By Adam Pagnucco.
On June 27, the Greater Bethesda Chamber of Commerce invited me to moderate a panel with Council Members Andrew Friedson and Kate Stewart at their annual real estate update. I’m a writer, not a public speaker, so I normally decline these invitations. However, it’s never a good idea to say no to super-realtor Jane Fairweather, so I did it – this time! The event was attended by a who’s-who of the county’s real estate sector, which supplies more direct revenue to the county budget than any other single industry. I asked several questions to Friedson and Stewart to which they graciously supplied answers. I transcribed them as best as I could for this series.
Let’s get started!
Question
My first question is for Council Member Stewart. This is your first year on the county council but it’s not your first year as an elected official. You have an interesting position. You are the chair of the Government Operations committee, which plays an outsize role on budgetary issues.
This is your first county budget and it was a mammoth budget. It comes over from the exec, it lands in your lap. It’s got a ten percent property tax hike, it’s got a big increase for schools, it’s got big increases for a lot of things. It was a “welcome to the council” moment.
So my question to you is, when you saw this come over to you, first year, chair of Government Operations, big budget, big tax increase, did you have a “holy cow” moment when you saw that? Please describe your reaction to it and then how you proceeded to deal with it and make decisions on it.
Council Member Stewart
Well thank you Adam, and first I want to say, thank you to everyone. I’m very glad to be here this morning with you to talk about these issues.
So I will say when we got the budget, the first meeting, we went over – we like to say “across the street” – to the county exec’s building, and we sat there with our colleagues and it was presented. I think many of us, especially on the Government Operations and Fiscal Policy Committee, we were prepared to see a pretty hefty property tax being proposed – not as hefty as what actually was proposed. And I will say on Government Operations and Fiscal Policy, we had already started preparing for the budget we knew was coming. We looked at some of the one-time infusion of funds we had gotten over the winter in the increases in income tax, knowing that that money was not going to be sustained over the years and what we did on Government Operations and Fiscal Policy was to write a letter to the county executive and say, “Treat this money as one-time funds. Do not put this into the operating budget.” Unfortunately, he did not see the wisdom up here! And I’d note that Council Vice President Friedson also serves on Government Operations as does Council Member Sidney Katz.
So some of us were surprised at the full ten cent increase. We had been prepared on Government Operations to deal with a very difficult budget this year. And I’m very proud of the work that our committee did as we went through the budget process.
Question
Thank you. My next question is for Council Member Friedson. This is your fifth year on the council so you are not a new member. But you are the council vice-president this year. Next year, if everything proceeds as it normally does, you will be the council president. “President Friedson” has a nice ring to it, yeah? So assuming that you are council president, there’s going to be some tough challenges next year as there were this year. What would you like to get done as council president?
Council Members react to the “nice ring” of “President Friedson.”
Council Member Friedson
Well, this is a good entre to that conversation. We have economic challenges here that we need to really be serious about addressing. So economic development is going to be a key part of it. I think that we talk about it a lot. We do a really good job of that. I think our execution needs work.
And there’s a big emphasis that I’d like to place on that. Not just in a one-off here’s an economic development project we can work on, or here’s an effort we can undertake, but ensuring that we have a sense of urgency that we really feel. The numbers tell the story. The story is not as good as we would like. Montgomery County has assets that almost every other jurisdiction in the country would love to have, would sacrifice almost anything to have. We’re like a roster with a lot of talent but not as good of a game plan as what we need.
So we need to make changes. And I think the challenge that all of us face in the aggregate is we’re a really good place to live, we’re a solid place for the most part to do business. And so we have rested on those laurels for a long time. And we accept the fact that things are going pretty good. But if you accept the fact that things are going pretty good for long enough, everybody else will step up their game. And you will realize that when you look at the numbers that they have not only caught up, they have started to surpass us in certain areas. That’s not acceptable for a place like Montgomery County where we don’t have an excuse not to be leading the region. We don’t have an excuse not to be leading the nation because we do have so many incredible assets.
So that’s a big part of it. Obviously housing. As chair of the Planning, Housing and Parks Committee, I serve on that, similar to the committee in the prior four-year term. I’m going to focus on housing so that will continue to be at the forefront of the agenda. But competitiveness really has to be first and foremost. Otherwise we can’t honestly do all of the other things that we want to do – all of the social safety net programs, all of those proposals, all of our environmental sustainability numbers, our public education – if we don’t have an economy that supports wages, that supports families and providing and pumping money into the economy. That’s economic development and that’s what I am going to be focused on next year.
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Tomorrow: the budget and taxes.