Meet the Staff

by Kristen E. Humphrey, MLA, Local Assistance and Training Planner

Sarah Diehl, AICP, joined the Maryland Department of Planning (Planning) in January 2021 as our only team member to be interviewed, hired, and on-boarded entirely remotely and mid-pandemic. Truly an other-worldly experience about which Sarah simply says, “I cannot wait to meet the rest of Planning in person rather than through a computer screen!” 

Sarah is Planning’s new Compatible Use Community Planning Liaison, leading the effort to support compatible land use between Maryland’s numerous military installations and surrounding communities. As part of her role, she is coordinating the development of the state’s first compatible use website and handbook. (You can read more about compatible use planning in the October 2020 edition of Planning Practice Monthly and our February 8, 2020 and May 5, 2020 blog posts).

Sarah is looking forward to working with the great team of diverse stakeholders that Planning and partners at the Maryland Department of Commerce (Commerce) have assembled to develop these resources and says she’s particularly excited to see how this project helps shape collaborative relationships among communities, local governments, the state, and its military partners. 

With a bachelor’s degree in Landscape Architecture, minoring in Project Management, from the University of Maryland in 2015, and a master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning, from Georgetown University in 2018, Sarah began her career as a planner/landscape designer at a multi-disciplinary engineering firm in Hunt Valley. While there, she focused primarily on land use and multimodal transportation design projects. She is serving as Secretary on the Executive Committee of the Maryland Chapter of the American Planning Association (APA).

As a native of Cumberland, Sarah is a life-long Marylander, currently living in Baltimore with her fiancé and two rescue animals, Roxy the cat, who regularly shows up in video calls, and Maggie, the dog, pictured below. She loves spending her free time reading, playing board games, camping, and adventuring with Maggie, and cheering on the Orioles at Camden Yards. True story: Sarah once won second place in a mini golf tournament in Ocean City…but only because that guy in first place? Yeah, he cheated!

Sarah, you may have been robbed, but we’re awfully glad to have you on our team.

Welcome to Planning!