By Adam Pagnucco.
Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman, one of the most progressive local officials in Maryland, is proposing a property tax cut in his FY26 recommended operating budget. Pittman’s move comes as his neighbor, Howard County Executive Calvin Ball, has recommended no tax hikes and the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors just passed a large property tax cut.
Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman. Photo credit: Anne Arundel County Government.
In discussing his recommended budget, Pittman mentions the same thing that is on the mind of the vast majority of elected officials in the region: the existential economic threat of President Donald Trump. In his budget message, he wrote:
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We are in a defensive posture. Direct and cruel attacks are being launched every day by the federal government. Those attacks target our workers, our businesses, our retirees, our judges, our men and women in uniform, our schools, our immigrants, our colleges and universities, and our environment.
Our job – the job of our agencies, our elected officials, our nonprofit partners – is to protect our people – to protect them from harm.
That’s what I was told growing up, growing up with a father who had worked in the Pentagon overseeing Civil Defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nobody knew then how many Americans would survive a nuclear attack, but they built bomb shelters and planned urban evacuations – to protect as many people as they could.
Nobody knows how far this federal government will go in its efforts to dismantle the public and private sectors that have made our nation great, but in Anne Arundel County, we will protect our people, and the foundation of that protection is financial. It is how we tax and how we spend the public’s money.
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Here is what Pittman wrote about his county’s fiscal approach and taxes.
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That fiscal foundation is strong in Anne Arundel County. It’s strong because we made it that way.
We grew our economy, budgeted responsibly, taxed progressively, and now find ourselves able to protect our people from the worst of the federal impacts while keeping our taxes the lowest in central Maryland.
This budget does not raise taxes.
Our proposed income tax remains lower than all central Maryland counties and includes a progressive structure to protect our lowest income earners and ask a little more from those at the very top.
Our property tax rates will actually decline, from 98.3 to 97.7 cents for every $100 of assessed property. Our neighbors pay from $1.10 to over $2.
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But wait, doesn’t cutting property taxes mean cutting spending? Not this time. Pittman’s all-funds budget increases total spending by $172 million, or 4.6 percent. The county’s local appropriation to its school system is rising by $52 million (5.6%) and the total school budget is rising by $93 million (5.5%). This spending is supported by growing collections in property tax revenues ($37 million, 4.0%) and income tax revenues ($37 million, 4.5%). That’s right, property tax collections are still growing despite Pittman’s rate cut because of rising assessments. (Assessments in MoCo are also rising substantially.)
What makes this remarkable is that Pittman is no anti-tax ideologue. Instead, he is at least as progressive as Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich and has proposed tax hikes in the past. He just believes that with Trump about to pounce on his county, he should not add to his residents’ woes with a local tax increase.
Besides budget restraint, here is something else that Pittman, Howard County Executive Calvin Ball and a majority of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors have in common: they’re all Democrats. They are proving that Democrats can budget prudently and prepare responsibly for tough times.
Can that be said about governing Democrats in Montgomery County? We’ll find out soon enough.