The boom was good for Montgomery County. In the four years before the recession began in late 2007, revenue increased by more than $1 billion and spending jumped by nearly as much. Public schools were showered with resources, public employees were paid generously, the uninsured were given health coverage and the poor were given tax breaks. Now officials are scrambling not to run out of money by June 30. They're trying to retroactively double the local energy tax, starting two weeks ago. They've zeroed out their rainy day fund. And they're cutting off hundreds of contracts, saving $148,056 on locksmiths, $7,301 in the cost of chemicals for a Germantown pool and $1,000 on dead animal disposal.
Montgomery is one of the nation's richest counties, a place where median household income tops $90,000 and the government budget totals $4.3 billion. That officials are having to scrounge their way out of the fiscal year is a sign of how far things have fallen in the Washington region's biggest-spending suburb. Communities across the country, Montgomery's neighbors among them, are feeling the aftereffects of the recession. District officials are considering a levy on sodas and higher taxes on the wealthy. Fairfax County raised the property tax rate and dipped into reserves to avoid some anticipated cuts. But in Montgomery, economic realities are closing in on a political culture accustomed to ever-rising budgets and government generosity, forcing officials and the public to face an uncomfortable and unfamiliar future.
"When there's a lot of money, it's fun to give it away," said Nancy Dacek, a former PTA leader who served for a dozen years on the Montgomery County Council, including during the region's last major downturn in the early 1990s. "This is a very caring county. We are concerned about our neighborhoods. We are concerned about our schools. We always have been, and that's a good thing," Dacek said. "But we can't say no, either, and we're going to have to do that."
Next week, for the first time in more than four decades, the County Council will vote on a new budget that is smaller than the one it passed the year before. How Montgomery got here, and how it decides to spend the billions of dollars it does have are questions that go beyond grants and salary levels and the thousands of lines of fiscal minutia in the thick budget book under debate. They go to the county's values. "The budget is a moral document," said Joy Nurmi, a community affairs official and former council staffer.
Spending, cutting mishmash
The guide to the county's future comes with its own linguistic cues and telltale verbs. Department lists in the budget fall under "Decrease," which is meant to convey cuts with little or no effect on people. Then there's "Reduce," and to a smaller degree, "Eliminate." There are also increases, and the vast middle of continued spending.
The picture that emerges is a mishmash: painful cuts to good programs; cuts of things that should have been gone a long time ago; continued questionable spending; and spending -- particularly on employee salaries and benefits -- that creates a real disconnect between the size of government and the county's ability to pay for it without a stifling tax burden. It's a good budget for gypsy moths, the West Nile virus and frisky deer, with funds for population control and other efforts down. Less so for senior citizens stuck at home, who would get transportation to fewer stores and less dental care. Early cutbacks, part of the dash to end the current year in the black, left some elderly residents without toilet paper at county facilities, a county official said.
The budget proposes a drop-off in fire code enforcers and community police officers. A home fashion brochure in Bethesda is gone, as is a program to prevent public drunkenness in Wheaton. In Silver Spring, overtime police patrols of parking lots cost $110,630. Going with contract security guards would cut that to $35,480, for the same number of hours.
The biggest item by far is education spending, which is the top county priority. For a sense of scale, consider this. Sharp proposed cuts in eight areas of the county budget, including a 10.9 percent drop in Health and Human Services funding and a 24.8 percent reduction in transportation. Total: $69 million. The proposed increase in benefits costs alone for school employees is $69.4 million.
The budget also calls for halving a drug treatment and job training program for the homeless and cutting payments to medical clinics treating the uninsured, just as recession-driven applications for public assistance have soared 19 percent in six months. A fast-growing tax break for the poor would be cut by a third. "Meeting human needs is what motivates me," said council member George L. Leventhal (D-At Large), who is pushing his colleagues to restore some of the social services funding. "We saw it coming, but we didn't think it was this bad."
To offset sagging income tax collections and fund the massive schools operation while protecting such human services, county officials have turned to tax increases. A proposed cellphone tax would increase bills by $1 a line, or 50 percent. Businesses are in revolt over the proposed doubling of the energy tax. Adventist HealthCare says the added $620,000 cost is the equivalent of seven intensive care nurses or 30 fetal monitors. Top executives from Hughes Network Systems said covering the $450,000 increase would require "hard decisions" that will affect Montgomery employees. The county, they wrote, should "reexamine its priorities" based on available funds and make tough decisions "in the same manner that Hughes and other business leaders" do.
Costly good intentions
But that is often not how decisions get made. The creeping costs of good intentions helped bring Montgomery to this point. County leaders, and other advocates for expanding public services, have pressed for a progressive approach they say matches Montgomery's liberal politics and its residents' high standards. But progressive aspirations can drift off track as policies wend their way through a government bureaucracy in which fiscal controls are sometimes lacking. Well-meaning ideas can morph into employee perks.
In 1988, officials in the increasingly diverse community launched a multilingual certification program for county government employees. The idea was to tap the language skills of county workers to better serve a population that speaks Spanish, Chinese, Korean and other languages in addition to English. For years, those employees were paid extra for the hours they used their language skills on the job. But that changed after a push by county managers and negotiations with one of its influential public employee unions, the Municipal and County Government Employees Organization. Starting in 2002, government employees in the program were paid extra for every hour they were on the clock, whether they used their language skills at work or not, county officials said. After ending the accounting requirement, the county upped the size of the bonus. Those certified with basic conversation skills now get a $1-anhour pay bump, and those who test with advanced skills get $1.50 extra an hour. Police and firefighter unions have similar provisions.
The size and cost of the program have grown steadily, from 498 employees and a cost of $959,000 in 2005 to 708 participants and a tab of $1.4 million last year, according to an analysis of county pay records. Department heads must certify "that certain jobs may require occasional use" of another language, according to a county collective bargaining agreement. But the program doesn't consider which languages are needed most, or track how or whether employees use them. Once an employee is certified, the "multilingual" designation and extra pay generally stick with them in whatever job they have, officials said.
Workers at Montgomery's Department of Correction and Rehabilitation, for example, were paid the language bonus last year for being able to speak French, German, Polish, Spanish, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Arabic, Tagalog, Burmese, Korean, Yoruba, Esu and Ibo. Correction health nurse Lydia Boahene was paid a total of $14,738 over five years for knowing Akan, a language spoken in parts of Ghana and Ivory Coast. She said she doesn't know how many times she's used it. "I wouldn't be able to tell you if it's two or three times or if it's five times," Boahene said. She saw a Ghanaian inmate last month, she said.
"He does speak English, and he knows I speak Akan, so when he sees me I speak Akan," Boahene said.
Corrections chief Art Wallenstein said he pushed to establish the more generous language bonus a decade ago. But he saw language simply as a means to a greater good. "Language to speak to inmates was not the issue. . . . That's not why we hired them," he said. "This was a minority recruitment program." Some employees, such as child welfare caseworker Soledad Calvo, routinely rely on their language skills at work. Her job is licensing foster homes, and she speaks Spanish about half the time. "The families are more comfortable when we are speaking the same language," Calvo said. "Montgomery County is really good for that. We have a lot of staff that speaks Spanish."
Montgomery officials are trying to stay on the right side of voters who have proved ornery in other Democratic strongholds, such as Massachusetts. A county-funded survey this year found just 7 percent of Montgomery residents would be willing to pay more taxes for better services. "I think you're going to see a more fiscally conservative county," said council President Nancy Floreen (D-At Large). But when that means cutting things people care deeply about, dissent can build quickly.
"We're just getting the stuffing knocked out of us," said Art Brodsky, head of the voluntary library board. They're being cut by nearly a quarter, and more than 700,000 people with library cards will soon find shorter hours and fewer staff. "We in the county realize we pay a lot of taxes. But hopefully everyone can see, at least until relatively recently, we got something for it. We got first-class schools, first-class libraries, first-class parks," Brodsky said. "Now the question is, do you go from all these first-class institutions down to third-or fourth-class institutions?" SOURCE: Washington Post
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