Activists Take On Developers, Bureaucrats

Standing in her kitchen on New Year’s Eve, Amy Presley and her friend Kim Shiley reflected on the unlikely turn their lives had taken. Margaritas were mixed. And they discussed a question that many in Montgomery County would come to ask over the next year: Why are they doing this?

The pair had spent hundreds of hours in 2004 digging through arcane county planning records and grilling reticent bureaucrats to try to document problems in their new housing development. Presley, a marketing consultant, had begun scaling back clients. Shiley, an administrative nurse with the federal government, had sacrificed weekends and days off.

Tears welled in Shiley’s eyes. She thought about her cancer, a Stage-4 melanoma now in remission. “Another holiday. It makes me wonder will I still be here next year, and if I have been doing what I could be doing,” she told Presley. “I want to have fun, too.”

“You will be here, and so will I,” Presley remembers telling her.

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