A fourth challenger has announced he will run against incumbent Councilmember Vincent Gray for the Ward 7 seat. Kelvin Brown, a military veteran and Ward 7 resident for about six years, tells DCist that he disagrees with the direction of Gray’s office, and that he wants to “take a more active leadership role” in the ward.

Brown moved to D.C. from Georgia about eight years ago “to pursue new business ventures,” per his campaign website. He works in D.C. as a program manager in housing finance at Fannie Mae.

Since moving here, Brown says he’s undertaken volunteer work across the city, including toy and food drives, voter registration drives, clothing drives, forums with local youth, and the construction of houses across the District with Habitat for Humanity. But Brown has never held elected office before, and just last year lost an ANC 7B06 election where he ran a write-in campaign.

“Our message resonated well with our community and we really had a lot of support. People were eager for a new voice, and someone who had a vision of what a new Ward 7 could look like,” Brown says. “The biggest hurdle that I had to overcome was that we were a write-in campaign, so someone has to remember your name, remember the spelling of your name … I think had I been on the ballot, I would have won an ANC race.”

The winner of that race, April Pradier, beat another opponent on the ballot, Donovan Anderson, by seven votes—almost 38 percent to nearly 37 percent. In third place, with 25 percent of the vote, was “write-in,” though it’s unclear how many of those 220 write-in votes were actually for Brown.

Brown tells DCist that he decided to shoot even higher this time around, for a seat on the D.C. Council, because “I think I would be doing the community a disservice by not putting my best foot forward and going for this Ward 7 race.”

Brown was allied during his ANC campaign with James Butler, the write-in candidate that challenged Mayor Muriel Bowser last year. Among Butler’s policy proposals in that race were eliminating mayoral control of schools and requiring or encouraging non-profit organizations to “adopt” a homeless person and help them get housing. Butler told the Washington Informer that he and Brown were part of the Progressive Blue Wave Slate, though Brown says it was never so formal an agreement.

“We had similar ideas around key issues. But I was not a part of a slate last year,” Brown says. “But I do think the work that James and his team were doing for voter registration and everything were all good things we need across the District.”

Brown served as a Sergeant in the U.S. Army for eight years. He says his experience in the armed forces have influenced his leadership style and his desire to be a councilmember in the first place.

“I’m a man of integrity, a man of leadership, and a man of action,” he says. “And based on my interactions with voters, the climate on the D.C. Council with all the corruption, and the pay-to-play politics, all the backroom deals—none of that represents the best interests of the community.”

Brown says that his priorities as a councilmember would be economic development and investment in the ward, reforming the education system to focus less on test scores and more on “producing variety individuals who have the life skills to be effective participants in society,” and changing around healthcare goals and plans east of the river. In a stark departure from Councilmember Gray, who has fought for years to build a new hospital on the east end of the city, Brown says he doesn’t believe it will be effective to build “a big bureaucratic hospital” on the St. Elizabeths campus in Ward 8. He instead wants to build “community care centers that focus on the prevention of disease instead of reaction to illness.”

Brown also says he wants to focus on bringing more grocery stores with fresh produce to the ward and improving the public transportation system so it’s not so “piecemeal.” All of these improvements, he believes, will lead to a decline in gun violence and crime.

Brown will be running against two ANC commissioners in Ward 7, Anthony Lorenzo Green and Veda Rasheed, as well as another candidate without experience holding public office, James Jennings, and the incumbent Vincent Gray.

Gray has served in various roles in D.C. government, first as the Ward 7 Councilmember, then chairman of the D.C. Council, then mayor. Gray lost his mayoral reelection bid to Mayor Muriel Bowser in 2014 amid a federal investigation into his 2010 mayoral campaign. Gray was not indicted, but multiple campaign aides pleaded guilty to various crimes associated with the investigation.

Gray has not officially filed to run in 2020, but he announced to the DC Line earlier this year that he will be seeking reelection.