(One in a series of posts about our republican opponents in november)
Time for a pop quiz.
Imagine you are attending a rally for a candidate running for Dorchester County Council. Now imagine that this candidate’s platform is a series of familiar complaints about traffic, overcrowded schools, flooding, developers who have not met their responsibilities, and the like.
Is this candidate (A) a Democrat, running as the outsider against the Republicans who have dominated the County Council since 2014? (Before then, members ran without party designation.)
Is this candidate (B) an establishment Republican simply blind to her own party’s responsibility for these problems?
Or is this candidate (C) a Republican outsider, fed up with the status quo?
Either candidate A or C would be a logical guess. But that would be wrong.
It’s B, and the candidate is Jennifer Kunda, the Republican running for the vacant District 7 seat on the Council. The video on her campaign website introducing her to voters emphasizes that she is fed up watching bad decisions being made about roads, schools and public safety that negatively affect the quality of life in the County.
Even more eye-popping, Kunda also stresses in her campaign that she served for five years as a member of the Dorchester County Planning Commission. This means she had the responsibility of preparing and revising a comprehensive development plan; preparing zoning ordinances; making recommendations for revisions to zoning and land development standards; and more.
She seems to realize that it is illogical (perhaps nonsensical) to complain about how the County oversaw development while SHE was a part of the process for a crucial five-year period. Nevertheless, she is positioning herself as some sort of “outsider” to the process. She says she is not courting “fancy endorsements” and that she isn’t the candidate of establishment Republicans.
But this isn’t true. She is the choice of the local Chamber of Commerce, a pipeline for Republicans running for public office. Among her biggest donors is Banks Construction, since 1948 one of the leading companies in the Low Country specializing in heavy civil construction, asphalt paving, and site and infrastructure development. Banks has a very real economic interest in seeing growth continue, and Kunda is their candidate.
Kunda makes her own living in residential real estate sales, so she herself has an economic stake in growth.
As a member of the Planning Commission, was Kunda perhaps a lonely voice in the wilderness, trying to push back the tide of unplanned growth? Sorry, but no.
An examination of the minutes of all twelve Commission meetings in 2025 shows that almost all votes were unanimous by the seven commissioners. They were supportive of most requests made of them. When they voted against a request, it was in support of the position of the County’s planning staff, which was advising them.
Kunda did vote against approving a very small number of requests from property developers that she believed would add to traffic or flooding problems, but she was consistently outvoted. She seems to have had no success changing the minds of her fellow commissioners.
To make matters worse, in 2025, Kunda was absent entirely from four of the twelve monthly meetings (in July, September, October and December), and she attended only the first 42 minutes of the meeting in April. This is not exactly the record of a conscientious public servant.
In her campaign materials Kunda demands that developers pay their “fair share” of growth costs, without providing any details of what that fair share is or how it would be enacted by the Council she wants to join. She never addresses why the County has not been much more vigorous in pursuing developers using the laws it already has on the books. She never addresses if impact fees charged to developers are high enough.
Despite her stated commitment to proper land use standards, Kunda has little to say about wetlands, tree preservation, greenbelt policy, and related matters.
Kunda is, it seems, happy to make grand pronouncements about her goals, but she is silent about the hard parts: how to make her goals legislative reality.
Her Democratic opponent for the seat, Preston Smelt, is by contrast very specific in what he would do on the Council. He is far ahead of Kunda in considering how “concurrence” should be implemented. (Concurrence is the principle that developers must plan for and help pay for schools, roads, water lines and so on long before houses are built and sold.)
You can read about Smelt here https://dorchesterdemocrats.com/speaking-freely-about-preston-smelt-county-council-candidate/ in a Speaking Freely post on the DCDP website, and you can visit his website here https://progresswithpreston.com/.
Anyone in Dorchester County who agrees with Kunda about the planning mistakes made by the County in the last decade, and who therefore wants real change, ought to vote for Democrat Preston Smelt, not for the person who for five years had a chance to make things better, and failed.
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Comment on “Speaking Freely About Jennifer Kunda…”
Thank you, Mr. Rubin, for this thorough exposĂ©. It confirms what many of us have suspected: you can’t spend five years on the Planning Commission approving the very development patterns that created our traffic nightmares, overcrowded schools, and strained emergency services—then run as the “outsider” who’ll fix it. Jennifer Kunda had her chance to be a dissenting voice. The record shows she wasn’t one.
That’s why I’m supporting Preston Smelt for District 7.
Preston isn’t a career politician. He’s a data analyst who built revenue-management systems for the hotel industry and ran his own business. He moved to Summers Corner in 2024, saw the same infrastructure crisis we’re all living, and decided to do something about it. His platform is specific and actionable:
Pause new housing approvals until roads, schools, and public safety catch up
Make developers pay upfront for the infrastructure their projects require (true concurrence)
Accelerate traffic-light installation at dangerous intersections and require second entrances/exits for single-access developments
Force massive data centers to be fully self-funded—construction, power, water, zero county subsidies
Protect District 2 schools from redistricting chaos while fixing overcrowding through state partnership
Preston has a plan. He has the analytical background to make it work. And he’s not taking money from the construction lobby.
Learn more at progresswithpreston.com — and vote like your commute, your kids’ classrooms, and your emergency response times depend on it. Because they do.
Thanks for another enlightening well written article!
David, this is truly excellent reporting and advocacy, and especially forceful in practical ways. Bravo.
David, as usual, another insightful blog!
This one lays bare the stunning hypocrisy of yet another Republican candidate who claims to be the solution to the problems that she personally created. Reminds me of someone currently living in the White House, what’s left of it!
David, I strongly disagree with your opinion of Ms. Kundas. I have been plagued with stormwater issues for over 7 years. I have received more assistance and support from Ms. Kundas in the last 5 months than any other elected or appointed official in Dorchester County with whom I have interacted in years. Trust me, she knows the dynamic tension between growth and smart environmental policy. Did you interview her as a candidate? I believe you would have been impressed with her knowledge and I know she would have articulated views that you would embrace. Wouldn’t that be the prudent journalistic thing to do? I believe Ms. Kundas represents a new generation of county candidates that have been unable to get older public servants to view the county’s needs in a less partisan, ‘open for all business’ way. Ms. Kundas represents smart development and for me, she is a breath of fresh air in this county. I hope you are able to rise above the party divide, meet the candidate, and make fewer partisan assumptions. Thank you kindly. Jan