For Immediate Release: Thursday, May 16, 2024
First, I appreciate the County Council’s embrace of most of my Fiscal Year 2025 budget recommendations. It appears the Council adopted 99.5 percent of my proposed budget, including critical compensation increases for our hard-working and dedicated County employees.
Second, I am deeply concerned that the Council’s process is hard to reconcile with the principles of good government and smart policy. After weeks of public committee sessions supporting proposals and virtually all unanimous votes to fund them, the County Council made significant decisions in private to reverse some of their decisions, without public conversation, transparency, or accountability.
Today, the Council voted to cut funding for food for needy neighbors just days after choosing to use existing surplus reserve funds for a corporate assistance initiative. While that initiative may be helpful, it was elevated above other programs and not considered in the context of the overall budget and needs.
Additionally, the publicly presented budget document does not show that the Council’s straw vote eliminated funding to recruit more young women into public safety and provide better health care to our firefighters.
In a confusing decision that could have been explored in a public session, Councilmembers unanimously rejected efforts to bill insurance companies for the care we provide in the community to offset the burden on our taxpayers. The Council also unanimously rejected funding to replace aging police equipment and comply with new state criminal prosecution standards.
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I am also concerned about the unanimous vote to reject climate change proposals even though we all agree there is a climate emergency. These are a few of the decisions released today after private deliberations.
I do not doubt that each Councilmember has a deep-rooted concern for our community and our residents. I have heard them express this sentiment on numerous occasions. However, I am very concerned about the lack of public conversation and transparency.
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As County Executive and as a former at-large Councilmember, I am very mindful of the difficult nature of budget decisions. We will always have more worthy programs and practices than we can fund. As at least one Councilmember noted this morning, these challenges are even more difficult given the Council’s decision last year to ask the school system to use one-time federal dollars to fund ongoing needs rather than increasing the tax that would have provided ongoing funds for these critical programs.
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As I have stated before, we have the lowest commercial tax rate in the region. If we can work together to modernize our tax system, we will better target our funding sources and resources. We had the opportunity to work together with the state legislature earlier this year to achieve progressivity in our income tax rate and better target our property tax rates through differential taxing. However, the Council declined to work with us to achieve these goals.
If we used a differentiated property tax method similar to Northern Virginia’s approach, we would have raised more money from the commercial sector while still having a lower commercial rate than Virginia to fund critical, congestion-relieving transportation projects. This approach would have allowed us to meet other needs without increasing the burden on our residents.
Again, the decision to make these final budget decisions in private, reversing public committee votes, erodes confidence in the process. I believe that a transparent process leads to a better product, and the public can better understand the difficult choices we must make. This secretive process masks the debate about what our priorities are within the limits of our budget.
Some of these decisions embodied in today’s vote will require us to return to the Council in the coming months to request that critically important needs be funded in a timely manner. I look forward to working with them and the public to improve our process in the future.
Release ID: 24-235
Media Contact: Office of Public Information 240-777-6507
Categories: Executive Office
For updates and link to press release, see here: http://www2.montgomerycountymd.gov/mcgportalapps/Press_Detail.aspx?Item_ID=45255