{"id":8700,"date":"2017-10-16T08:20:58","date_gmt":"2017-10-16T12:20:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=8700"},"modified":"2017-10-16T08:20:58","modified_gmt":"2017-10-16T12:20:58","slug":"a-reply-to-nancy-floreen-on-mcps-funding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=8700","title":{"rendered":"A Reply to Nancy Floreen on MCPS Funding"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thanks to Council Member Nancy Floreen for writing about MCPS funding in recent years<\/a> in response to my blog post<\/a>.\u00a0 First, a note of appreciation.\u00a0 While we may disagree about MCPS, we agree wholeheartedly on the issue of economic growth<\/a>, which is the anchor for the county budget.\u00a0 The political winds on growth shift back and forth in county politics over the decades, but Floreen has consistently pushed an economic development agenda.\u00a0 She was for jobs before jobs were cool!\u00a0 All the things the county has done right in economic development \u2013 and there have been a few of them \u2013 have Floreen\u2019s fingerprints all over them.\u00a0 It\u2019s one reason why your author admires her and is sad to see her leave the County Council.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s begin with areas of agreement.\u00a0 First, Floreen is absolutely right about the terrible days of the Great Recession.\u00a0 The county had not faced anything like it since the 1930s.\u00a0 Everything had to go on the table in those days \u2013 spending cuts, layoffs, furloughs, broken collective bargaining agreements and an energy tax hike \u2013 because the alternative was default.\u00a0 Floreen was Council President in 2010, the worst year of the recession.\u00a0 She, the County Executive and her colleagues saved the county from fiscal disaster.\u00a0 That achievement should not be forgotten.<\/p>\n

Second, Floreen mentions the state\u2019s teacher pension shift as a stress point on county finances.\u00a0 Again, she\u2019s absolutely right.\u00a0 For many years, the state\u2019s payment of teacher pension benefits was the one state program that disproportionately benefited Montgomery County. \u00a0That\u2019s because our high cost of living as well as our prioritization of schools leads us to pay higher teacher salaries than the rest of the state, which results in higher pensions.\u00a0 In 2010, nearly all of MoCo\u2019s state legislators running for election promised not to shift pension costs to the counties.\u00a0 But in 2012, Governor Martin O\u2019Malley pushed a plan to do exactly that and most of our state legislators voted for it.\u00a0 The result is that Montgomery County pays roughly $60 million a year for teacher pensions<\/a> now, more than any jurisdiction in the state.\u00a0 Compare that to the size of last year\u2019s property tax hike, which was $140 million a year.\u00a0 No matter what is said about the county, the state should not be let off the hook.<\/p>\n

Now to the areas of disagreement.\u00a0 It\u2019s interesting that Floreen says our blog post is misleading but does not actually refute any of the data on which we rely<\/a>.\u00a0 She simply picks other data and disagrees with our characterizations.\u00a0 We are sympathetic to her problem: it\u2019s hard to refute data that happens to be true!\u00a0 One thing she contests is our choice of FY10 as a base year for comparison.\u00a0 We picked FY10 because it was the peak year of overall county spending before the Great Recession fully kicked in.\u00a0 So comparing FY10 to FY16, the year before the tax hike, is valid because it\u2019s a peak-to-peak comparison that includes both the cuts to departments in the early part of the period as well as the restoration that occurred afterwards.<\/p>\n

She also disagrees repeatedly with our referring to MCPS as going through austerity.\u00a0 Our basis for doing so was the county\u2019s local dollar spending per pupil, which comes from county budget documents<\/a> and was not contested by Floreen.\u00a0 In nominal terms, here is the county\u2019s local spending per pupil from FY06 through FY17.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The data shows that the county cut its local per pupil contribution to MCPS for three straight years and froze it for four straight years.\u00a0 This period greatly exceeds the length of the Great Recession.\u00a0 The local per pupil contribution went up after last year\u2019s property tax increase.<\/p>\n

Last year\u2019s per pupil bump looks significant, but here is the same data adjusted by the Washington-Baltimore CPI and presented in real terms using 2017 dollars.\u00a0 (We estimated 2017 inflation at 2.02%, the average rate of the preceding years in the chart.)\u00a0 Clearly, even with the tax hike, the county\u2019s local-dollar commitment to schools is not what it once was.\u00a0 And the CPI underestimates major cost drivers for the schools, such as the costs of serving rising numbers of students who live in poverty and need language services.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Floreen then talks about the county departments that were cut during the recession.\u00a0 She\u2019s right: they were cut.\u00a0 But after the recession ended, most of them were restored to levels exceeding what they were before the recession.\u00a0 Meanwhile, county dollars for MCPS were cut by $33 million between FY10 and FY16<\/a>.\u00a0 Floreen doesn\u2019t deny that, but she notes that local dollars aren\u2019t the only source for MCPS\u2019s budget.\u00a0 The schools get plenty of state money too.\u00a0 Floreen says this:<\/p>\n

What really matters is the total MCPS budget, not the State share versus the local share. The higher State spending for MCPS in recent years reflects that the State\u2019s funding formulas, at long last, are starting to recognize our students\u2019 actual needs, as shown in our higher ESOL and FARMS populations. The State aid increases, which were long overdue, enabled us to provide continued strong support for MCPS during the Great Recession without further decimating every other function of government.\u00a0 Why is that not a good thing?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Floreen is conceding a central point of our original post which is reinforced in the per pupil data above: the county depended on state aid to keep MCPS afloat while it restricted its own contributions to the school system<\/a>.\u00a0 Meanwhile, MCPS enrollment grew from 140,500 to 156,514 between FY10 and FY16, an 11% increase<\/a>.\u00a0 The Great Recession by itself can\u2019t be cited as a justification for restricting county dollars for schools because the restrictions continued long after the trough of the recession had passed.\u00a0 Indeed, fifteen other counties increased their local per pupil contributions after the recession ended<\/a>, including nine controlled by Republicans.\u00a0 The message here is, \u201cThe state was paying for our schools so we didn\u2019t have to increase county per pupil spending on them.\u201d\u00a0 Is that \u201ccontinued strong support for MCPS\u201d as claimed above?\u00a0 Is it satisfactory for parents and voters?\u00a0 Let the readers decide.<\/p>\n

Finally, Floreen repeats her longstanding point that last year\u2019s 9% property tax hike was intended to support MCPS.\u00a0 That\u2019s true: MCPS did get a big share of that money.\u00a0 But so did the rest of the government.\u00a0 Last year, we laid out<\/a> how the county could have cut the tax hike in half, still given MCPS all the money requested in the County Executive\u2019s budget and done it without spending cuts to other agencies.\u00a0 County Executive Ike Leggett, who originally proposed the tax hike, asked the council to cut the rate increase in half<\/a> after the General Assembly passed a law easing the county\u2019s liability from a U.S. Supreme Court decision on income taxes.\u00a0 But the council chose to keep every penny of the original tax hike and spread it across every agency instead<\/a>.\u00a0 That\u2019s not an Education First budget \u2013 it\u2019s an Everything First budget.\u00a0 The result of the tax hike was a tremendous boost for the 40-point triumph of term limits at the ballot box.\u00a0 Even the council\u2019s own spokesman at the time now says the tax hike was unnecessary and is vowing to stop another one if he is elected to Floreen\u2019s open seat<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Look folks.\u00a0 We get this is tough medicine.\u00a0 We understand that elected officials don\u2019t like to be criticized, especially around election time.\u00a0 And we understand that Nancy Floreen, a Council Member we respect, would like to go out on top.\u00a0 But it\u2019s important to understand the past to prepare for the future.\u00a0 The schools need small, steady increases in per pupil funding to deal with their challenges.\u00a0 There can no longer be wild swings between extended periods of per pupil cuts and freezes followed by huge tax hikes intended to undo the effects of those cuts and freezes.\u00a0 To fund MCPS fairly without raising taxes, the county will have to restrain the overall growth of the rest of the budget to pay for it.\u00a0 There cannot be any more Everything First budgets.\u00a0 With four Council Members leaving and the Executive race wide open, it will be up to the next generation of county officials to chart a better way forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco. Thanks to Council Member Nancy Floreen for writing about MCPS funding in recent years in response to my blog post.\u00a0 First, a note of appreciation.\u00a0 While we may disagree about MCPS, we agree wholeheartedly on the issue of economic growth, which is the anchor for the county budget.\u00a0 The political winds on … Continue reading A Reply to Nancy Floreen on MCPS Funding<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[151,33,1764,44,134],"tags":[1545,1368,1475,1478,1539],"class_list":["post-8700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adam-pagnucco","category-budget","category-montgomery-county-public-schools","category-nancy-floreen","category-taxes","tag-adam-pagnucco","tag-budget","tag-mcps","tag-nancy-floreen","tag-taxes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4mKJE-2gk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8700"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8704,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8700\/revisions\/8704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}