When we sat down to chat about her political history and her political future–not to mention her political present!–at RoCo’s RV, Jen Terrasa (D-13) told me that she had a vision, if you will, of the house that sits just beyond where our vehicular home is currently parked.
“Colleen, for whatever reason, it looks like there’s a pond or a lake in the backyard. Is there?” she asked me, her head resting on a hand propped up by the couch we sat on.
I told her there wasn’t, that it was a gently rolling stretch of grass. I thought, though, that it was very “Jen,” this observation. It was a vision of beauty, and her capacity to see not necessarily what is but what could be is one of the things both Robert and I have come to love about Jen. We’ve gotten to know her over this past year during the intense, awesome 2018 gubernatorial primary campaign season in HoCo. Both Robert and I got the chance to sit down with her for an hour-and-fifteen-minutes each to talk about whatever we wanted. Robert chose to get her thoughts on affordable housing in Howard County. I, on the other hand, dished with her on her past 12 years on the Howard County Council and her transition to the Maryland General Assembly (MGA) where she’ll be one of three delegates representing District 13 starting in January 2019.
Betwixt and Between
I’m drawn to liminal spaces, interstitial points in time that are neither what came before nor what’s to come, but their own in-between state. I get a lot done during the more quotidian of these, such as sitting in a doctor’s office waiting for an appointment or the few moments before I have to leave for my gym class or just after I first get in bed at night. The pressure’s off, in a way, and I can just be or do. I wanted to know how Jen was feeling in her own political liminal moment, when she’s undergoing a political-career transition.
Jen’s vision of the lake reminded me of the destiny John Winthrop envisioned when he said in 1360 that the settlement at Massachusetts Bay would be “a city on a hill.” Jen has a way of seeing both what should be and then considering carefully how to instantiate it. She takes her role as a legislator seriously, yet she thinks of herself as one of us. Well, RoCo (Robert and Colleen) doesn’t live in District 13, but I mean “us,” as in the grand-scheme “us”–all of us.
The Senator leading her four-person legislative team, Guy Guzzone (D-13) put this into words best when I asked him why he and the other Team 13-ites, Delegate Vanessa Atterbeary and Delegate Shane Pendergrass, wanted to work with Jen.
“Jen approaches things from both her head and her heart. Her willingness to really dig down on an issue made those of us who were already on Team 13 really want her to join us,” Guy told me during a phone conversation a few days after I chatted with Jen.
Jen sees all of humanity as a unified whole, not an “us” versus “them.’ We’re all, as she told me, people who worry about out communities, who want to be heard, who are reasonable. I knew she did, but that day it struck me how she truly sees her as one of a collective of equals.
“That’s one of my approaches to community. Assume that people who are upset about something are not upset because they’re bad people. There’s something that’s driving them,” she said. Early on in her political life, someone wrote on a paper for Jen, “Assume good intentions.” It’s stuck with her.
This was especially true when CB9 came up. That’s 2017’s Council Bill 9 that sought to make Howard County a sanctuary city for immigrants. Jen and then County Council member Calvin Ball sponsored it. It didn’t pass, and it incited both fervent support and vehement opposition. Jen told me she bumped into someone who’d testified against it in the Harris Teeter in Kings Contrivance.
“She said to me, ‘Why would you want to do this to us? Why would you want the crime to increase in Allview?’ I told her that if I thought this would make crime increase, I wouldn’t be sponsoring it. I think this is going to make us safer,'” Jen told me as we both put our legs up on the couch to get comfy at the same time. She told me they had a “ridiculously nice conversation” wherein Jen told her that it’s in all of our interests to foster a community where immigrants feel included and that their voices matter. She told the woman she felt like all residents had to trust that when they report crime they’ll be heard.
In an email exchange later, that woman from the Harris Teeter told Jen that while she still didn’t think Jen was right about it all, she appreciated that Jen wanted the best for the community. And she felt like Jen was listening.
“In a world gone mad, with the Muslim ban looming, what Calvin Ball and Jen did was to restore my peace of mind. It was priceless. I will always support her,” said Deeba Jafri a marketing specialist who lives in Elkridge and is also a local community advocate. Her parents are of Pakistani origin, she’s Muslim, and she was born in Great Britain before becoming an American citizen. The issues, then, of immigration and the rights of religious minorities are deeply important to her.
Caring And Sharing
Jen’s political career has been about caring but not a paternalistic or cloying caring. She is one of the kindest people I’ve met, always going out of her way to help me. She instinctively gives of her own time and energy often. In fact, several of the articles here on rocoinhoco.com have come to fruition because I asked Jen for contacts as Robert and I researched them. The first time I did this, she whipped out her phone on the spot and retreated momentarily to a corner in an Elkridge saloon then candidate for Board of Education Sabina Taj was holding a reception. She put us in touch with the incredible Colette Gelwicks, her eminently helpful District Aide. We’ve asked Colette for help several times, and she kind of just makes things happen. She even sent us an email out of the blue asking how my interview with Rec and Parks director John Byrd went! Colette’s now Christiana Mercer Rigby’s aide, as that HoCo politico was elected last month to represent District 3 on the council. Hopefully I’ll get to interact more with Colette then. COLleen and COLette!
Jen told me about a cartoon that visualizes the difference between equality and equity, what each term means and how equity is we should strive for in HoCo. To me, it summed up so well Jen’s highly advanced thinking that’s yet free of pretentions or self-importance. It’s at once complex and simple, and she shares it without hesitation. Below is a version of the graphic she clued me in on by artist Angus Maguire for the Interaction Institute for Social Change.
Portrait of the Politician as a Young Activist
Jen was born Jennifer Gilbert in New York City to parents who are so very RoCo! In their ethnic background, they’re allegiance to progressive politics, and their hometown, they’re very us. This is most strikingly true because they moved to Columbia when the Rouse vision inspired them.
She went to Oakland Mills High School and then to Oberlin College in Ohio. She moved back to the area and got her Bachelor of Science in sociology from the University of Maryland at College Park. She and her ex-husband moved to Puerto Rico for a year. She got her law degree from the University of Baltimore in 1997.
Before law school she also met her ex-husband and they lived in Puerto Rico for a year. She has three children. Her eldest, Tony, was home visiting from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he’s a freshman. She texted me patient and kind responses in the midst of his homecoming when I asked her questions for this article. To boot, she shared a picture of Tony and told me about his visit with that singular, parental pride.
An Organizer Is Born
Soon after, when Jen was a member of the Kings Contrivance Village Board when she was at an event at which she couldn’t find a seat. She said she’s normally shy, but she asked Josh Feldmark and Jessica Feldmark (State Delegate, D-12) if she could sit at an empty seat at their table.
A few weeks later Jessica called her and asked her if she’d be interested in being on the Howard County Planning Board. Later she ran for a seat on the county council and won. Her career in law, that she was as she described it “a passionate resident for 30 years at the time,” and her history of local activism led people to support her first council campaign, she told me.
“When I talk to young people who’re considering running for office, I tell them, ‘You should be involved in campaigns before running your own. It really is like drinking water from a fire hose the first time,” Jen told me.
I told her how I thought canvassing, that basic of democratic politics was so odd. I’m slightly annoyed when someone rings my doorbell unexpectedly. Jen told me she got it, but she also made me look at it another way when she said she wanted to live in a community where everyone’s “uplifted and respected.” The first step in that is getting to know a place.
She and I commiserated about how tireless a canvasser Christiana Mercer Rigby, who’s taking over her spot on the council, was this past election season. It’s the best way, we decided, to get to know every crevice of a community as Christiana does now.
Also: Labor union leader Bryan Coster looked back on his career with me.
Hindsight Is Just Right
I asked Jen what she hoped people would know about her political career.
“I want people to know I care. I really want them to know that,” she said, nodding slowly and looking directly in my eyes. Still, while she hopes people know that she cares about what’s important to them, she was quick to point out that she doesn’t say things just to make people feel good. As thoughtful and empathic as she is, she considers a question carefully before offering her opinion on it. Sometimes she’s too hard on herself about it, though! I had asked to interview her once a few months before we actually got to sit down, and she apologized so much for the delay. I told her to stop. I felt lucky to have any of her time.
Jen says she hopes it will take her less time to get the hang of state-level legislation than it did county-level. I rolled my eyes then. I felt bad about, but come on, Jen. You’re amazing. Own it!
Jen’s very content with leaving her council seat in the hands of Christiana Mercer Rigby. She’s excited for the brand-new council lead by County Executive Calvin Ball to get to work, too.
“I had a very emotional last two weeks on the council,” Jen said back at the RV. “I feel like some of it was, ‘How am I going to pack this up?’ But a lot of it was, ‘It’s weird to leave all this.'” Her kids have only known her, for example, to work at the council. In the first few years, she said of her council era, you’re still getting to know how things work, who to go to, the statecraft of it all. I suggested that she’d have a leg up in Annapolis, though, because some of it will likely be the same as county council life. She smiled warmly and nodded.
“At orientation in Annapolis, I was excited to meet some people on a bus tour of the city who I’ll be starting out in January with who seemed to be like-minded people,” she said, then.
Do the Most Good
What I love most about Jen–well, tied for most with a lot of other stuff–is how she automatically wants to protect the most vulnerable people. She offered a thought on this as I fumbled with my digital voice recorder and paper notes. We were preparing to go our separate ways for the day.
“If I had unlimited resources, I’d make sure our parents of kids with disabilities are taken care of. There’s so much strain on those families, and it can really devastate them,” she said. Constituent services, as in the ability to work directly on what the people she represented, was her proudest achievement while serving on the county council.
Jen had been to her eye doctor just before meeting me, and I’d been worried about her driving to the RV in the glare of the sunlight that day. As I watched her drive off, I thought about how she’s used to navigating in bright light, after all. That’s life as an optimist who wants to impart her happy vision of life unto others.
I waved to her, and she made her way down Davis Avenue back home.
Thanks for reading! Check back with us 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.