Pittman Previews Fiscal Year 2020 Budget

Posted Thursday, May 2, 2019 9:04 am

By Zach Sparks

The Severna Park Voice went to print two days before County Executive Steuart Pittman announced his Fiscal Year 2020 budget proposal. To keep readers informed, we asked Pittman to share his priorities in advance, knowing he must withhold certain details until May 1.

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The Bay Bridge isn’t crumbling and giant meatballs aren’t falling from the sky, but Anne Arundel County has severe needs. If this realization weren’t apparent to County Executive Steuart Pittman during his campaign in 2018, it was made obvious during the seven budget town hall hearings his administration held across the county from February 27 to March 28.

Taxpayers said teachers are woefully underpaid, traffic is unbearable, police and fire stations are understaffed, and the county lacks sufficient sports fields and facilities.

While Anne Arundel will receive more than $40 million in additional revenue than the $1.59 billion Fiscal Year 2019 budget, Pittman said only $10 million of that amount can be used to fund new priorities for Fiscal Year 2020.

“It’s obligated with debt service that we didn’t have last year and basically our pay packages and retirement packages,” Pittman said, “so there’s not a lot of new revenue left.”

Days before sharing the full details of his budget, Pittman explained the county’s needs and his budget priorities in vague detail.

“People aren’t getting everything they asked for, but I think they are going to be happy for the most part,” Pittman said. “… In this county, we have a lot of needs because we have grown so fast, with 10% population growth every decade, and we have not kept up in our schools and our public safety in particular as well as in our infrastructure and our roads.”

While Pittman did not fully fund the Board of Education’s $1.28 billion Fiscal Year 2020 operating budget request, he planned to fund much of it.

“My view is we have a school board that is bipartisan and half elected and voted unanimously for this budget and I can’t just turn my back on them and say they don’t know what the needs are,” Pittman said. “And, of course, most of that was in the superintendent’s budget as well. The big increase from the superintendent’s budget to the school board’s was to address some back step increases for some of our more senior teachers to bring them closer to what they should be. I’m sympathetic to that. We cannot continue to lose our best, our most experienced teachers to other counties. That is the kind of thing that lowers your rankings overall. If our schools aren’t doing well and they don’t have a good reputation, our property values go down.”

School officials weren’t the only people looking to Pittman for support as his administration prepared the budget. Local police and fire departments and detention facilities are all in need of employees they can recruit and retain. While the county has grown, those departments have stayed stagnant, said Pittman, who wants to implement three- or four-year plans to fully upgrade each department.

“In some cases, we have the positions and haven’t been able to hire, and in other cases, we haven’t created the positions,” Pittman said. “… We’re taking step one and doing it in a way that we believe that they can recruit the positions we create rather than just creating positions just because it looks good to create new positions. So there will be a lot of hiring going on in all three of those departments and we think that will, particularly for police, we have to take some of the pressure off that is forcing officers to work 12-hour shifts when they don’t want to because they just don’t have the officers to meet the needs.”

Staying on topic with police, he also mentioned the importance of school resource officers and police at Arundel Mills Mall. As for the fire department, Pittman said call volume is increasing faster than the population is growing.

“We have apparatus going out with two firefighters when they should have four according to national standards,” Pittman said. “As for detention, we have to staff up. We have been 40 detention officers short. We’re not running the 287(g) program and we don’t have the ICE detention center, so that has freed up some staffing, but we’re going to have to staff up for the new central booking facility at Jennifer Road by the end of the year.”

Pittman said his budget would also address workforce housing, invest in parks and focus on the environment.

He recently replaced the Inspections & Permits director and he said other changes were included in his budget proposal.

“We have had fewer inspectors by far per construction site than any other county in the state,” he said, “and the fact that we have so many failing sites where the erosion and sediment control efforts are not working and nobody has been inspecting them, we’re going to be boosting environmental inspectors and, of course, enforcement of some of our environmental laws.”

To pay for each of these priorities, from teacher raises to more public safety officials, Pittman considered several alternatives: raising the voter-imposed tax cap, which can only be done when using the added funds for education; raising the income tax rate from the current 2.5 percent; and raising developer impact fees.

Pittman didn’t disclose his full decision before his May 1 address, but he did explain his reasoning. He said to expect a “mixed bag” of tax increases in his proposal to give the county more than $10 million in new revenue.

“I had hoped that we’d have enough revenue and, of course, you don’t know about all of the new obligations until you sit down with the budget office and they show you the projections, but it’s not possible to do it without some more revenue,” Pittman said.

Following the budget, the county will seek places to make cuts. Ben Birge, chief administrative officer for the County Executive’s Office, will help in that effort.

“He’s an expert in that area, and the goal is to create efficiencies and figure out which programs are not working so we can cut but cut wisely,” Pittman said.

Overall, he thinks people will be pleased with the budget.

“There will be people who say you should have done more,” Pittman said. “There will be people who don’t want to spend money. So you can’t make everyone happy, but I feel very good about it.

“The process worked well,” he continued. “As a new county executive, it is a bit of a daunting process to figure out how to spend taxpayers’ money, and the budget office has a system. They have been through a lot of county executives. They know the departments and they know what the departments’ needs are, and the process worked really well. It took a while. There were some pretty intense meetings and difficult decisions, but between the budget office, the department heads and our staff here in the county executive’s office, I feel good about what we’ve done.”