Montgomery County At-Large Councilmember Will Jawando voted today to approve the County’s Fiscal Year 2027 Operating Budget following a challenging budget cycle. During the process, he released a fully detailed alternative framework before bringing the single largest package of itemized reductions to the floor, and, in the final hours of the negotiations, successfully moving a motion redirecting $36 million in capital cash back to the operating budget to restore two additional tranches of funding for Montgomery County Public Schools.
The County Council faced a $189 million structural gap on day one of the Council’s review of the budget, the result of a County Executive recommended budget built around tax increases that a majority of the Council had publicly opposed before the budget was even transmitted. With the body forced to close the gap themselves, Councilmember Jawando spent the weeks leading up to the cycle building and releasing his FY27 Alternative Budget Framework, a working draft of a balanced plan structured around core protections: no property tax rate increase, full funding for every negotiated collective bargaining agreement, honoring the revenue-sharing commitments with our municipalities, a 7.5 percent inflation adjustment for nonprofit service providers, preservation of the Income Tax Offset Credit and the Working Families Income Supplement, and a measured contribution from MCPS that asked the school system to share in fiscal discipline alongside every other County department.
“On April 27, I released a framework to show what closing that gap could look like,” said Councilmember Jawando. “It was not perfect. I said so on the day I released it. But the purpose was to show that you could close a $189 million gap without raising property taxes on moderate-income homeowners, without raising income taxes on the working middle class, without breaking faith with the County employees who negotiated their contracts in good faith, and without dismantling the safety net or shortchanging our schools.”
Across the six weeks of budget worksessions, Councilmember Jawando approached the budget with a discipline he believes the moment demanded, not only looking for places to reduce spending, but actively working to find new revenue and to understand each line item and each vendor contract in detail. He moved an additional 8-cent increase to the County’s 9-1-1 fee that generated $1.6 million in new dedicated revenue and passed 10-1. He went through each line item to identify reductions that would not impact services or personnel. And he held the line against the Council’s elimination of the Income Tax Offset Credit and the income tax restructure, voting against both because of their impact on moderate-income homeowners and middle-class households.
Advertisement
“This was not an exercise in finding the easiest cuts,” said Councilmember Jawando. “It was the work of going through budget line items, asking the harder questions, and finding revenue where revenue could be raised without asking working families to absorb more. That is what I tried to do every day of this cycle. The structural deficit this County faces is real. I am committed to continuing the work toward a genuinely progressive tax structure, one that raises revenue from those at the top who can readily afford it, rather than from the working middle class, because that is the only path that fixes this problem at its source.”
In the final hours of reconciliation, Councilmember Jawando moved to redirect $36 million in current revenue that had been allocated to the Capital Improvements Program back into the FY27 operating budget, funding two additional tranches of MCPS support that would otherwise have been cut. His colleagues joined him in that effort, and the motion passed. Unfortunately, even that collective effort was not enough to fully fund the Board of Education’s request, and it does not undo the painful cuts that remain.
“When this process started, MCPS was facing more than $100 million in cuts,” said Councilmember Jawando. “The cuts that this Council voted on today are not the cuts that were on the table when we began. They were deeper and initially reached further into our classrooms. The positions that are preserved today are preserved because educators, parents, and support staff showed up, testified, made calls, and made it impossible for this body to look away. This body responded. But MCPS will still end up cutting Special Education Resource Teachers, more than school-based social workers, Pupil Personnel Workers, and EML Therapeutic Counselors who serve our most vulnerable students.”
Advertisement
Councilmember Jawando also emphasized that the structural questions the budget did not answer remain on the table. “Our schools are still underfunded. Our nonprofit partners are still absorbing federal cuts they cannot replace. Our County workers are still being asked to do more with less. This budget did not solve that. It got us through this year. The work to fix the structural picture, the bargaining process, the revenue base, the long-term commitments this County has made without funding them, is work that starts right now. I am ready to lead it.”
# # #
Read the original article at mccouncil