By Adam Pagnucco.
MCPS Superintendent Thomas Taylor has made a huge ask in his new recommended six-year capital budget. How big is it? And what’s in it?
Let’s see for ourselves.
Let’s start with the total dollars in his request. Unlike the operating budget, which is annual in nature, the county’s Capital Improvements Program (CIP) is a six-year plan. Every even year (like 2026), the CIP is completely redrafted. Every odd year, it is amended. (Those amendments can be substantial.) MCPS’s CIP begins with a recommendation from the superintendent, then becomes a request by the school board, then goes to the county executive for a recommendation in January and is finally decided by the county council (along with the operating budget) in May.
The chart below shows the total dollars in MCPS’s part of the CIP since the FY05-10 amended budget. This is 22 consecutive budgets, folks! We aim to please the readers here at Montgomery Perspective.
Look at that last bar, the one in red. That’s Taylor’s recommendation. It’s huge, yeah? That explains the title of this series.
But wait, that chart is a bit unfair to Taylor for two reasons. First, it doesn’t take into account the effects of inflation. And second, here’s a dirty secret about the county’s capital budgets: the first two years matter more than the last four. That’s because the first two years in each amended budget are the closest approximation we can realistically get to how much is built. (Unfortunately, the published capital budgets have less backward-looking information than the operating budgets.) The next four years are basically a collection of plans and promises. County politicians have long made an art form of burying certain projects in out years and repeatedly delaying them. Sure, they stay in the budget but languish unbuilt for years. Here’s an example.
The chart below is a fairer measure of the true size of Taylor’s ask. Each bar represents the amount of MCPS’s capital budget as expressed in the last amended capital budget in which it appears. And each bar has been adjusted to 2025 dollars using the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria CPI-U to account for inflation. (Inflation in 2025 is assumed to reflect the current increase at this writing over 2024, while inflation after 2025 is assumed to equal the prior ten year average.)
Let’s ignore that last bar since a year six estimate (and a low-balled one at that) can never be assumed to match reality when that year approaches. The annual average from FY05 through FY25 is $335 million in 2025 dollars. The annual average from FY26 through FY31 in Taylor’s recommendation is $442 million. So in historical terms and adjusted for inflation, Taylor is effectively asking for a 32% increase over what MCPS has gotten before.
That’s still huge.
How does he want to spend the money? More in Part Three.