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Next Friday, I present my final budget proposal to the County Council. The theme is “A House In Good Order.”
I promised residents at each of this year’s budget town halls that this budget would leave a house in good order for my successor. I want whoever that is to be successful, and I have no need to employ the fiscally irresponsible budget gimmicks that politicians so often use in their final year.
The most satisfying thing about this year’s budget is that we can see the return on the investments we made in the last seven budgets, and the impacts of the fiscal discipline that we’ve practiced. It’s also a really good budget that delivers a lot of what our residents and our department heads asked for.
But it doesn’t fund everything. We never can. So I want to share some of my thinking on the tough decisions, on saying, “No, not this year.”
I’ll start with a proposal to create a county-funded and administered grant program to pay for security at organizations vulnerable to hate crimes. It came primarily from the four synagogues in Anne Arundel County, but has attracted support from others.
I took the proposal seriously. Antisemitism is a national epidemic, as is hate against African Americans, Muslims, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community. All of these groups have enhanced security measures in the last year and a half.
Montgomery County has a $1.7 million safety grant program, and Howard County and Prince George’s County had much smaller programs in previous budgets. None, in my view, come close to meeting the needs, and while some have said that even a small program sends a signal that we care, I believe that a small grant program that rejects most applicants leaves too many feeling rejected.
Our county’s strategy is delivered through our new Hate Crimes Prevention Program within our Office of Equity and Human Rights and with our Police Department. The former provides public education, prevention, and victim services. Police does free security assessments at facilities, makes recommendations to federal grant programs, and regularly waives special event fees when deploying officers for these organizations. It’s ongoing work that is done in close collaboration with the leaders of the impacted organizations.
I met with advocates for a safety grant program on March 19, with our Police Department and Hate Crimes Prevention Program present. I told them that there would be no grant program in our upcoming budget proposal, but that I wanted to hear more about the need, their security programs, and where the gaps exist. Police held a follow-up meeting with the group to go into more detail.
Saying no to direct grants was not easy, but I wanted to do it in person. A future county executive may see things differently, but I believe that the focus of our county work to protect synagogues and other vulnerable institutions should remain with our Police Department and Hate Crimes Prevention Program.
Our International Association of Fire Fighters launched a robust campaign this year during our Budget Town Halls in pursuit of an additional 350 firefighters. It referenced a consultant report that offered ambitious staffing recommendations.
The annual cost of a new firefighter to the county is about $100,000 when equipment and benefits are included. The $35 million for all 350 would raise our property tax rate 3.5 cents per $100 of value, taking us from 97.7 cents to just over a dollar and one cent. As an alternative we could raise our income tax for all tiers to the state maximum rate.
Our firefighters noted that we could use a federal SAFER grant to pay for a part of the new hires’ salaries for the first three years, but Trump has paused those grants. We don't know if or when they will return.
Since I took office, we have increased our firefighter staffing from 853 to 927, with the help of a SAFER grant our first year. The budget that I present next week will accelerate that progress, but it will come nowhere near the level that our union is calling for. I believe that doing so would be fiscally irresponsible, and would prevent us from delivering other essential county services.
We meet National Fire Protection Association standards for all of the incidents we respond to. We meet them by responding from multiple stations. That’s how our system was designed to function, and it’s one of the best anywhere.
Growing our police department has been limited, not by budgets but by recruitment challenges. When I came in we had 759 sworn officer positions but fewer than 700 officers. Today we have 811 positions, but 28 of them are vacant. Our struggle in recent years has been finding qualified applicants for the job. That’s why we raised starting pay to be the highest in the state and made our department a more desirable place to work.
There has been a lot of discussion about how many officers our county should have. The Fraternal Order of Police has pushed for increases in the range of 350, and I’ve been frustrated that we still haven’t reached the 824 recommended in a 2016 study. An officer costs a bit more than a firefighter, so the tax increase we’d need to grow to an 1150-officer department would be higher than the one we’d need for the firefighters. That kind of growth is not in the budget that I will propose next week, and I’m not convinced that it’s what we need, even if we had the money and the applicant pool to get there.
What we need, in my view, is to make our residents safer by implementing specific service enhancements recommended by our chiefs when we can afford them. The good news is that we do exactly that in this budget, and it does include new positions. Let’s hope we can fill them.
The big fish is Anne Arundel County Public Schools. It’s half our budget, and it should be. It determines our future.
All I’ll say on its funding for now is we stretched. It’s not the $124 million increase that our Board of Education requested, but we set a record, by a lot.
I am looking forward to telling the whole story on May 1, because I’m damn proud of what we’ve done. I hope that you’ll be satisfied with the progress, and will also be inspired to keep the work going, even after I return to your side next year as an engaged resident demanding a better future.
Until next week…