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A bit about Kai...

Kai left the region for a while, attending college in a small Minnesota town set amid endless farms, then living in Minnesota and California for a number of years before moving to Frederick in 1995. Since then, he has been actively involved in our community in many ways.

Beginning in autumn of 2003, until he announced his candidacy for the Board of County Commissioners, Kai wrote a bi-weekly column for the Frederick County Gazette. Before that, he wrote a bi-weekly column for the Frederick News-Post for a year. You can read Kai's columns here.

In 2002, Kai was appointed by the Board of County Commissioners to the Citizens Zoning Review Committee, which met every other week for a year and a half to review the current Zoning Ordinance, the proposed “Public Hearing Draft Zoning Ordinance” (January 2002), and any recommendations presented during previous Zoning Ordinance update efforts, and to assess the documents, correspondence, testimony, etc., and provide the Board of Frederick County Commissioners with recommendations as to amendments, revisions or the re-writing of specific sections of the ordinance.

Since mid-2003, Kai has been a member of the Frederick County Parks and Recreation Commission, which is composed of 8 members appointed by the Board of County Commissioners and one county commissioner who serves as a liaison.

Since autumn of 2004, Kai has been the Director of the Frederick Regional Action Network. The organization's mission statement says the non-profit organization "promotes common sense solutions to persistent challenges associated with growth and development."

Kai served as co-chair of the Western Maryland Committee of Reality Check Plus (stepping down when he announced his candidacy for County Commissioner). Reality Check Plus is a series of growth visioning exercises that are planned to be held in four different regions of Maryland in the spring and summer of 2006, including business, civic and elected leaders from throughout Maryland who will participate in Reality Check exercises. Participants will be asked to decide where the thousands of new residents and jobs that are expected to come to Maryland over the next 25 years should be located.

Kai has been coaching youth soccer and basketball in Frederick County for the last nine years. He is a serious amateur photographer, whose images of Frederick County have been exhibited in various venues in the county.

Kai has been married to Kirsten Waller for twenty-six years. Kirsten is head of the Infectious Disease Surveillance section of the Pennsylvania Department of Health. They have two sons, Tor, 14, and Leif, 9.

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WHY I'M VOTING FOR KAI!

Jane Sachs
Thurmont

Although I’ve known Kai for only six months, it seems like I’ve known him since we were both kids. I suppose most people know by now that he lives on land he first came to cherish as a small child from Washington, through visits to his granddad’s mountain farm. That was a big coincidence for me, because I have a similar history up here in the Catoctins. No doubt, Kai too spent hours in those days following deer trails through the woods,...

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