It’s getting to be as wearying to dish out the bad economic news and its dire effect on the state budget as it is to read about it. But that’s what’s on the menu monotonously for the next few months.
County government leaders are bracing for the worst.
“I have no doubt it will be all bad news,” said Michael Sanderson, who becomes executive director of the Maryland Association of Counties on Thursday, taking over from 17-year veteran David Bliden.
“I don’t think there will be good news for anybody on the budget front,” Sanderson, MACO’s legislative director for 14 years, told me. “We’ll be facing as challenging a fiscal environment as any have seen.” Sanderson was a staffer for the House of Delegate’s Ways and Means Committee during Maryland’s deep recession of 1991 through 1993.
MACO and county leaders are at the center of the fiscal crunch in Annapolis. More than a quarter of state revenues — $6.5 billion, not counting federal funds — goes to the counties. That money makes up about a third of local budgets.
Counties at center stage
“The role of counties and county governments in Maryland probably is as central to people’s lives as any other place in the country,” Sanderson said. Throughout the nation, particularly in the Northeast, local governing is fragmented into hundreds of townships and municipalities, with an overlay of often hundreds of small school systems each with their own taxing authority.
New Jersey is perhaps the most egregious example. It has 50 percent more population than Maryland (but, surprisingly, is actually smaller in land area). In addition to its 21 counties, it has 566 boroughs, cities, towns, townships and villages and 593 school districts, one of the reasons that taxes are so brutal there, particularly crushing property taxes.
Maryland has 23 counties plus Baltimore City, and 157 mostly small municipalities. There are 24 school systems, none with taxing authority as in Jersey and many other states. Maryland is the only state where all counties have a local income tax.
“We have responsibility for things that most effect citizens,” Sanderson said. “We ultimately deliver services that people care about the most [police, fire, schools, trash, parks, land use.]”
When you have a $2 billion shortfall in revenues facing the state next year, there is little choice but to start whacking where almost a third of those revenues ultimately wind up — county governments. That’s particularly true for education, where 80 percent of state aid goes.
That’s why it came as little surprise that facing a $400 million hole in the current budget, Budget Secretary Eloise Foster suggested to Gov. O’Malley last week that he should cut $38 million in local school aid — less than 10 percent of the shortfall, and a pittance in the overall aid picture.
The new Post-Sun
It was quite a relief that when The Baltimore Sun and Washington Post announced Tuesday that they were going to be sharing stories, they specifically excluded state government coverage, on which they will continue to compete — meaning we won’t be outgunned more than we are now.
That means, I hope, they’ll continue to compete for leaks from the O’Malley administration. Last week, the “letter” from Foster written Wednesday to her boss somehow wound up in the hands of The Sun and The Post two days later. Do they have someone in the mail room rifling through those brown interoffice mail envelopes?
Based on the stories, one a front-pager labeled “Sun Exclusive,” the papers appeared to be under the impression that each had a scoop. Maybe next time they can say “Sun-Post Exclusive.”
The governor’s press office released the letter to other reporters who complained after the first story ran. The one-page missive actually sounds like something that was planned for public consumption, not an internal working memo.
“I understand your reluctance to reduce education aid,” Foster pens the governor. “I can assure you that that this reduction, which amounts to less than 1 percent of $5.3 billion in state support for K-12 education, maintains the record level of funding provided to our local school systems under your leadership.” State aid to education would still be up 3 percent this year and 18 percent since he took office, she writes, as if O’Malley doesn’t already know this. Maybe this is just talking points for the upcoming how-I’m-cutting-the-budget tour.
Underpaid judges?
The Sun’s Laura Smitherman dug up the juicy report that a judicial compensation board was recommending whopping $40,000 raises for all of Maryland’s judges over the next four years. The draft report was poorly timed in a week when 9,100 state employees who make less than $40,000 a year were furloughed for two days, equivalent to a 1.5 percent pay cut.
Despite the current pay — $127,000 for district court judges and $140,000 for circuit court — there seems to be no shortage of applicants for judicial vacancies. In small counties, only four or five attorneys apply for a district court job, but, in Baltimore County, 22 lawyers have applied for the seat of the retiring Dana Levitz.
