County officials across Maryland are gearing up to push back against O’Malley administration policies that have cut state aid to the counties, piled on teacher pension costs with little say in how the pension system is run, and taken away local control over land use decisions.
The 2013 initiatives by the Maryland Association of Counties were formally adopted by the MACo legislative committee Wednesday and announced later that day on the association Conduit Street blog. The committee has 62 members, including all the major elected officials from each jurisdiction, but each county and Baltimore City gets only one vote.
“County governments have taken the deepest cuts of any part of the state’s budget during the Great Recession,” the MACo position said. “Local governments have lost some $1.8 billion in state support since Fiscal Year 2010, affecting nearly every essential local service: roads and bridges; law enforcement; health departments; and jails. Temporary cuts have been made permanent or extended with each budget cycle, and state administrative costs have been shifted to counties without any county control. In addition to aid reductions and cost shifts, the state’s recent teacher pension shift sends to counties massive new costs that lie completely outside the county government’s management.”
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4 comments:
So....when you want to know why the roads are falling apart and not getting paved, complain to the Governor that the majority of idiots in the state voted for. Does anyone comprehend how much it is going to cost to fix roads that have not have maintenance paving? Try about 10 times as much to reconstruct vs. preventive measures. I think that people are going to have to make some tough choices and decide if they are willing to start paying more to their local governments for roads so that they can shoulder the cost, rather than hope that the fuel tax that we all pay for this purpose will be returned to the counties. The other choice is to suck it up and accept crumbled roads. The State handed a broken pension plan to the counties. The democrats have been elected over the years, in part, by taking care of the teachers. In essence...buying votes. If they are going to handcuff the counties into paying the bill, the counties should have the ability to decide what the teacher salaries and raises should be. Keep voting democrat....see how good it is working? Oh, also, why is it that a certain county (prine georges) and a certain city (baltimore) did not receive a 90 percent reduction in HUR funding? Simple. Because those two areas alone can nearly win an election.
Well said!
7:45...paying more to gov't is not an option. They need to fix the bad spending habits they have and make the necessary cuts, just like any other business has done. So, it looks like all we have is your second option. Of course, all of this is redundant...if we keep going the way we are, roads will be the least of our worries.
You must be referring to the State spending habits. It has been verified that that the County could absorb the costs handed down by the state and make difficult cuts on the local level. The question is how much do you cut before you affect the core services that government must provided. A business would have implemented speed cameras YEARS ago and anything else to grab revenue. A business could not survive with a revenue cap in place.
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