Pretend you’re a member of the Montgomery County Council. You find out your public school system is seeking a legal opinion about how much money you owe it. How do you find out? They cc you on the petition, but they never told you they were going to send it. Are you still BFFs (because yes, this is middle school)?
On page 12 of Thursday’s editions, The Washington Examiner quotes Nancy Floreen and Phil Andrews, two Montgomery council members who say no way. We also caught up with Marc Elrich, D-at large, who echoed similar sentiments:
“I think everybody’s shocked because some of us had talked with school board members as recently as Friday, I know I talked to a board member on Sunday, and they didn’t say anything about it. I have nothing nice to say, so I won’t say it. It’s ridiculous. We don’t even know what the budget is, and they’re already trying to tie the hands of the council.”
…
“If in their view we had to make “maintenance of effort,” we would be cutting the police force, the fire department, we would be taking fire engines out of service, we’d be reducing library hours and probably shutting down libraries … in order to accommodate them. And that’s just not realistic. County residents rely on much more than just the schools. The idea that they’d get an $82 million increase when our county executive [Ike Leggett] is talking about reductions of 5 to 15 percent in all county departments, it’s just ridiculous. And we know this is not going to happen.”
…
“It’s been very frustrating because I’ve had nice sit-down conversations [with the school board] where everyone said we don’t want what happened last year, a repeat of a lawsuit [threat], we don’t want high-profile fighting – and then they do this … and here we are, without even the budget over, and they’re doing this. I feel like I wasted my time talking to people and getting people to a place where it felt like we could work through this. I don’t even see the point of [talking to the board about the petition]. They know we’re angry. They know they violated the spirit of the discussion. It’s not going to be good.”
