d find time for lunch. And dinner, at least for three nights a week, was hosted by advocacy groups.
“Those were important to get to if you can, because you can learn so much about an issue at them,” she told me. The dinners would usually end around 9:00 p.m.
I let out a sigh of awe.
Courtney smiled, and I thought about how maybe she’d inherited a love of hard work from her immigrant ancestors. Immigrants are the most intrepid, proactive people I could imagine. You have to be bold and simply to know you can achieve what you set out to in order to pick up and move to a whole new country.
The specific circumstances, too, may change, Courtney said, but the issues are the same now on some level as when she started advocating in 1998.
“We’re going to continue to go and meet the challenges,” she said. I’d join her, just like I did that day canvassing, with my little clipboard in hand!
Also: See what Ken Stevens told me about his life in local politics.
Thanks for reading! Check back with us each here at rocoinhoco.com every week as Robert, Colleen (and pup, Moses) get to know the many facets—one each week–of this prismatic place called Howard County. We want to take you along with us, so follow us on Twitter at @rocoinhoco, join our Facebook group, and follow us on Instagram at @rocoinhoco.