The vice chair of the Herndon Planning Commission wants to make the jump to the Herndon Town Council this November.
A Herndon native, Meron Yohannes is hopeful that her lifelong personal connection to the town and past public service experience at both the local and federal level will distinguish her in a crowded field with 12 candidates vying for six seats.
“I think I have a lot of perspective,” Yohannes told FFXnow in an interview, “not just as somebody that was born here, raised here, not just somebody on the planning commission, but to be honest, as a younger person that knows how hard it could be to try to get your bearings of making a living for yourself, getting a foundation for yourself, maybe wanting to raise a family.”
Though running for elected office has been a longtime dream, Yohannes had imagined her first campaign would come under slightly different professional circumstances.
A Virginia Commonwealth University graduate with a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s in public administration, she worked as an analyst for the Bipartisan Policy Center, a D.C.-based think tank, before getting appointed by the Biden administration to serve as a senior policy advisor in the U.S. Department of Commerce.
As soon as Donald Trump won a second term as president on Nov. 5, 2024, Yohannes knew her time at the commerce department would end with Inauguration Day. But she wasn’t prepared for just how challenging the regional job market would be, as the federal government pushed out thousands of workers — including her fiancé, whose Census Bureau job was targeted for elimination by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
After missing out on a public service-related job that she really wanted, she was contemplating her next move during Tsome — a traditional period of fasting observed by Ethiopian and Eritrean orthodox Christians leading up to Easter — when she realized she was ready to pursue her dream.
“As a planning commissioner for the town, as a vice chair, there’s already some things that it was tough to deal with as an appointed advisor, because there’s only so much I could do,” Yohannes said. “So, I had already been thinking … town council makes a ton of sense if there was still time to put my name in the race, and there was, and so, I was ready to just go for it.”
Her journey to the planning commission similarly emerged out of a period of restlessness.
Feeling unfulfilled by her work at the Bipartisan Policy Center amid the turmoil of the Covid pandemic and the nationwide racial justice protests sparked by George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, Yohannes says she wanted to work more closely with her local community.
In addition to becoming an enumerator for the 2020 Census, which involved asking neighbors to fill out the once-a-decade survey, she reached out to the Herndon town manager’s office to see if there were any available opportunities. That led to an extended conversation over coffee at Panera on Elden Street with then-town manager Bill Ashton, who encouraged her to apply for an open seat on the planning commission.
She was officially appointed to the commission in September 2020.
“I’m so thankful to have that because it really did merge my interests perfectly,” she said. “I really care about development, I really care about housing, and I really care about [the question of] how do you make a community a well-functioning community, on top of also the privilege of being able to give back to my hometown. It was just such a great opportunity.”
With six years as a planning commissioner now under her belt, two years of them as vice chair, Yohannes says she’s especially proud of the group’s work on the Transit-Related Growth Area (TRG) plan and other efforts to establish a vision for development around the Herndon Metro station.
At the same time, she acknowledges that the denser development near the Metro and expected population growth awaiting Herndon will bring plenty of challenges.
The lack of an official policy requiring affordable housing remains a nagging gap — one that Yohannes hopes to address if she’s elected to the town council. As the child of immigrants from Eritrea, she wants Herndon to remain a place where families like her can live and thrive.
“We do need a body that is ready to say, ‘Hey, this development needs to have certain affordable units. This development needs to consider public spaces, not just for its residents that it’s building for, but for the town as a whole,'” Yohannes said. “Those are the few things that I really, really want to focus on, and I feel like I have the expertise and the drive to be able to push towards that.”
The need for more affordable and diverse housing options is a priority, but Yohannes says she would approach all issues with “an equity lens,” from public safety to transportation and the town’s walkability.
“An equity lens doesn’t mean slowing things down. It doesn’t mean that … someone gets less because we need to focus on others. It doesn’t mean that,” she explained. “What [an] equity lens means to me is making sure that the basis of a good quality of life in Herndon … should be the bare minimum for everyone.”
The Nov. 3 ballot will feature other town council candidates who share Yohannes’s values. She, Space Force veteran Sabrina Bruce, local government employee Yasmin Shafiq and community organizer Josif Ezekilov have banded together as an informal “progressive” coalition focused on affordability, inclusion, connectivity and transparency.
“I just want to make it very clear that I’m not in this for the big bucks. I’m not in this for the title. I’m really in this because again, this is a community I grew up in,” Yohannes said. “This is a community where my loved ones still live in, and I want to do everything in my power to continue to make it the best place it could possibly be.”
Other candidates include current council members Cesar Del Aguila, Vice Mayor Clark Hedrick, Michael T. Lloyd, Kelvin Garcia and Alex Reyes. Naila Alam is not seeking another term after she was censured by the rest of the council on Feb. 3 for “excessive absences” from meetings and other expected duties.
Additional challengers for the town council’s six seats include nurse Doug Mejia, Board of Zoning Appeals Vice Chair Stevan Michael Porter and Deltek marketing director Justin Britt. Porter previously ran for the town council in 2024 but was edged out of a seat by Alam, who received just 32 more votes after a recount.
This story has been corrected to more accurately describe how Meron Yohannes’s fiancé was affected by the federal government downsizing. He was given a deferred resignation offer because his position was expected to be eliminated, not laid off as initially stated.
