Facing a budget deficit of about $240 million, Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett reiterated a call for higher taxes at a budget forum Monday night in Bethesda.
Leggett first expressed the need to raise property taxes above the county’s charter limit in an interview with The Washington Post last week. He faces an uphill battle with his call to raise taxes above the charter limit, or greater than the rate of inflation, because the move would require the votes of all nine County Council members.
“If you look at what we’re facing today, over a $200 million deficit potentially, the cuts at the state level and the real challenge that we have going forward, I’m not going to say that taxes above the charter limit is not a possibility,” Leggett said. “I think it’s just a question of when it happens, whether it’s this year or next year.”
Leggett described the fiscal realities facing the county. Since the recession of 2008, he said the county has cut a total of $2.9 billion in expenditures from the county budget—including cutting 10 percent of the county’s employee positions, reducing health and retirement contributions, trimming department budgets and not providing step increases or cost of living adjustments to employee salaries.
“I don’t think you can find anywhere in this region, especially any county executive or mayor or governor who did as much as I did for as long as I did,” Leggett said.
He noted that since 2008 he hasn’t proposed raising taxes above the charter limit. But he said Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan is not interested in increasing the state budget and can’t count on increased state funding.
Monday night’s forum provided residents with an overview of Leggett’s thinking and the opportunity to pitch their own budget ideas while the county executive formulates his fiscal 2016 budget proposal, which he is scheduled to send to the council in March.
After hearing from parents whose kids attend schools feeding into Walter Johnson and Walt Whitman high schools, who described overcrowded schools, Leggett criticized Montgomery County Public Schools for its “opaque” budget.
He noted that the county’s budget website allows visitors to access spending records, budget documents and vendor contracts. “What we don’t see, and what citizens say constantly we don’t see, is the same thing from the school system,” Leggett said.
He urged MCPS “to be more transparent so when you make the argument for additional resources, people see precisely where the money is going and can make those comparisons. People will be much more comfortable.” He said many people are “simply in the dark about what we are spending in our school system.” This year, the school system’s budget is expected to take up about 49 percent of the total county budget or about $2.3 billion.
Earlier this year the school system did launch its own Open Data Portal that includes the superintendent’s recommended fiscal 2016 budget, enrollment statistics and facilities information as part of an effort to provide more transparency.
Leggett also made the case again for the Independent Transit Authority (ITA), a five-member board that could raise funds and guide bus rapid transit projects in the county. He shelved legislation on Saturday after pushback from local legislators and the public that would have enabled the county to create the transit authority, but said Monday night he’d like to continue to pursue it.
He said the authority could be used to “tax ourselves” to provide the funding the county needs to pay for the expensive up-front costs of building a mass transit network and then later recoup those costs from the state over time.
By building the network, Leggett said, the county could benefit from increased tax revenue from new development that could provide a buffer against higher taxes in the future.
Some county officials said they were blindsided by the plan to create a transit authority when it was introduced last month. The proposal called for the ability to create a new tax that could go over the charter limit. It would also remove certain powers from the county’s Department of Transportation and the County Council and give them to the new authority, such as managing the county’s Ride On bus network.
“Some have objected and said ‘Well, I don’t like that idea,’” Leggett said, “and my response is ‘Well, give me your idea’ because we simply cannot stand still and if your idea is to say, let’s have transit stand in line behind all these other projects, then our children and our grandchildren will be standing in line for a long period of time and these projects will stay on paper and never move.”
He said the county must debate whether is a need for more mass transit and how to pay for it.
“To me,” Leggett said, “I think my idea thus far… still to me is a better idea.”
Two council members—Roger Berliner and George Leventhal—put forth a slightly different proposal Monday that would require commercial property owners to pay a more substantial cost toward building bus rapid transit networks. Council member Marc Elrich also has said he would support this idea. The reasoning, according to council members, is that commercial property owners would likely see an increase in their property values with transit constructed because they would then have the right to build larger buildings under approved master plans.
On Monday, Leggett said he still believes his plan for the transit authority—which would tax residential and commercial property owners equally—is the better one.
