Richard ‘Dick’ Ladd
Former Anne Arundel County councilman who ‘had a heart to serve his community’ enjoyed jazz and bike riding
Former Anne Arundel County Councilman Richard “Dick” Ladd, a Republican who represented Severna Park from 2010 to 2014, died of a stroke July 18 at the Hospice of the Chesapeake in Pasadena. He was 80 and lived in Chester.
In a statement, County Executive Steuart Pittman thanked Ladd for leading a “life of service.”
Born in Quincy, Massachusetts and raised in Scituate, he was the son of Robert Ladd, an engineer, and his wife, Harriet. He attended Bowdoin College, Tulane University and the Air Command and Staff College.
After serving in the Army as a helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War, Mr. Ladd won four Bronze Stars and 16 Air Medals, according to the Maryland Archives.
Mr. Ladd served in the military for 20 years and left as a lieutenant colonel. His final assignment was at the Pentagon.
He next became a staff member of the U.S. Senate appropriations committee. He then joined a consulting business, Robison International, and later purchased the firm.
His wife, the former Sabra Ashley, said he entered Anne Arundel County politics because he enjoyed keeping busy.
“It came natural to him because he liked helping people, and his community” she said.
“He was an amazing person, I’m lucky to have known him,” Councilman Nathan Volke, R-Pasadena, said at a recent County Council meeting. “Four Bronze Stars, that says quite a lot right there, he was quite a person.”
During his time on County Council, Ladd voted to change retiree health care benefits and establish county stormwater fees.
While chairman in 2011, he led several “contentious” council meetings, including a debate over a controversial change to the county’s binding arbitration agreement with its public safety employees, a 12-hour marathon budget hearing and a series of emotionally charged meetings on rezoning thousands of plots of county land, according to a 2011 article in The Baltimore Sun.
Notably, in 2012, after 107 rounds of tied votes to fill the empty District 1 seat on the County Council, Ladd switched his vote from Mike Wagner to Pete Smith on the 108th vote after the council came under fire for a lack of diversity.
Ladd told The Capital in 2012 that he switched his vote because “any delay would further erode the confidence in the council.”
In the 2014 race for County Council, four Republicans sought out Ladd’s seat. During the race, which he ultimately lost, he said building a new high school was his top priority and that he would still work to find a way to hire more police officers.
Councilwoman Amanda Fiedler, R-Arnold, offered her condolences to the family and recalled having long conversations over the phone with Ladd.
“I remember Dick Ladd calling me up at seven o’clock in the morning or seven o’clock at night to talk with a passion over a whole bunch of different topics,” Fiedler said. “I remember being on the phone with him forever talking about private roads and infrastructure in the future, and he was so passionate about everything and very caring.”
Ladd was on the board of the Public Advisory Committee of the Baltimore Regional Transportation Board after serving on County Council. Ladd supported Gov. Larry Hogan’s initiation of the National Environmental Policy Act process to add additional bay crossing capacity, which he wrote about in a column for The Capital in 2016.
In an opinion piece that he wrote for The Capital in 2018, he explained highway infrastructure capacity is an underlying cause of Annapolis’ gridlock and increasing commuting times. He was passionate about it being discussed as part of the General Development Plan.
Del. Sid Saab met Ladd when Ladd first got involved in county politics and joined the council.
“He would call me sometimes for input or feedback on some of the issues that came in front of the council as a chairman,” Saab said. “I’ve relied on him a lot of times also on advice. He was very well versed in many other issues and we became good friends.”
He was always against the traffic issues and loved the environment, Saab said, calling him a wealth of information.
Ladd worked “tirelessly to deal with traffic problems on the Broadneck Peninsula,” Amy Leahy, vice president for public affairs for the Greater Severna Park Council, wrote on his Dignity Memorial Obituary page.
“What I know now about Dick, after working with him over the past 10 years, is that he had a heart to serve his community,” she wrote.
Mr. Ladd enjoyed jazz and his favorite vocalist was Diana Krall. Crawl. He was also a bike rider.
Survivors include his wife of 20 years, Sabra Ashley, a retired hotel convention services manager; two daughters, Kim Baylis of Hallettsville, Texas and Pamela Cann of Bowie; seven grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. His first wife of 37 years, Edie Russell, died in 1999.
A memorial service was held in late July at Calvary United Methodist Church, 301 Rowe Blvd., in Annapolis., where he was a member.