At tonight’s Council Work Session, I shared concerns about a new $1 million line item that was a complete surprise to Council when we discovered it barely six days ago – below is a text version for those interested to read, and the video version can be watched, along with the subsequent Council and Mayor discussion, at this timestamp in the meeting video.

I want to take a moment to speak to one of the elephants in the room …

There’s a fully new, $1 million budget line item, that was a complete surprise to Council and that we only saw for the first time the end of last week (barely 6 days ago at this point).

Nowhere has the Mayor previously made a case for this $1 million program to residents; Nowhere was Council even let know it was coming, much less their input sought; It doesn’t even appear in the three-page cover letter of the budget.

We’re talking about the 4th biggest expenditure line in this budget, and one that’s entirely new out of left field (the others being standard expected ones like Finance Dept comp/Police comp, our annual Pension funding contribution, & Red Light ticket costs).

It’s fully 2% of our $50 million budget, all by itself – It would represent the largest single grant our City has ever issued – And it also represents a significant shift in our City’s financial model.

To me, this is not how we do things in Laurel – And while I’m reasonably confident it isn’t the case, I can’t help from feeling like it’s coming in a back door, trying to fly under the radar.

And there’s a lot to discuss about this one line alone – It essentially ties back to $1 million in interest income the City smartly earned on COVID funds that we now have free and clear to direct however we see fit.

To me, one of the smart questions we should be asking is: how do we best use this $1 million? Why have we decided against investing in our infrastructure? Whether it be Main Street enhancements we say we never have the money for, or handicap adaptations for Gude Park. Whether it be a COLA increase for Police or City retirees we say we haven’t been able to afford, or fixing the our City’s historic Foundry Building that’s falling apart and provides an irreplaceable touchstone to Laurel’s beginnings in the 1800s. Whether it’s paying down our own debt and saving future interest costs, and the list goes on …

At the end of the day, these are the residents of Laurel’s funds, and the people and their representatives should have been invited to the table to talk about how to best direct it – Done right, that conversation should have been much farther along at this point, but as it is, it hasn’t even been started until now.

There’s also questions in my mind for how the Mayor proposes to use the funds, as a temporary 12-month rent subsidy program where 100 people will get $9,000 over a year to subsidize their rent, after which the money is gone. Housing affordability is certainly an issue, but it’s not clear to me that this is the most effective solution for the investment. Council first received a rough sketch of the program docs after close of business Friday - to my reading, there’s some good things in there, like financial literacy education. But the qualification criteria is still in flux, I’m seeing a 20%+ cost to administer (which is above average), and I’m trying to clarify how we’re accomplishing the long-term ability to sustain housing after the program ends for the people we’re purporting to support; whether that’s actually being accomplished by the time the $1 million is spent.

Not to mention we’d be outside our wheelhouse – These types of programs have not been the purview of municipalities of our size: we help where and in the ways we can to support our vibrant network of non-profits and other organizations, but the purview of municipal government is to pave the streets, pick up the trash, maintain our parks, and keep our residents safe. We’re out of our lane when we start going deep into social services, which is the purview of County, State, & Federal programs.

And we’d be moving into the area of duplicating taxpayer resources inefficiently by re-creating the wheel that already exists. For comparison, PG County has a $5.4 billion budget and roughly $200 million of that goes to social services - that’s four times our entire budget, on the social services piece alone for PG. Maryland has a $67 billion budget and roughly $10 billion of that goes to social services. The U.S. has a $7.4 trillion budget with somewhere around $55-70 billion going to social services in the state of Maryland alone. Taxpayers fund these programs already, we lobby to bring these resources to Laurel (e.g., with the help of our District 21 delegation, $91 million this past session to our district), and I suggest we’d be remiss to try to change ourselves into covering something our real estate taxes were never intended to cover and our budget wasn’t intended to support.

In closing, I ask us as a City to pause, back up a step, and do this the right way together – Rather than barrel this through from out of left field.

It needs to be given the appropriate air, and our already compressed 24-day timetable for budget approval is not the time to be bringing this up for the first time.

My recommendation is to bank this money for a conversation this summer, and to address all of the regular budget items as usual in this process so we can keep the lights on – Anything other than that is, I believe, a disservice to this body and to the people of Laurel.