Opinion: After a Brutal Budget, County Council Finds Money for Its Most Powerful Endorser

This is an opinion piece submitted by a Montgomery County resident. The views are the author’s own. Moderately MOCO publishes opinion from people who live here; submissions run in the writer’s words.

By Nora Gordon

County Councilmember Kate Stewart has introduced a bill giving $2,500 in property tax credits per year to teachers and other select Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) employees. Stewart has five co-sponsors for the bill, which means the majority of the 11-member Council is on board.

The bill is framed as a way to support affordable housing. In reality, it’s a bonus estimated to reach fewer than one in five district employees. To be eligible, MCPS employees must own homes in Montgomery County and be covered by the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA) or Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 500 bargaining units. Given that the county’s median home price is over $600,000, the tax credit won’t make buying meaningfully more affordable for those who don’t currently own; at an estimated price tag of up to $12 million, it’s not a strategic use of the County’s scarce resources. Most distressingly, it forces the question of how elected officials balance all of their constituents’ interests, not just those of the policy’s powerful beneficiaries.

No one would propose higher salaries for staff who own rather than rent, yet the Council appears willing to achieve the same ends with this policy. Moreover, compensation for these employees is determined by the collective bargaining process between their unions and the MCPS Board of Education – not the Council. And while public safety officers in the County already receive this credit, other public employees do not.

The credit could cost the County up to $12 million. At 0.2 percent of the County’s FY27 $7.9 billion operating budget, this may not sound like much. But $12 million would more than cover the costs of the 27 pupil personnel workers, 43 social workers, and 39 English composition assistants whose positions were cut in the final stages of last spring’s brutal MCPS operating budget fight. These employees serve some of the neediest MCPS students. If you were looking for the most bang for your $12 million, you could check out the New York Times’ recent rankings of cost-effective approaches to improving schools. I’ll save you the click: teacher property tax credits are not among the 30 approaches they asked experts to rate.

The MCEA contract doesn’t mention property tax credits either, but does include a schedule of salary increases. To honor these increases, last spring the County Council passed a bundle of tax changes; the property tax credit for MCPS staff wasn’t part of that bundle, even though it had to have been on the radar of County electeds. The tax credit only became possible in 2024, when the Maryland General Assembly passed a law allowing counties to offer it to public school employees. Montgomery County delegate Lorig Charkoudian introduced that legislation, and Councilmember Stewart testified in support.

Now MCPS is embarking on a countywide elementary and middle school closure and consolidation study, likely preparing to argue that there is no extra money to operate schools below their capacity or meet long-ignored infrastructure needs. While passing this credit wouldn’t make housing more affordable, it should make voters question what other money the Council might be able to dig up under the couch cushions to keep their neighborhood schools open. And it would mean the current MCEA collective bargaining process may not yield the final word on the deal teachers – rather, some teachers – get.

If Council members care about housing affordability they need to start addressing the market forces shaping housing prices for all residents. Piecemeal policies meant to appease their most powerful constituents won’t do the job.

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Nora Gordon of Chevy Chase is an MCPS parent and professor of public policy at Georgetown University McCourt School. She writes a free Substack newsletter about MCPS called “Why is it like this?”

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About the bill, and how to be heard

Bill 48-26 is scheduled for a County Council public hearing on Tuesday, October 13 at 1:30 p.m. Residents can sign up to testify in person or on Zoom, or submit written, audio or video testimony, through the Council’s website or by calling 240-777-7803. For a 1:30 p.m. hearing the sign-up deadline is 2 p.m. the day before, which is Monday, October 12. Speakers get three minutes.

On the number of co-sponsors. As submitted, this piece said five co-sponsors, matching the Council’s September announcement when Bill 48-26 was introduced. Councilmember Sayles signed on afterward, and the official packet for the October 13 public hearing lists six: Councilmembers Evans, Katz, Friedson, Luedtke, Mink and Sayles. The number above has been updated to six; the author’s point, that a majority of the 11-member Council is signed on, is unchanged.

The school closure and consolidation study the author refers to went before the Board of Education on October 8. Moderately MOCO covered what that meeting would and would not decide.

Moderately MOCO welcomes opinion submissions from Montgomery County residents. Send them through the site.

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