By Adam Pagnucco.
Recently, I reported that Council Member Laurie-Anne Sayles left town for a week during one of the county council’s most critical periods of working on the budget. Sayles replied that she attended council sessions virtually even though she was also supposed to be attending sessions at two conferences in Hawaii. Some of my readers criticized her for this while others replied that remote work had become common during the pandemic.
Later, I reported that taxpayers paid for part of the costs of the trip. A week later, the Banner confirmed my work.
So how serious of a problem is this? I went through four operating budget seasons when I worked as a chief of staff at the county council. Let me bring you deep into the council’s world to explain what it’s like to go through a normal budget.
There is a LOT of reading.
The first thing to keep in mind about the budget is that it requires a lot of reading to understand. Excuse me, I meant to say READING. The county executive’s recommended FY27 operating budget is 872 pages long. There may also be leftover issues from the county executive’s recommended FY27 capital budget, which is 1,026 pages long. Then there are the analysis packets from the council’s central staff, which collectively go for hundreds more pages – at least. I haven’t even mentioned the agency budgets and all the emails from the public. It’s overwhelming.
I’m not suggesting that every council member reads every page of this. (I bet Marilyn Praisner came close!) But they need to read a lot to keep up. And that reading time competes with time in meetings.
There are a LOT of meetings.
My council member, Hans Riemer, was a hard worker. He took meetings with everyone. And that “everyone” ran the full gamut of stakeholders in county government. The executive branch people. The agency people (MCPS, the college and Park and Planning). Nonprofits. Civic association folks. Business people. PTAs. Unions. Other council members and their staff. The council’s central staff. There were days on which we held 5 or 6 meetings, all on different subjects. Hans was not an anomaly. All the council members and their staff were doing the same thing.
An aside. One day during budget season, a group came in that didn’t want to discuss funding. They just wanted to talk about some good work they were doing. I couldn’t believe it. “Wait, hold up. You don’t want any money?” I asked. They said no. I was overjoyed. “Can you stay a while? Keep talking! Should we order a pizza? Hey Hans, can we skip the next meeting and just hang out with these guys?” Hans laughed but we took the next meeting. And yes, that one was about money.
Oh the good old days!
There is a LOT of communication.
With so many hundreds of funding items at stake – not to mention the big stuff like taxes and reserves – there are a ton of people saying a lot of things at all times. It’s hard to stay on top of it but you just have to do it. Again, this is a huge challenge for time management.
My perspective comes from being a former chief of staff. It was vitally important that my council member be accessible day and night – and he was. I needed to bring him information. He needed to react, ask about it and give me instructions. He had information for me too. Without this close communication, I would have been flying blind and he would have been ineffective in pursuing his priorities. We were talking constantly, right up until the final day.
Here are just a few examples of the things that I might tell him during a normal budget.
“Council Member X wants to fund the same thing we do. She says we should also talk to Council Member Y.” “We just got 200 emails from people asking about a community center in Potomac.” “MCEA just held a rally. Here are the pictures on Facebook.” “Another council member’s chief of staff wants our support on a funding item. What should I tell him?” “Department Director Z needs an emergency meeting tomorrow.” “That vote that we needed? She changed her mind. We need to get another vote from someone else.”
I could easily add another 30 things off the top of my head. It was non-stop for weeks.
I have no idea how I could have served my council member effectively if he was off at some conference for a week during the budget. But that didn’t happen. Hans Riemer did his job well and was engaged at all times.
OK, the above is a description of what went on during a normal budget. This year’s budget was anything but normal. Old timers still in the building tell me it was the craziest budget since the Great Recession. I worked there during the second half of the Great Recession, so let me tell you, that is some major cray cray.
The main factor making this budget so challenging was that most council members wanted to avoid the property and income tax increases recommended by County Executive Marc Elrich. That was not an easy thing to do since those tax hikes together raised $189 million. Resisting them meant finding that money elsewhere.
Council President Natali Fani-González and Council Member Will Jawando both published plans for avoiding those tax hikes. Those plans contained numerous unpopular elements that were hard to swallow and the county’s chief administrative officer indicated that many of Jawando’s would violate existing laws or contracts. Adding to the pressure was aggressive pushback from MCPS Superintendent Thomas Taylor, who did not want his budget request to be reduced. Finally, eight votes were required to pass the budget.
All of this meant that the typically exhausting budget process was now excruciating as well. One council member told me, “Without exaggeration, I probably had 50 additional meetings in the 10 days she was gone and HUNDREDS of texts and phone calls.”
During the week that Sayles was away, the council decided on one of the most complicated aspects of its budget plan: a move to install progressive income tax brackets while abolishing the $692 Income Tax Offset Credit received by most homeowners to pay for it. Fani-González, the council’s Government Operations and Fiscal Policy Committee and Council Member Marilyn Balcombe had different proposals for how to do that. Additionally, some council members floated adopting part of Elrich’s property tax rate increase. This involved heavy deliberations while Sayles was in Hawaii.
Every council member knows that operating budget deliberations occur in April and May every year. Every council member knows how much attention and effort it takes. The huge majority of them clear space on their schedules so they can fully participate in the process, put in the work and get a budget done. There is time enough for out-of-town events later.
Now it’s up to you, the readers. What judgment do you make of the account told above?