For Montgomery County, this past state legislative session in Annapolis was fruitful, but not overwhelmingly so, as education funding fell short of hopes, according to the county’s intergovernmental relations director.
Melanie Wengar told The Examiner that the biggest disappointment was the failure to adopt the geographic cost-of-education index that would have provided more ample funding for schools across the state. Without it, Montgomery County was awarded just more than $50 million for school construction out of a record-high $400 million state allotment.
The county’s budget assumed that the index would not pass, yet it still would have helped contribute to hundreds of millions’ worth of improvements the school system hopes to achieve in the next five years, Wengar said.
Some of the more notable successes of the session were funding allocations devoted to important county projects such as the Germantown Business Incubator, designed to spur international companies to come to Montgomery County, and the Birchmere Music Hall in downtown Silver Spring.
Altogether, such projects accounted for about $6.5 million in the budget.
“We had a very aggressive agenda,” Wengar said.
The 32-member Montgomery County Delegation collectively introduced 11 local bills and 25 bi-county bills, with six local bills and 10 bi-county bills passing both the House and Senate.
Among the highlights were provisions to provide enhanced workers’ compensation benefits to correction officers and a controversial bill to redraw county boundaries to prevent certain jurisdictions from being double-taxed on parks fees.
Wengar said the state legislation that will likely impact Montgomery most are the establishment of a task force to plan for military base realignment and the allocation of $22 million toward stem cell research.
“Our job now is to evaluate what all this means,” she said.
