By Adam Pagnucco.
Reardon “Sully” Sullivan, who organized last year’s successful charter amendment campaign reducing term limits for the county executive from three to two, has formed a new ballot issue committee to gather signatures for another charter amendment. This one targets county government spending.
Sully engaged in his favorite activity: dropping off petition signatures.
Sullivan was the GOP candidate for county executive in 2022 and is currently the chair of the county’s Republican Party. He filed his new ballot issue committee, the Committee to Control MoCo Spending, with the State Board of Elections on March 15. When I asked him about the committee, he sent me the following statement.
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The Committee to Control Montgomery County Spending (Control MoCo Spending) was formed to limit the spending increase that any County Executive and County Council can legislate to the prior year Consumer Price Index (CPI).
The County Executive and County Council have a long history of lavish and sometimes reckless spending relative to our metropolitan neighbors and raising taxes to support their excessive spending. We currently find ourselves with yet another round of tax increases in under two years. The County tax and spend proclivity on top of the pending State tax increases will make Montgomery unbearable. These policies will force people and businesses to leave the County and further erode our tax base.
Financial discipline must be imposed on the County Executive and County Council. At some point hard choices must be made and spending trimmed to provide the best return on our tax investment. Currently, the County Executive and County Council vote to raise taxes under the guise of education; however, once the tax money is raised it is swept into the general fund and used at the discretion of the Council. Due to the state “Madaleno clause,” the County has little say in the amount of taxes that can be raised in the name of education, so we keep getting tax increases labeled as “education,” but used at the discretion of the County Council.
The Committee to Control Montgomery County Spending seeks to get a question on the ballot that will limit the spending of the County Executive and County Council to the prior year CPI.
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A note on what Sullivan refers to as the “Madaleno clause.” Montgomery County and a few other counties around the state have charter limits on property tax increases. During the Great Recession, some of the counties, including MoCo, had problems with meeting state mandates on public school spending because their revenues dried up. The state also had budget problems and one of its “solutions” was shifting a portion of teacher pension costs onto the counties. To make it easier to pay for school spending and the pension shift, the General Assembly chose to allow counties to evade their charter limits on property tax increases for the purpose of steering more funds to schools. Then-State Senator Rich Madaleno, now the county’s chief administrative officer, was one of the architects of the loophole. Because money is fungible, that loophole has essentially eviscerated county charter limits on property tax hikes. MoCo used it two years ago and County Executive Marc Elrich is invoking it again this year.
Sullivan’s amendment seeks to deal with this issue by addressing spending rather than taxes. I have asked him whether his amendment would provide the county council a way to increase spending above the CPI, perhaps through a unanimous vote. I will update this post when I hear back.
Sullivan’s group must now gather at least 10,000 valid signatures from county voters to place his amendment on the 2026 general election ballot. Last year, Sullivan submitted 15,956 signatures for his term limits amendment. He was assisted in gathering the signatures and promoting the ballot question by nearly $200,000 from the county’s real estate industry. It’s unclear whether such assistance is on hand again.
I imagine the county employee unions will not sit idly by if this amendment is placed before the voters. Let the next ballot question war begin!