By Adam Pagnucco.
Reardon “Sully” Sullivan and County Executive Marc Elrich disagree on just about everything. After all, Elrich is a long-time socialist who regularly proposes tax increases whereas Sully is the de facto leader of MoCo’s Republican Party who led an effort to remove Elrich from office via term limits. But they have one area of agreement.
The Stop the Spend charter amendment would limit annual growth in the operating budget to the rate of inflation unless all council members vote to override it. On his website, Sully writes, “I have been very clear about my support for reducing spending and keeping taxes in check. That is why I started the ‘Stop the Spend’ ballot petition to limit spending in the County to the rate of inflation.” According to Bethesda Today, Elrich predicts the amendment “could lead to chronic underinvestment in public services and infrastructure.” Both men believe the proposal would limit spending. That’s why Sully supports it and Elrich opposes it, but they don’t differ greatly on what they think it would do.
I’m not sure that they’re right.
Let’s start here. During every budget, the county council is inundated by demands from groups and individuals that they spend more money. The proposed uses range far afield: MCPS operations, capital projects, nonprofit inflation adjustments, various other programs and… well, almost everything. When the budget passes, council members tend not to express regrets that they spent too much. Rather, they will say things like, “We have more needs than resources but we did our best.” In other words, they want to spend even more.
Sully and Elrich assume that the Stop the Spend amendment would enable a lone fiscally conservative council member to dig in his or her heels to unilaterally limit spending. But who would this fiscal conservative be? Sully thinks it could be a hypothetical Republican council member, but no Republican has been elected to the council in more than 20 years. As for the Democrats, anyone foolish enough to hold up a budget for the purpose of limiting spending would likely lose almost every union and progressive endorsement in the next election. Who needs that kind of headache?
A more likely outcome is that a holdout would press for more spending, not less.
Think about the huge fights over the MCPS operating budget in the last few years. The usual demand from MCPS management and its employee unions is full funding of its request, every penny. The council typically awards MCPS 98-99% of its request, which amounts to substantial increases, but they are nonetheless accused of “cutting” the school district.
So what would happen if a lone council member decides to force his or her colleagues to give MCPS every penny it wants? This person would be celebrated as the council’s only champion of education, achieve a lock on the treasured Apple Ballot endorsement and be seen as the front runner in the next executive race. This scenario is so likely that if I were the teachers union, I would help Sully gather signatures next time to increase their leverage over the budget.
I’m joking. Kind of.
Another likely scenario is that a council member could use the amendment as leverage to seek funding for a pet project. Or probably projects, plural.
Let’s go back to 2023 when Council Member Kristin Mink wanted to allocate tax dollars for “multilingual, conversation-based canvassing” and cited the work of a favored nonprofit. Mink couldn’t get the votes for that idea and it died. But what if she didn’t need any votes? And if Mink or some other council member successfully presses for a pet project like this, why wouldn’t some others do so too? Soon enough the budget could get loaded up with individual initiatives of all kinds, many of which would likely outlive the tenure of their sponsors. In fact, a future council president might decide to preemptively allocate a certain amount of money to each council member for individual spending priorities with the understanding that acceptance of the money comes with the price of voting for the budget that contains it.
Would any of this actually happen? I don’t know. But Sully and Elrich don’t know either. And in the hands of progressive politicians like ours, budget leverage such as that stemming from the Stop the Spend amendment may be more likely to be used to increase spending rather than limit it.