By Adam Pagnucco.
Here is today’s question.
The county’s more than $7 billion budget funds hundreds of programs. Name one program that you think should be reduced or eliminated and quantify the savings for taxpayers.
Mithun Banerjee (D)
On April 29, Banerjee requested more time to respond due to medical reasons. At that time, he told me, “I was sick & still I am sick. I will try my level best to send them to you at the earliest.”
Andrew Friedson (D)
I would consolidate the county’s overlapping and redundant functions to streamline operations and improve consistency. Currently, several centralized departments like Office of Public Information, Office of Procurement, and Department of Technology and Business Enterprise Solutions have large staffs that are replicated with similar functions within other departments that also have their own communications, procurement, and technology personnel and roles. This leads to a lack of integration and coordination across county governments and prevents process improvements from being fully realized. When the current Procurement Director made significant improvements to the procurement process, for instance, that left out the large departments, which have their own separate procurement processes that continue to impede service delivery, frustrate local contractors, and entrench unnecessary redundancies.
Evan Glass (D)
The most concrete example of my approach to budget reductions is what I did as Council President: I cut the County Executive’s proposed 10% property tax increase by more than half without harming our schools, our labor contracts, or our social safety net. I did it by conducting rigorous oversight of every department, restructuring vacant positions, and refusing to fund programs that lacked clear outcomes.
As County Executive, I will apply that same standard across the board. Programs whose budgets are growing significantly faster than inflation, or that cannot demonstrate measurable results for residents, will face tough questions. That is not ideological — it is responsible stewardship of $7 billion in taxpayer money. The goal isn’t to cut indiscriminately, but to ensure every dollar delivers real value for our residents.
Peter James (D)
That’s $8 billion. Just one? I got dozens. The biggest low hanging fruit is the $1.23 billion MCPS CIP planning budget. You can plan a entire city the size of New York with that budeget. It is double the pork ridden industry standard rate of 8% to 10% of total project.
My companies moto is that “We go Beyond What is Humanly Possible” by using Nuerevolutionary Algorithms that automate the optimization of large complex systems, I will replace the most of human planning contractors with just a few smart humans that design the projects at an high level of abstraction and curate the results of the automated system.
The human brain is not capable of comprehending system with thousands to millions of interactive variables. So MCPS hires large engineering firms with large teams and large markups to do a poor job of planning. By automating this process planning costs go from $1.23B to $30M and take 100th the amount of time to complete.
There are hundreds of such processes that need optimization in the County government and it related agencies like WSSC, HOC, MNCPPP, etc.
Will Jawando (D)
Did not answer the questionnaire.
Shelly Skolnick (R)
Did not answer the questionnaire.
Esther Wells (R)
Our leaders have shown fiscal illiteracy by using one-time COVID grants to fund ongoing expenditures. Now, they want to raise your taxes to cover their failures. The FY2026 budget reflects a dangerous “annualization” of emergency programs, shifting costs from expiring federal grants directly onto your back.
I will eliminate the unnecessary expansion of the DHHS administrative infrastructure, specifically targeting the $43 million (8%) budget spike driven by these grant-to-tax transitions. I would immediately cut the $1.3 million added to the tax base for 11 new permanent administrative positions, along with the $1 million in salary adjustments inflating our liabilities.
These high-volume, repetitive roles are ripe for automation. By innovating our processes and implementing AI-driven systems to handle Medicaid processing and high-volume DHHS inquiries, we can generate massive tax savings while providing faster, more accurate service to those in need.
Taxpayers cannot be the “lender of last resort” for expired grants. By automating these functions rather than hiring permanent staff, we stop the bloat and reverse the need for property tax hikes. As a CPA, I will ensure we stop robbing our future to pay for the fiscal indiscipline of the past.