Montgomery County Councilmember Hans Riemer is jumping into the race for county executive in what’s expected to be a competitive contest in 2022.

The three-term at-large councilmember made the announcement on Monday. He says that while he plans to focus on housing, education, racial equality, and climate change, his top priority will be economic development.

“One of the big questions facing Montgomery County is how to create more economic development so that young people can work here, live here, and afford to live here,” Riemer told DCist/WAMU. “If there is one kind of embracing issue, it’s working to promote job creation and affordable housing so that young people will be able to call Montgomery County home.”

For years, the issue of economic development has been a flash point between Riemer and County Executive Marc Elrich, who has already announced his plans to run for reelection. Businessman David Blair has also announced he’s running; he narrowly lost to Elrich in the 2018 Democratic primary.

“The county executive has had a decades-long record of pushing against economic development, pushing against housing,” Riemer said.

Riemer has been a stark critic of Elrich’s approach to economic development. In 2019, Riemer called Elrich’s opposition to a housing resolution that pledged to build 10,000 additional housing units by 2023 for low-or-moderate income residents “NIMBYism in disguise.”

More recently, Elrich requested that Maryland’s Department of Transportation use one track instead of two for the light-rail Purple Line project in a downtown Bethesda tunnel to save the county $54 million. Riemer pushed back on Elrich, writing on his blog that the single track would create a bottleneck with “less frequent trains” and “low ridership.”

“With a bottleneck, we’d be unable to increase the number of trains operating on the Purple Line to the full capacity that we need,” he wrote.

During an appearance on WAMU’s “The Politics Hour” last month, Elrich pushed back on criticisms that he hasn’t attended to concerns about business and job creation in the county during his tenure. “I’ve signed every economic incentive that I’ve had in front of me and we continue to be very aggressive,” he said.

Riemer says he plans to fund his campaign through the county’s public financing system to build a grassroots campaign. That’s in contrast to Blair, who is again expected to self-fund his own campaign — just as he did in 2018.

Riemer has been involved in Democratic politics since graduating from the University of California at Santa Cruz. The native Californian moved to Silver Spring in 2002 with his wife and has two boys. Prior to his time on the council, Riemer worked as a senior legislative representative for American Association of Retired Persons.

In an email announcement, Riemer said he intends to have two campaign kick-off parties: one in-person on June 12 at 12 p.m. at the Silver Branch Brewery and another virtually on June 16 at 5 p.m.