Montgomery County officials are using more than $150,000 that had been budgeted to buy food and water in county departments in closing a budget gap of nearly a billion dollars.
A budget office document obtained by the Washington Examiner shows thousands of dollars in unspent county money intended to buy food, such as pizza, and bottled and filtered water as the cash-strapped county inches closer to the end of the current budget year.
Last month, County Executive Ike Leggett said $35 million worth of unspent money was needed to offset dwindling county revenue.
Patrick Lacefield, the county executive’s spokesman, said during an interview that officials were, in effect, “vacuuming up the money in the couches.”
Also included in the “vacuuming” are thousands of dollars planned for dry-cleaning, landscaping and furniture purchases, according to the budget office.
When asked why taxpayer dollars were spent on bottled and filtered water, Lacefield said the county routinely paid that expense for county workers. He added that county officials will now have to pony up their own cash if they don’t want tap water. He also said the pizza money was slated primarily for after-school programs.
» The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission, which supplies water for 1.8 million residents in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, has never had a drinking water violation in 92 years, according to agency officials. Their most recent report card again found that water met or exceeded U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards.
Critics say the six figures in unspent food and water highlights exorbitant sums spent on nonessential services.
“There is a lack of transparency, quite frankly, in the entire budget process,” said Gino Renne, president of the Montgomery Municipal and County Government Employees Organization. “If that’s what hasn’t been used [from the food budget], I’d like to know what the actual expenditure was.”
County officials Wednesday could not provide the total spent on department food and water by the Examiner’s deadline.
The bulk of the unspent food money was in the county’s correction and rehabilitation department, which accounted for roughly $100,000 of the total.
