Though he hasn’t won elected office before, Stevan Porter is likely a familiar face to many Herndon voters.
In addition to serving as vice chair of the town’s Board of Zoning Appeals, Porter has three campaigns for Herndon Town Council under his belt. After falling just 34 votes shy of winning election in 2024, he’s hopeful that his fourth bid for a seat could put him over the top.
“I still think I have something to offer the community,” Porter said in a recent interview with FFXnow. “I have a different perspective, maybe, and also, I want to continue to serve the community. That’s really what it’s about. I don’t have desires for higher office or anything like that. You know, I just want to be here.”
‘I care about … the right thing for Herndon’
Porter faces some stiff competition for the upcoming Nov. 3 election, with a total of 12 candidates, including five incumbents, vying for the town council’s six seats.
In a field with several younger, progressive-leaning challengers seeking to usher in a new generation of leadership in Herndon, Porter is trying to make the case that experience and a strictly nonpartisan attitude focused on reconciling differences, instead of staking out positions, can resonate with voters as well.
Describing himself as a “good mediator,” Porter says his ability to consider different, even opposing viewpoints and help build a consensus around “the best solutions for the community as a whole” could be a valuable asset for a council member.
“My biggest overall priority is simply, I’m not a Republican, I’m not a Democrat, I’m not even really a Libertarian at this point. I’m really pretty independent,” he said. “… I think we’re seeing too much of that in our society in general, that this is the progressive thing, so we’ve got to do it, or this is a conservative thing, we’ve got to do it. I care about what’s the right thing for Herndon.”
Porter brought a similar approach to his first political campaign in 2018, when he ran for Virginia’s 11th Congressional seat. Under no illusions that he could pose a real threat to Democratic stalwart Rep. Gerry Connolly as a Libertarian candidate, he says he nevertheless was so frustrated with how “divisive” politics had become that he ran to prove “someone could actually run basically a clean campaign that was just focused on trying to do what they felt was best for the community.”
Since then, Porter has pivoted to the more modest but realistic goal of winning a Herndon Town Council seat, running in 2020, 2022 and 2024.
A resident of Herndon since 2008 and Northern Virginia since 1995, Porter was first appointed to the Board of Zoning Appeals in 2023, but his involvement in the local community goes back decades. Since 2002, he has volunteered as a paramedic in Loudoun County, where he also teaches EMT students part-time, and he has been a member of the Herndon-Reston Rotary Club since 2017.
Aware that he will at some point age out of the paramedic work, Porter says he wants to continue finding new ways to serve his community.
That desire was recently compounded by the unexpected end of his 30-year career in information technology: Porter is one of thousands of people laid off over the past year by the tech giant Oracle, which has been aggressively borrowing money to fund artificial intelligence and data center ventures.
Unsurprisingly, Porter is less gung-ho than his former employer about the potential of AI, noting that the technology could become a crutch and that the data centers needed to power chatbots and other tools use significant amounts of water and energy.
“Like many people, I’ve been sort of shocked by how high my electric bill has gotten,” he said.
At approximately 4.5 square miles in size, the Town of Herndon doesn’t have much land to accommodate a large data center, even as the facilities have proliferated farther west in Loudoun County and in parts of Fairfax County. But Porter doesn’t see them as a huge economic boon, at least in terms of creating permanent jobs.
“There’s an initial boost in that people who work in the trades, contracting, the builders,” Porter said. “… But once the place is up and running, most of these huge data centers have staffs that are probably under a dozen people. I mean, they don’t need very many people because it’s mostly just a bunch of machines sitting there running.”
On affordable housing, economic development
When it comes to development, Porter generally thinks the town is on the right track in focusing mixed-use development in the area immediately around the Herndon Metro station and the surrounding transitional zone, known as Transit-Related Growth Area.
However, he anticipates logistical and financial challenges with updating streets, utilities and other infrastructure in older areas of Herndon to support the town’s future population growth. He also supports reducing bureaucratic hurdles for business owners and developers.
“Revitalizing the downtown, getting some of those storefronts filled again, we need to try to make it as friendly of an environment for would-be business owners and developers as we can,” Porter said, adding that the town shouldn’t be too generous “because obviously we don’t want another Comstock situation,” referring to the Reston-based company’s stalled downtown redevelopment project.
“But Herndon is an expensive place to do business. It’s an expensive place to live,” he continued. “You have the added headaches of an extra level of government you have to interact with. That can discourage businesses. That can discourage developers, and so, the more of it we can do to make that a less onerous process, I think, the better it will be for the town.”
Finding a balance between incentivizing development and ensuring it actually meets the town’s needs is also a concern for Porter when it comes to affordable housing, which he cites as a priority.
The town’s first affordable housing policy, which is being developed as part of its ongoing comprehensive planning initiative, should be based on clear targets and include requirements that are relatively in sync with other jurisdictions in the area, Porter says.
“We have to be careful that we don’t put on requirements that are comparatively too onerous, because it’ll just cause our developers and people to walk away, and then we don’t get any more housing — normal or income-controlled or any type of stuff,” he said.
At heart, Porter says he’s an educator, so when campaigning, he wants to help community members understand how their local government works, while also encouraging informed community feedback in return.
“That’s always going to be a very big push for me, keeping the community informed, doing my best to educate the community — not lecture the community, but educate the community about what’s going on, so that they can come back and provide their views of what is the best approach,” Porter said.
