The Montgomery County Council took the first step toward raising the county’s minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2020 by introducing legislation calling for new annual increases.
The bill introduced Tuesday piggybacks on similar legislation that went into effect in 2014 that will raise the minimum wage in annual step increases to $11.50 by 2017. The county’s current minimum wage is $9.55 and is set to increase to $10.75 on July 1 and then to $11.50 on July 1, 2017.
The bill introduced by council member Marc Elrich would, if approved, continue those increases by raising the minimum wage to $12.50 in 2018, $13.75 in 2019 and $15 in 2020.
Elrich said the bill is about more than increasing wages—it’s about dealing with social and moral issues as well.
“If you want to make serious social change, it has to start with families being able to put food on the table and roofs over their heads,” Elrich said, adding that raising the wages of the county’s lowest earners would provide them with more income that can be spent locally. “This is how you build an economy,” he said.
He said the plan is for the council to work with neighboring jurisdictions such as Prince George’s County and Washington, D.C., to try to coordinate the wage increases with increases implemented by those municipalities as the county did when it first raised the minimum wage in 2014.
Already, D.C. officials, including Mayor Muriel Bowser, have called for raising the city’s minimum wage to $15 by 2020 as the cost of living in the D.C. region continues to rise.
Council members George Leventhal, Hans Riemer, Nancy Navarro and Tom Hucker are co-sponsoring the bill and a public hearing is scheduled for June 21.
Leventhal said the federal government’s minimum wage—which is $7.25 per hour—doesn’t provide a living wage for people living in high-cost jurisdictions and it’s reasonable for cities, counties and states to raise it on their own. He said the council will research the impact the proposed increase would have on county businesses and how many jobs could be lost.
Navarro said 72,000 people in Montgomery County are living at or below the poverty level and raising the minimum wage may help reduce county spending on safety net programs that aid those residents.
“This is the starting point,” Navarro said. “As we did previously, we will work through some details. We’ll do it in a way that makes sense.”
