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Politics & Government

City of Bowie Elections 2011: District 2 Candidate Profile: Piero "Pete" Mellits

Mellits seeks to apply his engineer's way of thinking to council seat.

Editor’s Note: In Tuesday’s Bowie city elections, there are four contested races – , , and . Beginning today and through the weekend, Patch will run profiles on the nine candidates in the four contested races. For mayor and District 1, the incumbents are running unopposed. Today, Thursday: The two District 2 candidates.

Piero “Pete” Mellits loves the way he can use systematic logic to solve word games and word puzzles. When his daughter tells him she hates those word games, he tells her that “my life is a word game.”

He is, after all, a professional civil engineer. Rather than solving problems from a random starting point, he said he approaches all issues in a step-by-step, orderly fashion. Mellits tells the word game story to illustrate how he would apply that systematic way of thinking to city issues if he were elected as the District 2 council member.

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“My thought processes involve an engineering and analytical point of view,” he said.   

Mellits ran for the seat in 2009 against incumbent Diane Polangin and lost with 40 percent of the vote. For his first time as a political candidate, Mellits said that was a good showing, indicating to him that the potential to garner enough support to win the second time around exists.

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At 47, Mellits is a lifelong Bowie resident. In addition to being a father, a Bowie-ite and a professional engineer, Mellits also strongly identifies as being a firefighter, with 24 years of volunteer firefighting service. He is deputy chief of , where he has also been chief.

As a civil engineer and firefighter, Mellits said he is uniquely familiar with public infrastructure and public safety, the two major areas he said that a council member must possess expertise.   

“I am committed to challenging city staff and council so that the needs of the citizens are aggressively pursued,” he said. “It is not enough to sit in the council chair and commend and praise staff. Council members need to challenge city staff and the council in all areas of public safety and public infrastructure, from residential speeding and crime to code enforcement and emergency preparedness.”

Mellits said rather than seeing anything “absolutely broken with city government,” it is a matter of tweaking that he would employ. “The city staff does a great job, they are very responsive, and they all work hard. But quite often when an incident occurs, you can look at it and say ‘how can we critique ourselves, how could this have been done better?’ ”

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