Taxes Up, Services Down: Why Accountability Matters More Than Ever

Background

On Wednesday 3/15, Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich released his budget which included an 8% overall increase in budget and 10% increase for MCPS.

The cost to tax payers is being advertised as a “10 cents” increase but amounts to about a 10% increase in the tax rate from .98 per $100 to 1.08 per $100 per MoCo360.

On Thursday I posted my thoughts to Twitter and Facebook on this which combined reached about 10,000 people and had over 100 likes so I decided to put together a complete article going into a little more details about those statements with links and information added for support.

Quick sidebar on taxes

I don’t mind paying more taxes. My family came here for good services and I don’t mind paying for them.

I do have issues with paying more taxes with zero accountability, proper processes not followed, and with decreasing levels of services.

MCPS Issues

MCPS is dealing with major issues which have increased due to pandemic policy. Reading, writing, and Math scores are way down. You can see the huge impact on scores in our MCPS Test Score Repository which is full of dozens of pieces we have done in the past few years on test scores in Math and Reading. There is also data on the Maryland statewide trends here.

The pandemic and the response to it also greatly impacted the state wide Enrollment projections (now on pace to not achieve 2019 enrollment numbers until later than 2031), as well as enrollment at MCPS Elementary schools, Middle Schools, and High Schools.

Kids are given credit for not doing anything diluting the work of those that are. Even before the pandemic, MCPS implemented the 50% rule in 2019 which states:

“When using points or percentages, a teacher assigns a grade no lower than 50 percent to the task/assessment.”

There are a ton of student led newspapers that have chimed in about the issues with these policies such as The RM Tide, The Churchill observer, The Rockville Rampage, The Blueprint (Springbook), The WM Current, Silver Chips (Montgomery Blair), The Warrior Online (Sherwood), and Wooton Common Sense (again here). The Washington Post wrote that the “Relaxed grading policies mean more work for teachers” and also again in 2022 about how school like the policy because it increases graduation rates.

Public Safety in MCPS

Public safety is in the gutter due to policies enacted in recent years and our schools are both less safe and teaching students less. Frankly there is just too much to link here for these issues so I will just put a few links as it related to MCPS.

SROs

SROs were removed from schools in 2021 and violence (second article) and drug use has skyrocketed since in MCPS. Some community members say MCPS was safer with SROs. Following the in MCPS school shooting at Magruder HS, MCPS reconsidered this and eventually came up with CEO 2.0 and brought Community Engagement Officers back into schools. In fact, there is recent data showing that Black and Hispanic students percentage of suspensions for discipline has actually increased since SROs were removed (which is part of the problem removing them was supposed to solve). That article did not go into the violence or other types of suspensions but the full Maryland report can be see here.

Fentanyl and Overdoses

In MCPS schools and outside, youth overdoses have also greatly increased leading to evaluation of bathroom policies, fentanyl forums (second article), and five Montgomery County youth fatally overdosed in just January of 2023.

Antisemitism Rising

Lastly regarding security at MCPS, there has been an increasing tide of anti-Semitic acts reported. In February there were 9 incidents reported in less than a week at MCPS. Anti-Semitic flyers were found in the summer of 2022 at a bus stop in a heavily Jewish area. In March of 2023, Northwood High Schools closed their outdoor facilities to the public after “four separate incidents of hate speech and anti-Semitic remarks posted on the school’s athletic field.” There were 42 bias incidents in February alone in MCPS and also anecdotally from High Schoolers that many incidents aren’t even being reported, just cleaned up.

Lack of Infrastructure and Upcounty Issues

Roads and other infrastructure improvements (other than buses and bikes) are completely blocked if not being torn up leading to fights over the limited space. In Upcounty, residents have now gone over two years without White’s Ferry in operation impacting countless people and increasing the distance between Potomac Crossings leaving few options to get into Virginia. M-83, first included in the master plan in the 1960s is still being blocked despite extensive growth in Clarksburg that relies on that plan. Clarksburg is one of the fastest growing areas in the County and is expected to continue to grow at fast rates even as the lead contractor for the I-270 expansion exited putting those projects in doubt.

“As people continued to compete for limited houses, home prices soared and builders rushed to the undeveloped Clarksburg land. By 2010 the population grew to 13,677 residents and 4,352 households. By 2020, the population swelled to over 25,000 residents and over 8,000 households, with an 80% increase in 10 years”

https://www.theclarksburgyard.com/our-vision

As Adam Pagnucco of Montgomery Perspective wrote, “There is No Plan B for Upcounty”

Upcounty schools like Damascus HS are being put off for additional years (for the second time). We will have more on this soon.

Tax Assessments Increasing as Well

Tax assessments went way up when home values went up but will not go down when values go down. Our assessment went way up last year and others are getting that increase at other times making this an even larger increase. According to The Baltimore Banner, 2022 and 2023 were the two largest assessment increases in over a decade:

“Since Group 2′s last assessment, residential property values increased 22.2% on average, while commercial properties rose 15.8% on average, for an overall increase of 20.6%, according to the Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation. The overall statewide increase beat 2022′s jump of 12% and is the highest year-over-year value hike in several years.

The assessments were based on an evaluation of close to 90,000 sales that took place within the group since January 2020. More than 96% of residential property values increased during this time, according to a news release from the state agency.”

https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/economy/real-estate/marylanders-can-expect-to-pay-more-in-taxes-as-property-values-jump-more-than-20-AHCB4OID3NFQHKYYI6B7MLE3BI

Favors to Friends

We have additional positions being made such as a former term limited politician Craig Rice being given a position without it being open to anyone else to apply for over $214,000 a year (including benefits). This was recently submitted to the County Council for approval.

Rent Control

The same county official who recommended this budget also introduced the HOME Act saying that anything over a 3% increase in rental fees is too much. The County “Council Members and Executive Introduce[d] Competing Rent Control Bills.” Wherever you stand on that you can easily see the hypocrisy of then increases taxes by 10% on property owners. And in fact that can be used to increase rents over 3% by making a business case. Montgomery Perspective did a 5 part series on Rent Control looking at the pros and cons where it has been established elsewhere and information specific to Montgomery County.

Households on fixed incomes like retired individuals and others will not be able to handle this increase and they will get little relief especially as the double whammy of assessments and local tax increases (and yet unknown state and federal tax changes). The state has a $477 million revenue shortfall as of earlier this week.

Boundary Studies

The board of education is revving up to send kids past their nearest schools and make things harder on countless families with boundary studies while not publicizing this information to inform the public. Again we will have a more detailed article about this soon but in the meantime you can take a look at my testimony to the BOE below about public notification and boundary studies and then I will include the images and slides about which 8 school cluster will be included in this first boundary study after that.

My written testimony has also been uploaded below:

JasonMaksteinBoundaryStudyTestimony2023

For the upcoming Woodward High School boundary study (which is the first since the County Wide Boundary Analysis was completed), you can see the list of 21 schools impacted below followed by a PDF copy of the entire presentation to the BOE on this (since links directly to it on BOE site don’t work):

Schools Impacted by Boundary Study
Timeline for Boundary Study
FY2024-Cap-Bdgt-Amends-FY2023-2028-CIP-230314-PPT

Conclusion

All told, I am seeing irresponsible use of funds, zero accountability and a steadily decreasing return on the investment of taxes.

So even if I’m fine to pay more for better services if that return continues to decline what’s the point?

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