About Kai

Kai is 52 years old. He established a life-long connection to Frederick County when he was four, when his grandparents moved to the old Catoctin Mountain hill farm he explored as a boy. Kai and his family purchased a portion of that property and moved there from the City of Frederick ten years ago. (Most of the property is now part of ThorpeWood, a retreat center and environmental education facility working with at-risk youth.)

Kai and his wife, Kirsten, recently celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary. They have two sons, Tor, who is 18 and heading off to college in Minnesota this fall, and Leif, who is 13 and entering eighth grade.

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, and, for the last four years, has served as one of five members of the Frederick County Board of County Commissioners.

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 any or all of 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. For nearly four years he served as a citizen appointed to the committee, and has since served as the liaison from the BOCC.

Between the autumn of 2004 and running for county commissioner, Kai served as the Director of the Frederick Regional Action Network. The non-profit organization “promoted common sense solutions to persistent challenges associated with growth and development.”

Kai also 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 was a series of growth visioning exercises that were held in four different regions of Maryland in the spring and summer of 2006. Business, civic and elected leaders from throughout Maryland participated in Reality Check exercises, which were designed to help the state make smart choices about where and how to accommodate the new residents and jobs expected to come to Maryland over the next 25 years.

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

Information about the nearly four years Kai has invested as a Frederick County Commissioner is found on other pages of this site.