By Adam Pagnucco.
In making the case for his 10 percent property tax hike, County Executive Marc Elrich depicted it as being dedicated to MCPS.
In one sense, he is right. State law allows counties to evade their charter limits on taxes to increase funding for schools. I will relate the history of that law soon.
But in another sense, his claim is misleading because money is fungible. Because the executive can use a tax hike to increase MCPS funding outside the charter limit, he can redirect money that would otherwise have gone to MCPS towards other functions. In fact, his recommended FY24 operating budget is full of significant increases for the majority of county government. Claims that extra money is going only to schools are pure fiction.
Let’s look at two important budget schedules: Schedule B-2 (Expenditures Detailed By Agency, Government Function and Department) and Schedule A-6 (Contribution To/From Other Funds). Schedule B-2 shows budgets by department and agency while Schedule A-6 shows the county’s local contribution to MCPS separately from the large amounts of state aid going to the school system. The table below summarizes the increases in Elrich’s FY24 budget for the largest departments and agencies in county government.
As you can see, Elrich would like to increase roughly half the functions of government by at least 7 percent. Six spending items – utilities, human resources, general services, environmental protection, urban districts and health and human services – are getting double digit increases that exceed MCPS. These increases would not be possible without the tax hike.
Some of this is related to inflation, which is outside the executive’s control. That is certainly the case with utilities. But some of it is also related to his aggressive expansion of government. Elrich’s new budget adds 177 positions in county government and 24 positions in Park and Planning. That’s on top of 539 positions in MCPS and the thousands of new positions he added in his first term.
I don’t question Elrich’s contention that real dollar local per pupil contributions are down from their peak of more than a decade ago. He is right about that and I have written about that problem myself. But that just makes the case for one of Elrich’s other proposals in the past – his good idea for restructuring county government to save money. Elrich should have done that during his first term. Instead, he abandoned that initiative as his restructuring work group recommended eliminating just 9 positions. The Marc Elrich we were sold in 2018 – a responsible, careful reformer who would “streamline county government” – bears little resemblance to the spendthrift of today.
Here is a sound way to manage a budget. Identify your top priorities, the things that you absolutely must fund. Then pay for expanding those priorities by restraining the growth in everything else. That takes strategy and discipline but over time, it works. Our problem is that strategy and discipline are almost wholly absent among the county’s leaders, leading directly to the ten percent property tax hike that is now on the table.
So sure, let’s discuss MCPS’s needs and also how the school system spends your money. But let’s not pretend that the tax hike is just for MCPS. Because money is fungible, the tax hike finances more spending throughout the entire government.
The question now is whether you want to pay for it.